Wesley Dodds: The Sandman#2(2023)

The morning after his house burns down, the fire chief tells Wesley that a thief broke into his safe and then set the fire to cover his tracks, but was accidentally killed in the blaze. They pull the man's body from the ruins, burned beyond recognition. After the fire department leave, Wesley goes down to his secret lab and finds that one of his masks, some gas guns and a journal of his experiments to invent his anaesthetic gas have been stolen. The journal contains details of all the chemical formulas he tested, including multiple deadly toxins. With his home destroyed, Wesley moves into a penthouse apartment in a building owned by Wheeler Vanderlyle. Dian comes to check on him and insists he gets some rest before he goes hunting for whoever stole his research. He goes to sleep with his head in her lap and has a nightmare of a future war, with a man in a black Sandman costume walking through the battlefield spraying deadly gas on soldiers that melts the flesh off their bones. Wesley wakes up with a start to find it is night-time and Dian has left him a list of recent missing persons. He sneaks into police headquarters and looks through the relevant files, and determines that a man named Igor Kluge is the most likely identity of the dead thief. Wesley tracks some of Kluge's known associates and finds them robbing a department store. He confronts them as the Sandman and interrogates them but they tell him that Igor Kluge went straight a year ago after his first child was born. Somewhere else in the city, a man dons the black Sandman costume from Wesley's nightmare.