Absolute Sandman Volume 2

Absolute Sandman Volume 2
Written by Neil Gaiman
Edited by Karen Berger
1992 Eisner Winner for Best Single Issue or Story
1992, 1993 Eisner Winner for Best Continuing Series
1992, 1993 Eisner Winner for Best Writer
1992 Eisner Winner for Best Editor
1993 Eisner Winner for Best Publication Design for the Season of Mists trade paper back

The first year and a half of Sandman was the weakest of the series. There were some rough spots in the story telling and for a period the art was awful. Of course when you start out at terrific and that's the weakest part then what follows has to be absolutely spectacular. Volume two of the absolute editions contains what I consider to the be the high point of the series: the two best story arcs in the series and some wonderful single issue stories.

The first story arc in this volume is Season of Mists in which Dream realizes that condemning women who reject him to hell for all eternity is a bit of a jerk move and so sets out to release one of his former lovers from the abyss. Once there he becomes entangled in the most insidious scheme that the devil has ever created and finds himself the center of attention for the supernatural powers.

The other story arc is A Game of You in which a character who had been caught at the edges of an earlier story finds that the dreams that she lost are seeking her out in the real world. She is drawn into the dreamworld by them to overthrow a tyrant and her friends follow her in.

I can't decide which of these two stories are better. Season of Mists is the big fantasy novel filled with spectacular high concept ideas which Gaiman never allows to get in the way of the storytelling. A Game of You is the character arc where the live of residents of a Manhattan apartment building are detailed and then thrown into chaos. It's more personal than schemes of gods and demons. But then Seasons of Mist is a key portion of the narrative that carries the entire series while A Game of You is an interesting side show.

Also in this volume are the majority of the stories that were collected in Fables and Reflections and this is an instance where the original collections failed badly. Fables and Reflections contained all the single issue stories that there wasn't room for in other books. The problem with this is that they were not consecutive; they fell between story arcs and for most of them their placement was significant. They introduced concepts that would be touched on the following arc and revealed information at a gentle pace in their original form. Piling them all into one volume broke the pacing of the series and having them all restored to the original positions is a nice benefit.

The art, mainly provided by Kelly Jones and Shawn McManus, is for the most part up to the high standards set through the series. Unfortunately the last chapter of Season of Mists reverts to the scratchy, barely visible art that dominated The Doll's House. In earlier printings of the story it was so bad that some the text was unreadable but that has been corrected with Absolute Sandman.

Just because I think this is the high point of the series doesn't mean it's completely downhill from here. It just happens to be the portion that I think of as the best; the moment when everything came together perfectly. Season of Mists has been what I've used to hook people on Sandman in the past because it's straightforward and gives a feeling for the best of the series and A Game of You is a change of pace while still being just as good. There's still more great stuff to come, though.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Sandman #19: "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
Written by Neil Gaiman; Art by Charles Vess
1991 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Short Fiction

Cover by Dave McKean
1991 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Artist

No, I didn't typo that award.

Despite the fact that I was a comic reader at the time and I was making somewhat regular trips to my local comic book store "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was the first time I heard about Sandman. Since it was the early 90's there wasn't same level of nerd support network around; I wasn't reading the fan press so I just wasn't aware of the book's existence. Then there was a newspaper article about this comic book that won an award for prose and the uproar that surrounded it.

Let's get a plot synopsis out of the way first. Dream made a deal with a minor playwright who had only written one particularly bad play titled "Two Gentlemen of Verona". In exchange for penning two plays about dreams the writer will gain phenomenal skill and immortality through his words. This issue picks up with that writer leading his theater company to a meadow where they will put on the initial performance of the first play for their patron. Their patron also happens to bring along with him the people the play is about.

The preamble to this award is that it wasn't the first time something strange happened. The Dark Knight Returns garnered ballots for Hugo nomination across multiple categories. To resolve this in the Hugo awards structure they placed it as an art book in the non-fiction category. This is what lead to Watchmen's Hugo award in the one off "other" category. So in the late eighties the cross over between SF fans and comic fans was starting to blur things together. This came to a head at the World Fantasy Convention.

Gaiman was not some unknown comic book writer to the panel that selected this issue of Sandman for the award. That year he was also nominated in the novel category along with Terry Pratchett for Good Omens (Thomas the Rhymer and Only Begotten Daughter tied for the award that year). So Sandman's nomination was a surprise but it wasn't completely out of the blue. Of course everyone thought it was an interesting gesture that wouldn't go anywhere.

When the awards were announced things exploded and battle lines were drawn. On one side were the comic fans who said that they were finally vindicated that comics could be mature and a medium for great storytelling. The opposition were outraged at the idea that a funny book could hold the same significance as something created by a "real writer". That's when fuel was added to the fire by changing the World Fantasy Award rules so that a comic could not win again.

Obviously I don't have much sympathy for those people who denied that a comic book could be well written but at the same time I think the committee that sets the rules for the World Fantasy Awards was right. The medium is part of the work and while it may come across as spiteful (many people have interpreted it that way) changing the rules limit the category to prose was the right thing to do based on the scope of their awards. And it wasn't as though they hated comics; Moebius won the best artist award a few years later for his comics work and Vess won a second World Fantasy Award for himself a few years after that. There may have been some appeasement in the rule change but since it occurred the day after the award ceremony I'm sure it was something in consideration immediately after Sandman was nominated. What it comes down to is that a comic book and a short story are too different for direct comparisons to be made fairly.

Moving past the controversy the World Fantasy Award did go to one of the best issues of the series. Throughout Sandman Gaiman's short stories were more effective than his long ones. It may be my love of Shakespeare speaking (I've actually seen "Two Gentlemen of Verona" performed; it's like an Elizabethan playwright doing a bad parody of what Shakespeare would become) but I adore this issue. The poetic balance of Shakespeare burning brightly at the height of his career while losing touch with his family and the fairies about to leave the world behind only to stop to catch a show on their way out leaves an impression. Even if you don't like Shakespeare Gaiman avoids becoming too entangled in the words of the play itself and instead relies on a Greek chorus of goblins who comment on the action. It's the story of a strange, magical night; exactly the kind of thing that fits the tone of Sandman.

As for myself, the newspaper article made me award of comic's existence for the first time but it would be another a while before I started reading it. I read the earlier trade paperbacks first and because of the lead time between the issue and the award it wasn't until over twenty issues later that I was buying the comics. Still it was the World Fantasy Award that let me know that Sandman was out there and it was something I'd have to read at some point.

Review - Absolute Sandman Volume 1

Absolute Sandman Volume 1
Written by Neil Gaiman; Art by too many people to list here
1991 Eisner Winner for Best Continuing Series
1991 Eisner Winner for Best Writer
1991 Eisner Winner for Best Graphic Album: Reprint (Modern Material)
2007 Eisner Winner for Best Archival/Collection Project (Comic Books)

I needed to cover Sandman by the end of the year and I've been struggling with a format. Trying to do the whole thing at once doesn't work since there are awards specifically for certain storylines and issues. One issue in particular needs it's own post because of its significance. I considered trying to space it out a bit more but introduces the risk that I might lose my own train of thought as I go through it. Breaking it down too much is another problem since it would take too much time. I finally decided on a format of a post per volume of the Absolute editions that touch on the material in them, a special post on that one particular issue, one on Endless Nights, and if I have not completely burned myself out on Sandman at that point I'll wrap things up The Dream Hunters.

I'm also going to abandon my usual format at least for these Absolute volumes. You could copy and paste my comments among all of them so if you need to here's a convenient paragraph:

Neil Gaiman's original metatext on the nature of stories is brilliant. He weaves real world myth and legend into a compelling Sandman is one of the most significant comic books ever created and it demands to be read. Its missteps are few and the entire series stands out as a work of genius. Sandman is a comic book that will be discussed and dissected for a long time.

I can't say that Sandman is my favorite comic book ever (I have a tough time ranking such things in my mind given the quantity I've read). I can say that I place it in the ranks of comic books that have transcended the medium to be literature. It's an arbitrary distinction if there ever was one and a debate I'm going to get to in the next post.

So there's the preamble, let's get to the main event.

Sandman is the story of Dream a.k.a. Morpheus, the personification of everything that is not real in the universe. He governs the dreaming which is where stories and myths come from and where we go when we sleep. He is not a god because gods die; he is one of the seven Endless who exist beyond them.

At the beginning of the series a cabal of sorcerers attempt to summon and trap Death but instead capture Dream. He waits out the lifetimes of his captors and once he can escape he finds that his kingdom has gone wild in his absence. So Dream's first duty is to recover symbols of his office that were taken from him by the sorcerers so that he can use them in rebuilding dreams.

This was the storyline that was originally collected as Preludes and Nocturnes and includes some of the high and low points of the series. The high point is a gruesome issue called "24 Hours" in which a lunatic who can control people's minds spends a full day at a diner playing with the people who were there when he arrived. It's absolutely chilling to see people played with. This sequence also features a battle of metaphors with a demon (as opposed to a metaphorical battle)

The low point is that Gaiman tied a bit of the series directly into some superhero comics. He would do this overtly twice more in Sandman but this is the one that stands out like a sore thumb mainly because it's so awkwardly shoe horned in. Dream just goes to visit the Justice League one night and get information on one of their enemies. It just doesn't fit very well with the rest of the series during which the nods to superhero comics tended to be sly winks and references that comic book nerds would pick up without breaking the flow for the crossover audience he was getting.

The artwork in this section is sharp with some wonderful stuff by Sam Keith leading off for a few issues. I don't care for everything Keith does but this is an instance where his ragged, distorted figures match the tone. Also his page layouts which include strange borders and offset framing of panels add to the surreal tone of the book. When Mike Dringenberg takes over the quality of the artwork drops though it's still good enough.

That takes us to The Doll's House which won the 1991 Eisner for best reprint and all of the material from that version is included in this book. (That's true of everything in the Sandman trade paperbacks with one exception.) Some of you might be saying "But wait! There's one more story in Preludes and Nocturnes!" and I'll have to point out that the early printings of the collected editions included that story in both trade paperbacks.

I'm talking about "The Sound of Her Wings" which was one of the big turning points in Sandman. The first story arc was clearly built around it being a horror series. In "The Sound of Her Wings" Dream is moping in a park after finishing the first story where he runs into his sister Death. She convinces him to follow her around for a few hours as she does her rounds and he sees people dealing with their own deaths. So instead of being a horror comic it switches to some philosophy and exploration of the human condition. It also brought in the concept of the family of Endless who would be central to the ongoing story.

The tone of the series changed starting from that point. The next issue dealt with African myths and a few issues after that there was a story about a man who has a regular meeting with Dream. Neither of these could be mistaken for horror on any level and The Doll's House is really where Gaiman started determining the direction that he would go with Sandman.

The main storyline in The Doll's House is that of a woman seeking her lost brother who has become entangled in dreams. She is a is a focus of dream activity and Dream lurks in the background of this story as he uses her to search for some dangerous nightmares that escaped his kingdom during his absence. These plots come together at a convention for serial killers, a concept that's done so perfectly that the insanity of the basic premise can be overlooked for the sake of the creepiness.

As much as I love the concepts that Gaiman plays with in this arc it is my least favorite portion of Sandman. There seems to be a chapter worth of information that gets lost somewhere along the way which makes the conclusion come across as muddled. The protagonist of this story and her family trouble wasn't nearly as interesting as the fantastic things going on around her. Then there's the art.

The artwork in The Doll's House is the nadir of series. There is only one point where I think it looks this bad and it's still a few posts off. In this case I think it's the inking that's mostly at fault; the lines are thin and sketchy to the point that I wonder if the rough pencils were even filled in for most of the pages. It's still Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones providing the artwork and I'm not sure what caused it to degrade from decent to sketchy to just plain ugly.

This volume concludes with stories that were collected in Dream Country which demonstrated what Gaiman excelled at over his run on Sandman. These are four short stories that were complete in a single issue and each took on a very style style and tone. There's a muse held captive in the same way that Dream was, what your cats really do behind your back, a bit of Shakespeare, and a superhero who has become an agoraphobe. They're all exquisite stories that explore the edges of world that Gaiman is creating.

Absolute Sandman is the biggest project that DC comics has done with their line of Absolute Editions. It spans four volumes (five including Absolute Death which is a spin off of the series) and are gorgeous books. Each one is has a kind of faux leather binding and slip case that looks terrific on a book shelf. The inside is just as good as the stories have been recolored to help smooth over some of the art problems but that recoloring effort is not as garish as some modern recoloring projects are. The first volume has as an appendix the original series proposal and the script to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (that's issue nineteen, not the play). Missing, however, is the annotated original script for Calliope which was in the Dream Country collection. Still given what happened after that collection was printed I think it's a fair trade off.

What happened after Dream Country was printed? That's for the next post.

Review - Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog
Written and Directed by Joss Whedon
2009 Hugo Winner for Best Dramatic Presentation

This review has been delayed a long time. Though I've had my copy of the DVD release for a long time I lent it to a friend shortly before the Hugo awards were announced and I only got it back last week. They kept showing it more people who hadn't seen it which shows you how much affection they had for the movie. Assuming you can call a internet video a "movie" of course.

Dr. Horrible is a socially awkward nerd who is documenting his efforts to become a supervillain in a video blog. He has a crush on a woman who he sees at the laundromat and he plans to impress her by building a freeze ray and performing acts of supervillainy. His archenemy Captain Hammer interferes with one of these heists and meets the woman Dr. Horrible has a crush on. And since this is a musical most of this is told through musical numbers.

A major part of what makes Dr. Horrible so effective for nerds is the fact that he is the prototypical nerd. He's smart, thinks he knows better than everyone else, and can't talk to a girl to save his life. He even uses sheeple in song lyrics.

Before going on I want to state for the record that I've never used my freeze ray in an attempt to meet a woman. Or used the word "sheeple".

Getting back to the point the main character is one of the few genuine feeling depictions of a nerd you'll find. He's as socially awkward as any nerd and his clumsy attempts to connect will be familiar to any nerd (albeit on a different scale).

The script is fantastic. It runs from hysterically funny to some brutal pathos and does both well. It's a comedy based on classic dramatic archetypes. The plot that runs through an old story hidden so well behind a mask of comedy that you won't see it coming. The music isn't spectacular (Joss Whedon may be able to pick out notes on a piano but he doesn't have a lot of skill at it) but the lyrics are fun.

The cast are also note perfect. Neil Patrick Harris plays the titular role as a man who puts up the defensive mask of being a supervillain to deal with the world. Nathan Fillion meanwhile takes comedic arrogance to a level rarely seen. I feel bad for Felicia Day as the innocent woman caught between them since she isn't given much to do besides being blind to people's faults.

If you get the DVD instead of watching the show online the bonus material is worth watching on it's own. One of the commentary tracks is a whole new musical on its own with it's own dramatic arc. They spend very little time talking about the movie and instead sing their own parody of DVD commentaries.

Dr. Horrible is a classic story with very modern stylings and rebuilt for nerds. So it's completely unsurprising that it won the Hugo award. The only real problem with it is the low budget styling that grew out of it's origin as a video for the Internet. Anyone who is a self-described nerd should see it but since it has been distributed on the net I doubt there's any self-described nerd who hasn't.

Review - Plastic Man

Plastic Man
by Kyle Baker
2004 Eisner Winner for Best New Series
2004, 2005, and 2006 Eisner Winner for Best Writer/Artist - Humor
2005 Eisner Winner for Best Title for a Younger Audience

Plastic Man is one of those instances where my preference for getting comics as trade paper backs has worked against me. I don't buy a lot of comics in the monthly magazine form since the collected editions are generally a better match for me. Every so often though I find a series where I'd like to get more of and there just isn't any. Even though there were twenty issues of Plastic Man released and the entire run earned Baker awards only two collections have ever been published. It's been almost four years since the last one so it is very unlikely that they'll ever be bound together. So I have to consider Plastic Man based on those first twelve issues. Those two books have left me wanting to read the rest of it.

The first book, On the Lam, is easy enough to describe. Plastic Man's secret identity, who happens to be a reformed mobster, is framed for a murder. When his secret identity is uncovered he has to look for the real killer while running from his partner in the FBI, his sidekick, and the law.

That's about as straightforward superhero story you're going to find. If I stripped out the part about the FBI and the sidekick it could describe every single character published in the last fifty years. The difference here is that Plastic Man is a slapstick, loony series about a guy who changes into the craziest things possible (in fact the On the Lam book is bound in plastic with a cover that looks like Plastic Man disguised as the book). This is a cartoony book and the story exists only to give a structure to the gags.

The second volume, Rubber Bandits, is less universal in structure than the first as it opens with a story about comic book continuity and the trend of making characters unpleasant under the guise of being "realistic". Fortunately it immediately links this back to a time traveling Abraham Lincoln. Most of the rest of the book is more friendly to new readers with shorter stories.

There's a fine line in humor between "zany" and "random". When something is suppose to be funny just because it's out of place I tend to get bored because when you could have anything then nothing is effective. Plastic Man does not stray over that line even though Baker could have easily filled the pages with pop culture references and Plastic Man mugging for the reader. Instead Baker establishes his insane situation and drops his insane characters into it which prevents the plotting from degrading to a series of panel gags about what Plastic Man turns into next. He did not forget the jokes as he wrote these stories.

The artwork is for Plastic Man is absolutely stunning. It is very firmly on the cartoony side of the realism scale which lets Baker take advantage of his hero's malleable form. Plastic Man tends to have huge reactions that tie him in knots (sometimes literally). The animation influence is given a real showcase at the end of Rubber Bandits where the last story is a Tom and Jerry homage.

The animation metaphor extends to the lack of panel borders throughout the series. He also often uses sequences where it was paced in like animation where Baker has just drawn the key frames over the course of the page. Even the backgrounds seem to be on a separate floating layer from the foregrounds due to the coloring and style differences. This book looks like a cartoon and it's an effect that is pulled off well.

After reading Baker's Plastic Man there's no one alive who I'd want to see handling the character ever again. There's little else I can add to that since it is a series where the humor will work for you or it won't. It's charmingly goofy and made me smile.

Review - Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels
by Margo Lanagan
Tied for 2009 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

There were several times while reading Tender Morsels that I had to stop and double check the dust jacket and the publisher's page. I had to make sure I wasn't mistaken when I saw that the jacket identified it "a junior library guild selection" and it was published by Random House Children's Books. I kept checking because I could not conceive how Tender Morsels could have been published as a YA book; it's far more mature in every sense of the word than a vast majority of novels I have read targeted for adults. It's also an exceptional book partially for that reason.

A young girl who has been raped retreats into a dream world made physical in order to raise her daughters. They have an idyllic existence there until the bubble of their reality is punctured by a a man seeking wealth. After that things leak into their world from outside and they have to start dealing with the less than perfect nature of the real world.

The first thing that I have to mention, and the thing that kept driving me to check that it was in fact a YA book, is that this book features a lot of sex. None of it is explicit but there's around a dozen rapes in the first fifty pages. Lanagan may not go into detail on the physical acts she does not shy away from the emotions. If that wasn't enough the book takes some fairly deep steps into bestiality as the blossoming girls become interested in animal companions. Lanagan is more cautious on side stepping this (laughably so at one point not involving any female characters that read more as an editor forcing a statement on the issue given the context of the rest of the scene) but the concept is just about impossible to avoid.

Sex is a huge theme of Tender Morsels and as you may guess it tends to be neither romantic or erotic. Men are bestial, women are naive, and the two often conflict violently. It makes the few times in the novel where there is a healthy relationship between a man and a woman the odd one out. (Strangely enough there's little in the way of homosexuality but then given the themes tied to sex in the novel it might be better off that way.)

It takes more than just people having (or avoiding) a lot of sex to make a book "mature". Tender Morsels is also about the raising of children and what effect a sheltering environment can have. It's about the changes that a person undergoes throughout their life and the need for companionship. Modern attitudes are crushed hard in this psuedo-medieval land and there is no comforting moral to make up for that. There's a lot of themes to the book that I think would only strongly connect with an adult making this the most adult YA book I've ever read.

I was extremely impressed at the way Lanagan has the story unfold. The book abruptly shifts focus multiple times and every time I thought I had worked out where things were heading Lanagan derailed my preconceptions and threw it into a completely different direction. And every time she did this she made me more interested in what was going to happen next.

The book is not completely without faults. The characters are a bit shallow. While I'm certain that is intentional given the themes of the book I don't like being able to wrap up someone in a few words. There is exactly one positive depiction of a man in the entire book; anyone else who is an adult with a Y chromosome is a monster.

The recent rise of YA books as a publishing phenomenon has been a problem for me with some of the recent Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award Winners. Books intended for a target audience of twelve year olds typically are disconnected from me as an adult reader no matter how well done they are (see The Graveyard Book for an example of that). That is not the case with Tender Morsels. This is a rich novel that I'd recommend to anyone. It's a light-hearted dark-fantasy; a Grimm fairy tale in a modern fantasy style. It is a gripping book and I'm glad I read it.

Review - Criminal

Criminal
Written by Ed Brubaker; Art by Sean Phillips
2007 Eisner Winner for Best New Series
2007, 2008 Eisner Winner for Best Writer

Noir is the new black. It seems like everyone is going for noir these days (at least the ones who aren't going for zombies). You put some detectives in a gritty urban setting with a depressing narrative and you've got it made. Comics in particular have started producing a lot of noir in the past few years and the best of these that I've found is Criminal.

There have been three complete story arcs for Criminal so far and all of them are contained in Criminal: The Deluxe Edition. The first one is titled "Coward" and is about a thief who survives by planning every detail and following a strict set of rules. Those rules make other people think of him as a coward, especially since he fled the scene of the last big job while the rest of the crew were gunned down. He is driven to break his own rules as part of a new job that's bigger than anything before and it has some troubling consequences.

The second story is "Lawless" where a man trained as the army's perfect killer goes AWOL to seek his own brother's murderer. His brother was a criminal and the signs point to the murderer being part of his own crew. So this man infiltrates the gang by cutting a bloody swath through the underground.

Finally there is "The Dead and the Dying" which is three interlocking stories of a former boxer, a soldier just returned from Viet Nam, and a woman who loved the wrong man. Their lives collide as the woman seeks revenge on her former lover, the soldier attempts to find a place for his violent nature, and the boxer attempts to protect the woman he accidentally hurt.

These could have been simple stories about bad people doing bad things but Brubaker creates some compelling personalities to center the story on. These stories are from the school of writing where you throw together a bunch of strong-willed people together, put them at cross-purposes, and see what happens. These stories aren't about the big heist, they're about what happens after the heist.

One aspect of that is that these are bad people doing bad things and Brubaker does present them as heroes. It is appropriate to a noir story that the characters given heroic development but it can be a bit off putting when the guy you're supposed to be cheering is murdering people in cold blood.

Sean Phillips impressed me with his ability to carry these stories. These days it's more popular with artists to create large designs but he has created pages that are dense. He's fitting in seven or eight panels per page and while he stays locked on a three tier format he does not limit himself to variations on the nine panel grid. He enjoys the tight, inset reaction shot and uses it well. This wouldn't have worked if Phillips wasn't able to do a terrific job with the characters' faces.

I don't usually single out the colorists like this but Val Staples does a standout job with Criminal. It would have been easy to do a traditional coloring job with this book and it would have been fine like that. Staples on the other hand rarely uses more than two hues in any given panel which gives the book a washed out feeling that's appropriate to its style.

Even though I wouldn't call Criminal a perfect book I'm unable to come up with any specific flaws. Everything is good, I'm just left with a nagging feeling that it could have been better. However if you like noir at all then I can think of no reason to not read this book. The Deluxe Edition is well worth it too as a terrific looking hardcover that collects everything current and a whole lot of extra material. On the other hand if you don't care for noir then I doubt that Criminal is going to change your mind.