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First New Gaiman Sandman In 7 Years
meltoast writes "On September 17th, DC is releasing the first new installment in the Sandman series in over 7 years. Endless Nights is written entirely by award winning Neil Gaiman and drawn by seven different artists. Pre-order from ... well... where ever you want."
I would also love to see a cross over story arc of Spider-Man and Batman with John Romita Jr. and Jim Lee alternating between titles (Jim Lee doing Spider-Man, and Romita Jr. doing Batman). You wouldn't have to search for writers, because every stellar comic writer of recent times would be fighting tooth and nail to pen this.
Talk about a fanboy's disgustingly drenched wet dream!!
OK, so I am a big nerd, so sue me.
This is like Led Zeppelin reforming for a concert! No wait, its better than a rock bank reunion, as it's got guest artists that are superstars to! People have mentioned other great comics, Dark Knight, and Watchmen, but Sandman is a collection of modern fables and urban myths, woven into reality... plus a writer only gets better with age, like a fine wine developing over the years, the prose is laced with new passages of wisdom, new nuances of meaning... like a dream of a rock band reforming, with Led Zep jamming with Louie Armstrong... September 17th? excellent!
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The thing that impressed me most about Neil when I interviewed home for Nova Express back in 1999 (he had just started working on American Gods), was how generous he was with his time and how his tremendous success had left him largely untouched. Despite his enormous popularity, he was quite generous about signing things for a never ending stream of people, and seemed genuinely interested in talking to every one among the legions of his fans at Armadillocon. Certainly there are others who have let far less success go to their head.
There are lots of cool people among my fellow SF scribblers, but Neil has remained one of the coolest, and not to mention perhaps the most level-headed. And then there's his considerable talent...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
At this point, it seems like the whole Morpheus story was so well settled that even prequals do the ending somewhat of a disservice. Even The Tempest, the last Wake story, seemed like a bit of a shame; the story should have ended with Master Li's thoughts at the end of Exiles (echoing the Roman ghost riders: Only the Phoenix arises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.)
Anyhow, I don't mean to sound as stupidly fanboy as I do, and I don't mean that I don't welcome the chance to dive into some more Sandman, but I suppose I do sort of long for authors to know when they've reached the end of their time with their characters, when they've reached the best end they're going to find...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Well, inflation will do such a thing. I remember the last Impact Comics story arc from DC being the last 99 cent comic. Using more modern printing techniques to get better color accuracy and retention caused prices to generally increase in the late nineties. Then the market dropped out due to the glut of speculators and most comic makers are seriously hurting. Plus the rise of indies and successful creator owned companies caused a lot of renegotiation between writers, artists, and the major companies giving better royalty deals and contracts in general, which is good considering how most of them were crapped on for so long. I don't mind paying $5.95 for a graphic novel if its a good graphic novel. I mean, a newly released hard cover book of size runs $20-$30. That's the nature of the beast. Marvel actually makes more money off licensing its characters and their interest in Marvel Studios than they do from comics. And the best thing you can do is spend the money on the good stuff and not on the drek that is most mainstream comics these days. DC has proved, though, that it may be changing as they, and Marvel, are starting focus more on quality storytelling and not just action filled crap and character shattering mega-events. They are also noticing that, like video games, their core market is aging and is grasping onto writers rather than characters. It is mighty scary that Batman, over the last 6 months, has been one of the best written comics out there. And Marvel notice with their Marvel Knights like with people like Garth Ennis and Kevin Smith, that fans are now gravitating towards solid, consistant writers rather than fantastic characters, over-stylized art, and flashy covers and story arcs. I wish Frank Miller would just go back to giving us more Sin City and fantasticly unique stories like 300. I think that DK2 being the first comic he'd done for a major company in about a decade shows that he is a writer that has grown out of working in that box. He said in an interview that Sept. 11 hit him hard creatively and caused him to dramatically change the events of the story and was what caused it to ship so late.
Of course, there are so many poignant comic books, but one of my favorite from the 1985-1990 period was Sandman Annual #1. It came out during the first gulf war.
The story was about a sultan of Baghdad around 1000 AD, when Baghdad was the absolute pinnacle of civilization, knew the most mathemtatics, and was the most advanced culture in the world. But he saw in the deserts the ruins of Sumeria and Egypt and knew that all great civilizations fail. So he summons Sandman by threatening to break open a glass ball imprisoning 9,999 demons, djinn, and efreeti that Abraham captured -- unless Sandman preserves Baghdad unchanged forever. Sandman agrees, but with the provision that it'll only live on forever in the Dreamworld. The Sultan agrees, and wakes up in the dirty, broken, real-world city that Baghdad has become.
On the last page, you find out it was all just a story an old man was telling a little boy to keep his spirits up while the Americans are bombing Baghdad during the war, and you see what a wreck the story is, &c. &c. &c. Super-cool story. (BTW, I supported the war and still do, but I still appreciate a good story).
That and the Animal Man comic where Wile. E. Coyote becomes Jesus Christ and takes on the suffering of the whole cartoon world so that the cartoon animals will stop blowing each other up are two of the many that stand out from that period.
Around 1990 is when I stopped following comics though.
Gaiman's Sandman is all about storytelling. Gaiman used the comic to explore what exactly storytelling is and what it means to humans. This is why there's so many references to so many different mythologies (Judeo/Christian, Greek/Roman, Egyptian, Norse, etc.): because myths were the dominant way to transmit stories before the printed word was cheap.
It also explains his inclusion of two issues dealing with Shakespear. Most of Shakespear's plays are derivatives (i.e., Romeo and Juliet originates in Greek mythology, ). However, two of them, Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, are orginal stories, which is why Gaiman chose to deal with them.
The character Sandman (i.e., Dream, Morpheus) is by his nature a storyteller. Dreams are the stories that he gives us (and cats, according to one story in the series).
So basically, the Sandman is a story about stories. At one point, just to try it out, Gaiman experimented with going something like five levels deep (i.e., you're reading a story about a guy telling a story about some people telling stories, where one person tells a story where one of the characters tells a story).
It's this investigation of storytelling that is at the core of Sandman. While I'm also a big fan of TDKR and Watchman, I have to say that Sandman has thus far been the high water mark for literature in comic form.
BTW, another, albeit less prevelant, theme of Sandman is nature of rules. Should rules be followed blindly? What are the consequences of doing so? Can making the best choices within a set of rules lead to the worst consequences? Can storytelling die?