Neil Gaiman

I think my first issue of Sandman was Dream Of A Thousand Cats, if not Calliope. A friend of mine brought it back from the States for me and when I read it that was it, I was a Sandman reader and a Neil Gaiman fan for life. The stories of Dream Country were each like a bomb going off in my callow young head, explosions that propelled me simultaneously deep into the world of the comic and out into the more abstract realms of the possibilities of imagination, genre and form. In short order I'd show more picked up collections of A Doll's House and Preludes And Nocturnes, and was counting the weeks and days each month, waiting for the next issue to arrive.

Sandman opens with the imprisonment of Morpheus, Lord Of Dreams, by an English occult society in 1916. They were hoping to trap death but got her younger brother instead. It doesn't work out terrible well for anyone, least of all the occult society, but also the unfortunates who fall victim to a sleeping sickness that steals most of their lives, or for Morpheus himself, not to mention the vague efforts the universe makes to replace him with pale imitation superheroes. In 1988 he escapes, takes revenge, returns to his crumbling kingdom, and, with some difficulty, recovers his stolen tools.

It's all in there, in these early issues, but it's such a mess. Sam Keith's art is great, but not really in keeping with the book. Gaiman seeds all sorts of themes and elements that will be built on and expanded later, but issues go from genre to genre, until the book truly finds its voice in issue eight, the legendary Sound of Her Wings, which introduces Death, in a story about how everyone hates her and loves Dream, even though she's lovely and he's not. The multi-layered little story shattered comics into a million pieces, captured a million hearts and is the emotional and conceptual foundation stone of the whole epic. It's in stories like that, the stand-alones, that Sandman deepened and enriched its world and its mythology, even as the longer arcs drove the plot, often extremely obliquely, forward.

The Dolls House is a fantasy/horror masterpiece, building to the chilling and mischievous Collectors, which is itself about fear, and mythologising and demythologising it, self-mythologising and self-aggrandisement, and murder. Lots and lots of murder,

The Absolute Sandman Volume One is a big, beautiful object. The stories printed on larger pages of high-quality paper, recoloured, retouched. It includes back matter such as Gaiman's original proposal, all the afterwords to original collections, and the script of the astonishing Midsummer Night's Dream issue. So many of these stories were so astonishing. I'd forgotten just how astonishing they were.

Sandman was groundbreaking and earthshaking, and it blew my tiny mind, and this gorgeous edition is blowing it all over again. show less

When I saw Neil Gaiman had written a new version of the old fairy tale Hansel and Gretel on Netgalley, I was excited to see what he would do with. Happily, at least to me, he stays very close to the original. This is no Disneyfied version, no friendly animals or dancing candlesticks there to help the two children. Gaiman, instead, retains all the elements that gave me shivers when I read it as a child - war, famine, two children abandoned by their parents, and of course, cannibalism. Yikes! show more

And adding to the horror of the tale are the amazing stark ink drawings by Lorenzo Mattotti, the black colouring relieved only by patches of grey and white. In the end, though, both Gaiman’s usual excellent prose and Mattotti’s drawings emphasize the truth of all fairy tales that no matter how dark, grim and frightening the world can become, there is always hope and the chance of a happy ending.

I received an arc of this book from Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review show less

This book is a delight, definitely in the top tier of the 12 Doctors, 12 Stories novellas. Neil Gaiman's televised Doctor Who stories have been mixed at best ("The Doctor's Wife" was pretty good; "Nightmare in Silver" probably set back the potential of the Cybermen and didn't make much sense to boot), but this is nearly perfect. The eleventh Doctor and Amy discover that someone has bought up every residence on Earth (legitimately), leaving no room for its people, who all die off, leaving the show more Earth free for some aliens to take over. Gaiman does a good line in creepiness (the aliens all wear animal masks, and go under names like "Mr Rabbit"), Gaiman captures the performances of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan extremely well, there are lots of great Doctorish lines (the Doctor suggests a lack of gazpacho in 1984 would be cause for alarm), and there are some nice references to things the show established after Series Five (like Mels and the War Doctor). A perfect little novella, and probably the best work Neil Gaiman has done on Doctor Who. show less

Absolutely love this graphic novel adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story! Moon & Ba were definitely the perfect choice of illustrators, since their artistic style is anchored in reality but with serious overtones of whimsy that capture the careful balance between reality and strange happenings in this story. Gaiman’s text presents the adventure of two young boys going to a house party as being relatively straightforward - they go, they talk to girls, and the girls are weird. Obviously show more the story can be interpreted literally, in that the party really is full of alien tourists in the form of beautiful girls, but speaking from the perspective of a girl we are absolutely as strange as the story portrays without actually being creatures from another planet. I’ve had far stranger conversations with boys - whether that strangeness comes from a fundamental difference in how boys and girls communicate or whether I just have weird topics of conversation is a whole other matter. The art style seems to very much support this theory that our hapless narrator just doesn’t quite get girls, so he sees their conversations as being otherworldly and above his comprehension, as all of the girls look very human (even for all their beauty). And yet, the final scene, where the boys exit the party post-haste due to some kind of disagreement with Stella, brings us back to the idea that maybe these girls are not just girls - having the fires of a thousand suns in their eyes (etc) is a typical description of extreme anger, but I get the distinct impression that Stella could be much more than what she seems. Better run for your lives, boys! show less