J. H. Williams, III

I was expelled from the universe, by stars caught up with rhetoric and infection. I'm currently inside a Black Hole. - Dream

It's very rare to come across perfection. I believe it even more rare when it's a graphic novel with multiple creators. I'd say I've seen it only a couple of times. Claremont, Byrne, Austin, and Orzechowski on Star-Lord's second appearance. The same team on their brilliant X-Men run...and that's possibly it.

Until now. Neil Gaiman (words), J.H. Williams (images), Dave show more Stewart (colours), and Todd Klein (letters) have created the most gorgeous looking book I think I may have ever had the pleasure to read. And I make a point of noting the colourist and letterer, because they are often forgotten, but in this case, this book would not have been as good as it is without their input. And Gaiman's story? Brilliant.

As other will likely indicate, this is actually best considered "Sandman 0" as it is the lead in to issue #1.

I'm not going to get into it. I'll just say read it. Read it slowly and revel in the magic of the words and sights. Fall in love with this as much as I did. It's beautiful.

It's perfection. show less

It took me a week to slog through this crap as one chapter at a shot was all I could endure.

Bad enough this opening book in the series is an overlong and tedious chase scene with unbearably busy art with multiple clashing styles on each page, but the whole thing is presented in one of the most awkward and annoying formats for a book: a wobbly panoramic spread that opens up to be only seven inches tall but nearly two feet wide. Reading it anywhere but firmly on a flat surface is an annoying show more and clumsy chore. It's the sort of book that if dropped once while open, the bound pages are sure to start splitting from the cover.

Really, it's more a Where's Waldo? picture book than a story as it is purely Easter eggs. Hey, that guy looks like he was drawn by Jack Kirby! Hey, that guy from Chicago looks like Flattop from Dick Tracy! Hey, Dracs and Steins look like Universal movie monsters! Hey, pirates! Hey, Japanese robots! Hey, zombies!

Just to really drive home how self-indulgent this project is, the end matter has over two dozen pages listing all the music J. H. Williams III listened to while working on the art. Mostly vinyl, of course! And he specifies the color of vinyl! And which ones were picked by his wife! OMG!

And this is just Book One? No. Never again. show less

It was with a certain dull dour melancholy that I anticipated reading this. I'm not sure if I was thinking that this would be the sad end of my Sandman reread or that this would be a dull echo of Sandman at its height, a sincere but pale, as it were, imitation. Holy guacamole. That didn't even last a single page.

To be clear, Gaiman does not let the reader down. This isn't a retread of Sandman at all, this is a whole different type and style of Sandman story. Morpheus is proactive, for a show more start, in a way he generally isn't in the long run of the series, and we get some sense of why that is. This is an epic, action-packed space opera, a huge conflict that Dream must fight with Dream's own weapons and tactics, and he does and it's a giddy delight. It's a prelude, but it draws back in a score of threads laid out in the main series and refines them into a fast-paced eye-popping wide-screen thrill ride.

Not just that, but the mythical world of the Endless is deepened and expanded - we meet Mum and Dad! We meet versions of Dream from all over the universe! We hear the story of Aliana (but weren't there three gods? Oh Gaiman, you minx!) There's a giant talking Dream cat! A western! A city of stars!

But galloping gondolas it's JH Williams who takes all the prizes, who elevates the whole thing to a level that surpasses almost everything that went before, except that's not fair because it's like none of the other stories that went before. The art flows and pops and bends time and space on the page. It stretches and bends and still manages to tell a completely coherent story. Literally the only problem with the storytelling using this amazingly complex and vivid art is that once or twice the glossy paper stuck and I skipped two pages by accident.

No dour melancholy or doubt can survive contact with these pages, from the giddy delight of long-laid plot seeds effortlessly flowering and clicking into place like some sort of clockwork mechanical growing flower things to the sweeping action and the mind-bending profusion of ideas and the brilliant colours and the teeming inventions of landscape and alien lives and impossible incomprehensible realms and Destiny saying 'what?'

This is an exciting, exhilarating, comic, an utterly new execution of utterly familiar characters and ideas that enriches what has gone before by prefiguring what is to come. Gaiman and Williams have completely outdone themselves, as have the colourists and the letterer and presumably the vast processing intelligences that fill solar systems with their whirring, god-like, editing brains. It's a fantastic high note to end the reread and I'm already anticipating a future return to the story with the Overture at the start to see how it reshapes and alters the story. show less

I picked this book up because it tells the origin of Mr. Freeze, probably the most prominent of Batman's villains to not have an origin detailed in anything else I've read in my Batman readthrough so far (the Joker got The Man Who Laughs, Catwoman had a significant subplot in Batman: Year One, Two-Face will very shortly get The Long Halloween, and then of course there's Four of a Kind for Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, the Riddler, and Man-Bat). To my surprise, that turned out to be the least show more interesting part of this story; I don't think Mr. Freeze's story really adds anything to the book. It lacks the tragedy I recall from the 1990s Batman cartoon, and it doesn't really resonate with the other material in this book. It's very nearly an irrelevant side-plot!

The main function of Mr. Freeze is to be a supervillain of a type Batman has never seen before: one with hi-tech weaponry, and thus threatening on a scale that, say, Catwoman or the Joker is not. This is because the story is really about Batman's attempt to put together a crime-fighting team, able to help him do what he's coming to realize he can't do alone, and what Gordon and Dent and Alfred can't help him with. Of course I loved it: Batman assembled a scrappy gang of misfits who have to learn how to work together, and learn that they're strong as part of a team even if they are unfulfilled and often powerless outside of it. They're a fun bunch, and I loved the scenes of them working together, as well as the scenes of them out in the field-- and as it does in these kinds of stories, things turn sour, and that works really well, too. I suspect these guys appear nowhere else in the Batman canon, but I sure wish they did.

Writer Dan Curtis Johnson captures Batman's voice really well. By which I mean, I could imagine Kevin Conroy saying his lines! But seriously, this story really gets Batman and what makes him tick: Batman is not a loner, but a man who needs a family to keep going, and this story is the key one where he identifies that. It's about a year before Batman gains a Robin, but (as the final page drives home perhaps a little too heavy-handedly) this is where the emotional process starts. I also really liked Seth Fisher's artwork, which is cartoony but detailed in a way I find hard to articulate but really enjoyed looking at. Hopefully I come across more of his work someday.

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