{"id":27,"date":"2005-11-23T22:29:54","date_gmt":"2005-11-24T03:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=27"},"modified":"2005-11-23T22:29:54","modified_gmt":"2005-11-24T03:29:54","slug":"the-sandman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2005\/11\/23\/the-sandman\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sandman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nI just finished re-reading the Sandman<\/a> series of comics \/ graphic novels, which I last read almost exactly 6 years ago.\n<\/p>\n

\nLike all of Neil Gaimans books – Neverwhere, Good Omens, Stardust, Coraline, American Gods – it is something of a mixture of fairy tale, fantasy and modern myth. I won’t tell you the stories here, but the Sandman is about the Endless<\/a> – concepts related to how we perceive the world, that are more fundamental than mere gods. Dream (the Sandman) is the one we see the most of, although we meet his siblings as well, especially Death and Delirium.\n<\/p>\n

\nEric is an avid reader of comics, so we’ve got a whole bunch. I’ve read some, and liked some – the Sandman series, Bone<\/a>, V for Vendetta<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nI’m not a huge fan of comics in general. They don’t pull me in the same way that a book or a movie can do. I believe that this is in large part due to the mixing of two modes: pictures and text. I sometimes get so engrossed in the story that my eyes skip the pictures and just follow the words, so then I have to stop, go back and look at the pictures separately. That breaks up the flow. I think the two go to different parts of the brain.\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd quite often I just don’t think that the quality of the graphic side is high enough. The pictures may be sufficient to tell a story, but they don’t look good. I wouldn’t call them artwork, and I wouldn’t want to look at them on their own, without the story to support them. Many comic artists just draw in a “standard comic book style” – I couldn’t pick their work from among a dozen others. Others are unable to (or choose not to) draw figures and faces consistently – a character might have sharp cheekbones and a long nose in one frame, and then suddenly get cuddly round cheeks and an upturned nose in another. This annoys me a little bit whenever I see it. And characters are after all rather central to novels.\n<\/p>\n

\nTo put it differently, many comics seem to assume that the quality of text and pictures is additive. It isn’t – it’s closer to multiplicative. If one is half-good and the other is half-good then the total won’t be even half-good, it’ll be a quarter-good.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn fact, a graphic novel is harder to do well than a simple novel, or a simple series of pictures, because not only do both parts need to be good, they need to work together. When both the writer and the artist do get it right, graphic novels can be very good. They’re not a novel with illustrations, and they’re not annotated pictures. Both parts are essential to the whole, and together they make up something new.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Sandman gets both parts right, almost all of the time. A graphic novel is not drawn by the same artist from beginning to end. Different artists draw different issues, and the graphic style of the series can therefore vary a lot over time. The Kindly Ones<\/i> (vol 9) is completely in a league of its own, but A Game of You<\/i> (vol 5), World’s End<\/i> (vol 8) and The Wake<\/i> (vol 10) are really good as well. When it comes to art, I have a slightly old-fashioned taste in that I like things to look beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful. Music should have melody and rhythm, and not sound like noise; art should have beauty. The Kindly Ones<\/i> is very beautiful – it has a very expressive style, beautiful colours, confident lines, and uses different styles very well to highlight different parts of the story.\n<\/p>\n

\nStanding above and apart from the rest of the artwork are Dave McKean’s stunning and fantastical covers<\/a> for each issue. Those are so good that I wouldn’t mind having my bedroom walls covered with large-size reproductions. In fact they are so good that the covers have been published as a separate book<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe Sandman is also very well written. Gaiman creates beautiful prose, and he can handle very different tones of voice equally well. He can be solemn, funny, tragic, demented, casual, indifferent, jaded… often several of these at the same time. At the same time he’s a great storyteller. Even his most fantastical stories feel true, in a sense, and while I’m reading them it seems perfectly plausible to accept that there is a world where Dream walks around as a moody young man dressed in black. The central story, that of Dream, is only part of what is going on – the comic book format leaves Gaiman a lot of space to wander around on his way towards the end, and there are a lot of sub-stories. There are stories about the power of dreams, and stories about what happens when dreams disappear, or when we spend too much time in dreams. And all this is told in dozens of different formats – horror stories, adventures, love stories, fables, stories about people telling stories… So there is a lot of breadth and variety.\n<\/p>\n

\nThere is a lot of sheer fantasy and inventiveness in the small things. The “minor” characters are as well-defined as the central ones. Everybody gets great dialogue. Delirium in particular is an endless source of wonderful suprises. She creates little frogs when she is bored, or perhaps turns herself into a cloud of fish, talks in swirly rainbow colours and says things like “I wish I could give you a present. Do you need a word that means red and green at the same time?”\n<\/p>\n

\nThese are, in fact, the things that make me love the Sandman: in both text and pictures, there’s imagination and variety, there’s humour and beauty, and the smallest parts are as carefully thought-out as the central themes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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