But to me as someone who's grown up in the Franco-Belgian style, there's much more to Sandman that is American than merely the superheroes (who are only present in parts of Sandman, anyway). There is the form of serialization - monthly issues of a limited amount of pages, to a certain (small) degree with their own beginning and ending, which are then later combined into longer albums, whereas in here comics are invariably published in albums of usually 48 or 64 pages. There is the habit that still annoys me of using a bold font for every important word, which to me seems like an excuse for poor writing - if the writing and drawing are good enough, you don't need to bold words to make clear that they are important, any more than the writer of a book does. There is the relative unimportance of the artists, with Gaiman's the only name most people know, and many different artists working on the series (though at least the writer gets full credit and is well-known, which isn't always the case in Marvel and DC, as I understand it). Those are the main things, I think, but then since those are most of the main things separating the American comic tradition from ours, you'll see why I called Sandman a comic in the American tradition.