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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."
But Sandman is where it all went bad. And then the whole thing with his anti-Napster stance came along and blew his credibility out of the water.
He really should have stopped at Justice, which along with Puppets were the zenith of his career.
Here's a link to the first 4 pages.
I'd be careful where you pre-order from. If you buy from a bookstore, you won't be getting your copy on September 17th - you'll be waiting another week or two. The book is being distributed via comic book distribution, and so it will hit comic shops first, since that is what Diamond distributes to. From Diamond's initial distribution, it will make it to book warehouses and to bookstores, but if you absolutely want it on September 17th, buy from your comic shop. You might have better luck with something like Amazon, but people are still expecting the book to hit comic shops first (Neil Gaiman's blog had something on this earlier today, but it's late, and I don't feel like linkdiving)
They need the money more than Borders or Amazon do anyway.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
The last Gaiman Sandman story was _The Dream Hunters_ with Yoshitaka Amano. I know this, because I bought the book for my wife. That was October of 1999 (from the copyright of the book), which was only about 4 years ago.
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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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Sandman is a graphic novel about morpheus the god of sleep ( a very modernised and un-greek god ). Neil Gaiman's books and Novels generally deal with very dark themes - think of him as Terry Pratchett sans the humour :)
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Sandman is a 75 issue comic series, which ran from late 1988 to 1996, published by DC. Gaiman is in a lot of ways a protege of Moore, and some would argue (Myself included) that he more than surpassed his mentor.
To quote from the introduction to one volume, "there are seven beings that aren't gods, who existed before humanity dreamed of gods and will exist after the last god is dead. They are called The Endless. They are embodiments of (in order of age) Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium."
The Endless are personifications fo the ideas they are named after. Sandman begins in 1989, when Dream escapes from a prison he has been in since 1916, when a magician captured him.
The series can be bought in 10 graphic novels very easily on Amazon.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Sandman is the best comic series ever. By far. Gaiman created his own mythology (that's IMHO up there with the Greco-Roman one - well not like he didn't pull from it), and wrote some fucking amazing stories around it. Go to your local library right now and check out the whole series - many have them in graphic novel form.
I stopped reading comics when Sandman ended -- nothing could come close to matching it for me. Then I started up again when I picked up a copy of From Hell, maybe the best $35 you could spend on a single GN. Also good is Road to Perdition, but who really does it for me is Brian Michael Bendis. He's a writer on par with Gaiman, except he's more into precedural crime-type stuff. His GNs Jinx and Goldfish are kick-ass, and also Fire and Torso. He also does Powers, which is great fun to read, Alias, and does or has done Daredevil. Check out his stuff at www.jinxworld.com.
Oh and for a grippingly entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny story about trying to get a screenplay made into a movie, check out Fortune and Glory, also by Bendis.
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Art Spiegelman's Maus won a Pulitzer, and is regularly assigned in universities.
Dark Knight is less studied, but Alan Moore's Watchmen gets a fair amount of critical attention. And Sandman gets quite a good deal of critical attention, and would probably be assigned almost as much as Maus if it weren't for the fact that the whole series costs roughly $200, which is a bit excessive for textbooks.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
It's an interesting foray into the supernatural, taking lots of cues from mythologies around the world, and creates its own mythological panorama and pantheon of demigods and strange creatures.
The stories mostly focus on Dream, one of the seven Endless whose domains are the life, death, sleep, trials and emotions of mankind. Dream is the one who feels his responsibilities most deeply, and much of the series revolves around his interaction with mankind, and with his somewhat dysfunctional siblings.
It has spawned off a few series from parts of the mythos it has constructed. There's the Books of Magic, the Books of Faerie, and one of my favorites, Lucifer.
Most of the modern reprints (I'm gathering they're reprints) have some interesting introductions at the beginning by all sorts of famous (in the comic/SF/fantasy arena) folks.
You likely don't have to order them online - even most "regular" bookstores are starting to set up small graphic novels areas, and I haven't seen one of these yet without a Sandman or ten, and used bookstores often have a few.
They're a much different style from the superhero comics, however. It's a lot of myth, mystery and drama, but not much in the way of action. Definitely find out if it's to your tastes before ordering any.
Other comics, like The Invisibles are very interesting, with lots of action, but absolute noodle-benders, and will have you wondering what on earth (or planet of your choice, for that matter) they were smoking.
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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...
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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.