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<HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>Bob's Comics Reviews</TITLE></HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#D0D0FF"> <table width="100%"> <td width="385"> <A HREF="bob.shtml"><IMG Align=Top SRC="illo/bob.png" height="71" width="374" ALT="Bob's Comics Reviews"></a> </td><td><font size="5">August 1999</font></td> <td> <MAP NAME="BobTable"> <AREA COORDS="0,0,37,36" HREF="bob25.html"> <AREA COORDS="38,0,74,36" HREF="bob27.html"> </MAP> <IMG SRC="illo/bob-arrows.gif" border=0 height="36" width="74" USEMAP="#BobTable" alt="Arrows"> </td> <td width=30%> <p><A HREF="default.html"><img src="home.gif" align=right border=0 alt="Home"></A> </td></tr></table> <P><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr bgcolor="#606090"><td width="20"></td><td><font size="5" color="#F0F0FF"> Neil Gaiman: <B>The Sandman</B> </font></td></tr> <tr bgcolor="#606090"><td height="5" colspan="2"></td></tr> <tr><td height="10"></td></tr> </table> Every artform, no matter how low, no matter how despised and despicable, has its transcendent figure. For superhero comics, that figure is... Walt Simonson, who turned his run of <i>Thor</i> into the only bit of Mighty Marvel that offered the same sort of pleasure as classic fantasy. The narrative technique was sophisticated, the art loose and suggestive, and the reinvention audacious (Odin dead! Mjölnir taken by another! Don Blake gone!). The tone darted from the lofty to the comic as needed; there was even a cameo by the scion of the competition. It was sad to check in on <i>Thor</i> some time later, and see that Marvel had learned nothing; the title was back to its old hack self. Odin and Don Blake were back, and Thor was battling drug dealers. <p>Superhero comics have never gone beyond this (that I know of), and probably can't; but Big Comics has, in the form of Gaiman's <i>Sandman</i>. And it only worked because DC gave Gaiman control over his creation, and freed him from the house rules. Though they retained copyright, which may mean that Sandman will end up fighting druglords too. <h5>Art vs. word -- Art loses</h5> Now that I've set the scene for a rave review, I might as well temper it by saying that the series falls short of what it could be, chiefly due to the art. <p>I don't mean Dave McKean's covers, which are marvelous. They're constructed as much as drawn, and the're not so much illustrations as suggestions of something buried and menacing. <p>But inside, it's mostly too eighties-Big-Comics... busy, well worked, but neither highly competent nor particularly imaginative; and <b>awfully</b> colored. The garish flat colors look as bad as any superhero comic... worse, since newsprint takes the bite out of the superguys. <p>The gods that appear in <i>Season of Mists</i> typify the problem. On the one hand, the depiction of Odin and Thor beats the hell out of any of Marvel's versions but Simonson's: Odin is spooky, Thor is impossibly, comically muscular and stupid. On the other hand, the depiction of the Egyptian gods is like a scribble on the wall compared with those of <a href="frenchy.html#bilal">Enki Bilal</a>. <p>Another example from the same book is the city of the angels, which comes out looking like a silver tea set, with matching angels in Italianate draperies. If only an artist with the skill of a Moebius or a Méziéres or a Schuiten had worked on this. <p>There are high points, of course. Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III in the last chapters of <i>Preludes and Nocturnes</i> and the entirety of <i>The Doll's House</i> rise to the level of graphic ingenuity that makes the book really shine. Michael Zulli's work in <i>The Wake</i> is spectacular. I like Jill Thompson's sure, simple art in <i>Brief Lives</i>; and the art in <i>World's End</i> (by various artists) is varied and distinctive. <h5>Mythology in the key of D</h5> <img src="illo/sandman.gif" align=right alt="Death and Dream" title="Death and Dream"> The <i>Sandman</i> volumes are introduced by horror writers; but <i>Sandman</i> is not a work of horror, but of fantasy-- or better yet, mythology. <p>Gaiman is an excellent writer-- if you're not sure of that, try his <i>Neverwhere</i>, an original, quirky, and very satisfying fantasy, in which London coexists with a ghostly underworld, full of horror and magic, and the fatal temptation to explain everything is resisted. <p>He is erudite on many levels-- <i>Sandman</i> is filled with references and homages to everything from Shakespeare to Lovecraft, from Marco Polo to G.K. Chesterton, from Robert Graves to Narnia, from Cerebus to a few decades of DC. (The <a href="http://www.stahl.bau.tu-bs.de/~hildeb/sandman/"> Annotated Sandman</a> dissects all of this in loving detail.) <p>And he's a marvelous storyteller-- few writers, in fact, could pull off one of his throwaway chapters, the story of an author who gets <i>too many</i> ideas. <p>He easily reaches the level of Simonson's <i>Thor</i>-- revitalizing and reimagining a mass of received material-- but his real gift is in the invention of a new mythology-- almost a new religion-- centering on Morpheus, the Sandman of the title, who turns out to be one of the seven 'Endless'-- deities who watch over the affairs of conscious beings, and on the side form the universe's oldest dysfunctional family. <p>Morpheus's own portfolio is Dream; everyone who dreams (or, broadly, tells stories) visits his realm. This gives Gaiman a wide latitude; he can offer anything from contemporary dark fantasy to retellings of ancient myths. <p>In the first volume Dream finds himself imprisoned (by a "hedge-magicking occultist") for seventy years; then escapes and works to reconstitute his dominion. Gaiman spins a series of gothic horror tales, ending in the truly disturbing "24 hours", building them into an epic of loss and recovery. <p>And then, just when you think you've got Gaiman's number, it's all turned on its head. Morpheus turns out to have an older sister, Death... who bawls him out for being selfish and not realizing that she'd be worried <i>sick</i> about him. It's a moment of humor, but also of sudden fascination: the palette has suddenly deepened. <p>Death is not the grim old guy with the sickle; she's a perky goth chick with a rather sweet nature. Her job is to attend the death of every living thing, and escort it to... whatever's next; several destinations seem to be possible. She's perhaps Gaiman's neatest creation: here he shows that he has not only the rare gift of making old myths live again, but the even rarer gift of being able to throw out the old myths and create new ones in their place: in this case, imagining a Death you'd actually like to meet. <h5>Whingeing and moaning</h5> This isn't to say that Gaiman always succeeds. Some bits are very well done, whether long arcs like Morpheus's sister Delirium's search for her lost brother Destruction or short stories like that of Hob Gadling, the man who simply refuses to die. <p>On the other hand, a story about cats is rather self-indulgent (Jim Woodring's big, brutal Big Red is ten times more convincing on the inner life of animals); and some of the story arcs suffer from the basic problem of the superhero books, as well as Astérix: the main character has become so powerful that he is never really in danger, and the emotional temperature drops. Morpheus visits Hell, for instance, and Lucifer utters elaborate threats-- but nothing really comes of them; what we expected to be a trick turns out simply to be a diplomatic scuffle among the gods. <p>The short book <i>Death: The Time of Your Life</i> is a disappointment. It focusses on a lesbian singer whose personal life is going to pieces, and the deaths that break in on her; the moral is more or less that Fame is a whore. But, well, the couple gets back together again, Foxglove gives up on fame, and everything is hunky-dory. It makes no sense. Whatever made Foxglove chase after fame has not been resolved, nor has anything been done to heal her relationship problems. <p>And the role of Death is really a cheat. An ominous choice is set up... and then dissipated; the required sacrifice is performed not by the principals but by an assistant (virtually crying "banzai!"). The metaphysical thread has been lost. Death could conceivably be a good thing (especially if it isn't an ending but a transition), but I can't buy Death as a sort of tidyer-up of a few chosen people's temporal lives. <p><i><a name="gameofyou">A Game of You</a></i> is more ambitious, and its faults are more interesting. Here Gaiman takes a minor scene from an earlier book-- a vapid girl who dreams of being a princess-- and turns it into a rather dark fantasy; the girl's imagined, Narnia-like land is threatened by the sinister forces of the Cuckoo, and seems to be losing. It's enlivened by some well-imagined characters-- Wanda, Thessaly, Wilkinson, even George, whose best scenes are all posthumous. <p>Unfortunately, its center is never as interesting as the periphery. The princess is too confused and learns too little; the fantasy land is little explored; and the story of the Cuckoo is basically resolved only by a deus ex machina. And like Iain M. Banks in <i>Against a Dark Background</i>, Gaiman relies a little too much on the shock value of killing off his secondary characters. <p>There's a discussion of the difference between boys' and girls' fantasy-- interesting, but unfortunately left at the level of pop psychology; nor is there much consideration of what happens to our fantasies as we grow up. (A side note: it's interesting that A.K. Rowling's <i>Harry Potter</i> series contains the elements (Gaiman tells us are) characteristic of <i>both</i> boys' and girls' fantasies.) <p>In various stories, the necessity to stick Morpheus into everything becomes annoying. It's rather like Dorothy L. Sayers' <i>Gaudy Night</i>-- a lovable overstuffed attic of a book, but structurally ruined by the book's hero, Harriet Vane, having to yield her place in the center of the plot to the series's hero, Lord Peter. <h5>You can tell the difference 'cos he's not furry</h5> Your enjoyment of the series will probably depend on how much you like the character of Morpheus. Morpheus speaks in white letters on a black background (which is supposed to sound "otherworldly", I suppose), and is given to things like standing on his balcony in the rain to mope after a failed love affair. <p>Morpheus starts out selfish and even cruel; over the course of the centuries (like Cerebus, he's a slow learner) he achieves somewhat more maturity, until... well, until, you could say, he racks up more maturity than he can handle. <p>He's at his best, I think, when instead of fulminating gothishly, he's forced to interact with the other characters-- Death; one or another of his old flames; his mercurial younger brother/sister Desire; his psychedelic youngest sister Delirium; even his pet raven, Matthew. <p>The other main attraction is Gaiman's bemused, quirky, cluttered worldview. None of the various quests that make up <i>Sandman</i>'s story arcs goes according to plan. No one seems to have an ultimate handle on things, and there's room in the universe for a little of everything: the grotesque, the wondrous, the pathetic, the humorous. <h5>A <i>little</i> Sandman, anyone?</h5> <p><img src="illo/death.jpg" align=left alt="Death and Milou" title="Death and Milou"> What? You don't want to drop $200 on the whole series? Here's brief descriptions and evaluations of each book. <ul> <li><b>Preludes & Nocturnes</b> - Morpheus's imprisonment, escape, and recovery of his MacGuffins. A nice mix of horror styles. <li><b>The Doll's House</b> - Tracking down some escaped nightmares. One of the best written and drawn, and featuring a truly creepy antihero, the Corinthian. <li><b>Dream Country</b> - Four short stories; the best is the story of an imprisoned Muse. The TPB includes a script for this story; it's interesting to see what exactly writing for a comic book consists of. <li><b>Season of Mists</b> - Morpheus goes back to Hell to undo a past blunder. A romp through various mythologies; not much of a resolution. <li><b>A game of you</b> - A woman revisits her childhood dreamland... hell, everybody does. See the <a href="#gameofyou">discussion above</a>. <li><b>Fables and Reflections</b> - short stories of varying quality, chiefly important as background for the next book. <li><b>Brief Lives</b> - Dream teams up, improbably, with Delirium, to find their departed brother. One of the best books. <li><b>World's End</b> - Short stories told in an inn between the worlds. Varied and unusual. <li><b>The Kindly Ones</b></b> - Morpheus has managed to piss off The Fates; while they press their deadly game, he mostly sits back and hopes for the best. There's a lot of everything going on, but perhaps the most intriguing aspect is the return of the Corinthian... as a good guy... a creepy good guy. The fullest and most intense of the books. <li><b>The Wake</b> - The aftermath, drawn in Michael Zulli's suitably reflective pencil. Great for fans, but don't start here. </ul> <HR> <p><center><A HREF="default.html"><img src="home.gif" border=0 alt="back to Metaverse"</A></center> </BODY> </HTML>