Words are inadequate

In which the story of Morpheus, Dream of the Endless, reaches the end it's been clearly aiming for since at least Brief Lives, if not Season of Mists.

I remember disliking the art the last time I read this. Or, not disliking exactly, but thinking it wasn't good enough. It's certainly not photorealistic or drawn-from-life or representative or whatever you call it. "Art deco-ish," I said when I loaned it to Chris, and it is, all sharp angles and solid colours. But it's also exaggerated proportions and bold lines. And it works for the story, it drew me in and it didn't detract and probably added to the mythic feel.

I dunno. It's too big to talk about, especially since it's been so long since I've read the rest. Thirteen issues, drawing heavily on everything that's come before, some of which I remembered and some of which I didn't.

It's basically successful, I think. It reads like a coherent fully-constructed narrative, which the first two didn't; it has actual consequences, which A Game Of You and to some extent Brief Lives fell down on. It probably is the best of the arcs but it relies so very much on what's come before for that impact... it's like saying "The Sound of Her Wings" (tv or comic) is the best Sandman story, but it means so much less without the rest of Preludes.

It's worth reading the rest of Sandman for, though the rest of Sandman is generally good in its own right (my grumpiness aside).

Presumably I'll reread it again sooner than twenty years, this time.

(Not to say that I'm done. There's still The Wake, plus ancillary material: the Death stories, Dream Hunters, Endless Nights, and finally a first-read of Overture. Oh, and I scored a copy of Dust Covers recently as well.)

An interlude between Fables & Reflections and The Kindly Ones. Individual tales with a framing story to connect them: varied travelers lost in a storm take refuge at the Inn of Worlds' End.

So it's another anthology collection, but one with a frame story. To be honest the frame story only mostly worked for me. I appreciate how it ties in to the larger world and to Dream's forthcoming funeral procession, but ... eh. "People from our world get caught up in magic and refuse to believe it" is a theme that just doesn't do much for me anymore.

I found the individual stories mostly memorable but not brilliantly so. Nothing that grabbed me as much as the tales from Fables & Reflections. The worldbuilding in the Cluracan's tale and in Cerements is fantastic, of course, and the city's dream is pleasantly unsettling, but ... eh. Just didn't quite gel.

Or I'm just in a grumpy mood. Also always possible.

In which Delirium and her big brother Dream go in search of Destruction, their brother who walked away from his duties and his family three hundred years ago.

I don't know why it took me a year to get around to reading Fables & Reflections but I'm glad I did. Both because I like it a great deal and because it got me moving on the rest of the saga.

Having said that ... this one didn't really catch me and I don't know why. It's got good minor characters in Ruby and Ishtar (and Barnabas, Destruction's canine companion), it's got an interesting expansion on the mythos of the Endless, it's got a good Death scene. It's got Dream denying that he's changed at all in the face of increasing evidence to the contrary. Maybe that's what frustrated me? Like A Game Of You, it's a very 'nothing has changed' story.

It's tempting to compare this to Season of Mists, the previous Dream-centric arc, which also ended in a reassertion of the status quo. But for whatever reason I liked Season of Mists a great deal more. I dunno. Peter Straub, in his Afterword, also got a lot more out of this story than I did.

Back to Sandman after a couple of months absence.

In which ... you know, this one is really hard to sum up in a pithy sentence. Barbie from The Doll's House (yes) has her recurring childhood dreamscape invaded by the Cuckoo, and she ends up trapped back in the dream, and the other residents of her New York walkup apartment building go into the Dreaming to find her.

Morpheus has been on the sidelines before, in Dream Country. I wasn't a fan then and I'm not one now. Particularly since this story feels so ... futile. Two deaths (of, as Delany points out in his intro, the transwoman and the only character of color), an encounter with the numinous that seems to be forgotten as soon as it's over, and... and what? So an old dream could die, so a beautiful parasite could live? It didn't make an impact on its characters, is I guess what I'm complaining about, it didn't seem to have any point.

And the less said about the story's biological-determinism approach to gender the better. I might -- might -- have been in a better mood about the story if it hadn't ended with Wanda's funeral and her deeply unpleasant family.

On to Fables & Reflections, which I have fonder memories of.

The slimmest of the Sandman trades, just four standalone issues (plus the script for "Calliope" if you're into that.) May as well take them one at a time.

"Calliope"

Left an ugly taste in my mouth. It's a well-drawn, well-told story about a man who inherits a kidnapped Muse who's been raped repeatedly for the last sixty years, and continues that until he's forcibly stopped.

"A Dream of a Thousand Cats"

I remembered this as my favourite single story. On reread it's... fun, and slight, and only outstays its welcome by a little bit. Though the line "Little one, I would like to see anyone — prophet, king or God — persuade a thousand cats to do anything at the same time" is still great. Kelley Jones's art works well here, too. I dunno. Enjoyable but vaguely disappointing, or maybe I was still irritable after "Calliope."

"A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Charles Vess's illustrations, and Shakespeare, and the fae. There's really not much chance I wouldn't like this one despite my overexposure to the Dream in high school. (Every year I went to a student Shakespeare festival with seven other schools, for a half-hour performance each; every year at least three of them did something from the Dream.)

There's a good chance this was my introduction to Charles Vess. I still like his art, quite a bit.

"Facade"

It's always nice to see Death, but... this one just didn't do much for me. Eh. Can't all be winners.

(xposted elseweb)
Thoughts on Preludes & Nocturnes:

• I had somehow forgotten that Sandman started out life as a horror comic. Yow.
  
• Lots of foreshadowing, in both the writing and the art.
  
• I really wish Sam Kieth had stuck with the book: I like his Morpheus a lot.
  
• Dream is kind of a dick. As I recall this is a persistent theme.
  
• The two pages of Neil writing Martian Manhunter are great. (As is his John Constantine, but that's no surprise.)
  
• Death's initial appearance remains stunning (it's the contrast with the previous seven issues, I think), and "The Sound of Her Wings" in general ... wow.

Will Shetterly, Chimera

I've owned this for ages (four years now?) but put off reading it because it sounded exactly like Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music: hard-boiled detective story set in a near-future world with human/animal genetic hybrids as sub-citizens. I'm not sure what inspired me to pick it up this weekend. It's good, though; Shetterly's a fine writer, and a lot less odd-for-odd's-sake than Lethem, which makes him more readable. Chimera's a fun story with a bit of social commentary underneath. (If I'd read it a few years ago my libertarianism would have gotten holes knocked in it a lot quicker than it finally did.) The Infinite Pocket is a really nifty idea, too.

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Dave McKean (dir.), Mirrormask

OMG THE PRETTY.

Mirrormask, as everyone knows, was written by Neil Gaiman and filmed by Dave McKean, and financed by the Hensons who said "So we want you to make a movie like Labyrinth . . . although Labyrinth had a budget of $40 million dollars in 1986, and we can give you, er, a tenth that." And Neil and Dave said "Sounds like fun," and went off and made this gorgeous artsy thing that about twelve people, none of them theatre execs, would like, and somehow it got in at Sundance and even got on a few theatre screens before Sony realised that they'd been givng screentime to something other than Stupid Comedy XI or Blood-N-Gutz V. [And I missed it, not that I'm still bitter or anything.] And eventually it came out on DVD and was bloody gorgeous.

The bulk of the film is very much a dream sequence, with dream-logic and fantastical beasts and "Giants Orbiting" and all, and there are lots of masks (of course) and not a few mirrors, and a Dark Queen and an Anti-Helena and a very Scottish juggler. Attempts to describe the film fail me utterly. (See Zappa, Frank; "dancing about architecture.") If I were a film student or a lit student I could probably write a wonderful paper drawing parallels between this, Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea, and Hans Christian Andersen's fairy-tale about the man who lost his shadow. But I'm not, so all I'll say is that the outside and the shadows aren't evil, any more than Anti-Helena is evil, or Valentine is good, and I think Helena realises that by the end of the film. Subconsciously, at least.

Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe, A Walking Tour of the Shambles

This is the sort of book that says something utterly outrageous, laughs a little too loud, and then abruptly stops laughing and stares directly at you, so that you're pretty sure it wasn't really kidding. It's ostensibly a guidebook through a scary section of Chicago ["mysteriously untouched by the Great Fire. 'Ya can't burn Hell,' one resident joked"'], and is in actuality a chance for Gene and Neil to write something fun and creepy. Probably not worth $16, but what the hell.

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David Callahan, The Cheating Culture

Perhaps the most fundamentally depressing book I've read in ages. Callahan explores the widespread epidemic of cheating in modern culture: he looks in-depth at sports, education, and finance, and mentions other areas as well. I found the "how the heck did we get here" section especially enlightening: I'd heard Jonathan expound on the combination of sixties individualism and eighties greed before, but Callahan also excoriates the conservative focus on "values" for its tacit insistence that only results matter. Plus there's the Red Queen effect, where if you don't cheat and everyone else does you're handicapping yourself . . . it's an ugly mess. He offers some potential solutions in the last chapter, but overall this isn't a solution book, it's a problem analysis book. Everyone should read this one.

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Ted Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things
Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics
Courtney Crumrin in the Twilight Kingdom

Three wonderful comics featuring a junior-high-school outcast studying witchcraft. "Coraline, only not by Neil Gaiman and a comic book" is how I once described it. Courtney's a far more believable character than the average angst-ridden teen. She's genuinely unpleasant to people, for starters. And when you see her emotional fragility it feels genuinely fragile, and not like something that can be solved by whisking her away to someplace magical.

The first volume is a collection of four short tales; the second is a complete story arc. The third is curiously inbetween: its first issue was a separate story, and then the next three belong together. The second was probably the strongest of the three but I can see an argument for preferring the third one. Good stuff all around, though.

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Terry Bisson, Bears Discover Fire

The best short-story collection I have read in a very, very long time. Witty prose and ideas, good characters, and just plain fun. Includes the brilliant title story, as well as "They're Made of Meat" which can be found online, and a weird piece entitled "Coon Suit" that appeared in F&SF when I had a subscription. A lot of the shorter stories in the book have an eco-theme; in the Afterword he says that this is because A) he's conserving paper and B) if they got longer they'd get preachy. I dunno; some of them are a bit preachy already, but it's hard to see thme becoming any more so.

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Jeff Smith, Bone

Sixtyish issues of epic comic book story. Originally published in nine volumes. I'd probably feel gypped if I'd had to buy nine books to get the story told here, but in one volume it's worth having. It's at its best when Smith's laying on the funny ("Stupid, stupid rat-creatures!"); about three-fifths of the way through the plot starts to get pretty serious, and I think the story suffers as a result. I do like the art, though.

Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V For Vendetta

I hate the art for this book. Looks too much like newsprint, and there's far too much use of yellows and browns for my taste. Having said that, V is a neat post-nuclear-war Orwellian anarchist fable. It clarifies the distinction between anarchy ["without leaders"] and chaos, it invokes Guy Fawkes and Thomas Pynchon, and it's generally a good story. Not great; ranks behind From Hell and Watchmen. But still quite good.

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Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Black Orchid

I read this when I lived in Apt 6 and had just started getting into Sandman. I remember thinking that it had a great beginning ("I'm just going to shoot you. Now.") and got kind of weird.

It's still got a great beginning, and it still gets kind of weird. Behind the weird is a really effective story about living your life, with references to the DC comics universe strewn hither and yon. Dave McKean's art is first-rate, and Neil's scripting is good but has gotten better over time. I'm glad this is finally back in print.

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Jamie Delano and David Lloyd, The Horrorist

I'm not actually clear whether this is a two-part book called The Horrorist, or whether the story is called "Antarctica" and it's part of a larger series called "The Horrorist." With that out of the way . . . David Lloyd's art is a lot more palatable here than it was in V. The story itself is a kind of small Constantine story about how he's dead to the world, can't feel anything, and he encounters a creature that preys on human, well, horror. Sort of interesting but nothing to write home about. I'm not sure whether I keep reading Constantine because I like the character or because I feel vaguely obligated to do so, having gotten this far.

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Alan Dean Foster, The Mocking Program

Aborted halfway through.Okay, it's set in a nifty gritty near-future, yes, even cyberpunk world, and it's a murder mystery with cool technology. But the main character is just too perfect. Not only is he the perfect moral cop, but he's an "intuit" [low-level empath], so you can't even lie to him. People he questions tell him things he wants to know after making a token show of resistance-- this includes young street punks, shopkeepers who could get killed for spilling their guts, gangsters about to kill him, etc. The exploding house in Chapter 2 was cool enough that I kept reading, hoping for more stuff that was that cool-- but when Foster interrupted a sex scene for a paragraph-long digression about the technology, I realised that the man simply has no sense of pacing and prepared to give up. Not even the appearance of talking monkeys halfway through was enough to save this one.

Neil Gaiman, "The Monarch of the Glen"

I'd thought it would take me awhile to get into this story (it took two reads for me to really get into American Gods, after all) but right on page two Gaiman is making fun of either Texans or Scots. So, hey. It's an American Gods story, and (despite American Gods feeling like the end of the tale) it works pretty well. If I'd paid more attention over the summer I might even have picked up on some elements as fast as I should have, instead of waiting for them to be spelled out for me. Oh well.

Shadow's a much better character than I originally thought he was. I've said that before, but it bears reiteration.

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Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman, Humongous Zits / Big Honkin' Zits / Zits: Supersized

Three treasuries, comprising the first six Zits collections. It's amusing, it's occasionally brilliant, it's got bits I relate to all to well and bits I don't. I prefer Foxtrot but Zits is still decent stuff. Beats the sappiness of For Better or Worse hands down. (And we've got several other Zits collections at work, giving me plenty to do during kiosk shifts.)

Hey, it's a comic strip. You want detailed character analysis? Go read someone's master's thesis on the subject. (Or maybe just Pearls Before Swine from the week of Christmas '03 if it's still in their web archives.)