Name: Preludes and Nocturnes
Rating: 4.350175746924429 (1138 reviews)
ISBN: 9781563892271

Neil Gaiman

Sam Kieth

Mike Dringenberg

Danny Vozzo

Todd Klein

A collection of eight comics that introduce the series' lead character, the Sandman, Lord of Dreams.

Preludes and Nocturnes

Featuring the popular characters from the award-winning Sandman series by Neil Caiman, "The Sandman: Endless Nights" reveals the legend of the Endless, a family of magical and mythical beings. In this highly imaginative book that boasts diverse styles of breathtaking full-color art, seven peculiar and powerful siblings each reveal more about their true beings as they star in their own tales. 1-40120-113-X$17.95 / DC Comics

The Doll's House

Marija

Kelley Jones

Charles Vess

A collection of stories, comics, and plays that deal with never ending dreams.

Dream Country

The sandman.

Tim Pendry

Volume 3 of the acclaimed 'Sandman' series but stand-alone. This edition also contains the original script for the first of its four stories, 'Calliope', which might be of interest to students of illustration. If we are to be honest, Neil Gaiman is engaged in a project to bring 'Tales from the Crypt' up the literary and artistic food chain. There is no doubt that he succeeds admirably in his task, aided by a series of excellent illustrators, but the stories, with the exception of his re-thinking of the origins of Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream', are not complex - poetic and suggestive perhaps but not complex. The first story. the 'Calliope', tells of a writer's abuse of an incarnated muse, an exploitation that has its sexual side and which brilliantly makes a creative reader feel besmirched by his own potential for evil in following his artistic ambition. Gaiman and illustrator Kelley Jones' skill lies in making a captured Greek mythological figure into the type of sex-trafficked woman and the artist into little more than a sleazy punter or pimp - a reversal of romantic views of the artist and her muse that is truly horrific. The second, 'A Dream of a Thousand Cats' is a 'take' on another type of dream, not that of ambition but of dream as magical transformer of reality. This is a theme that we know from 'The Matrix' but here it is expressed as the remaking of reality and their history by humans and cats in turn and intentionally leaves us with a sense of unease. It might also be read as a commentary on the potential power of religious faith, born out of suffering, to change the world although the unease remains just that, unease - there is no real evidence here that faith changes anything but the faithful or that the faithful have anything more to look forward to than homeless wandering and more pain. The award winning Shakespearian tale is magical at two levels. It is English-magical in referring back to the Old Religion and the ancient countryside in a way that should have earned it a place at the recent 'Dark Monarch' Exhibition by the Tate on magic and modernity in English art. But it also revisits the issue of the price paid by the artist in his obsessive disregard for a greater personal creation than his play and his bargain with the Dark Lord of the the dream world for inspiration, a bargain as cruel in its way as that of the writer in 'Calliope'. Gaiman is different from all his contemporaries in questioning here and occasionally elsewhere whether the imagination and magic are sufficient cause to abandon the world. The conclusion appears to be that he and other imaginative people can do no other but that they should be under no illusion that what they do is somehow inevitably better or nobler than the lives of ordinary mortals. This seems to be an attitude very different from that of the bulk of the English School of imaginative and magical writers, of which Alan Moore is exemplar, where the world of faery, alchemy, imagination and magic seem to be presented as an alternate reality truer than our mundane world. It strikes me as no surprise that Gaiman would find himself not only living happily in America but seemingly welcoming its modernity in later works. There is an ambiguity in Gaiman that might just, when history judges him, tip him into the very top rank of authors. The final story,'Facade', as if to confirm this thesis, is, by contrast very modern and very American, with a nod to the 'superhero' tradition that never really embedded itself in Gaiman's homeland. In this case, we may have an Egyptian mythological back story and visual references to the Mummy tradition but the core story is one of mysterious government agencies and advanced bodily transmutation in which science rather than magic is dominant. This is the world of 'Superman' if seen through a very dark lens. Ra's magic is as scientific in its way as the speculations of Stoker's main protagonist against 'The Mummy' in the 'Jewel of the Seven Stars' nearly a hundred years before. Taken together, the four stories are variations on the theme of dreaming a myth - of the incorporation of myth into reality, of the use of myth to change reality, of the creative interplay, with its dangers, of myth and reality and of science as a dream or myth in its own right. The Dark Lord of the dream world appears in two of them - where myth and legend are most obviously in sight. The other two have American settings and owe their style to the American comic book tradition. As in 'American Gods', Gaiman is merging European mythic and American popular cultural traditions with not a little genius. It is probably no accident that Gaiman uses a quotation in a letter from the quintessential English writer of the supernatural, magic and the Old Religion, Arthur Machen, to the American James Branch Cabell in 1918 as one of his two introductory quotations. He also quotes separately that all writers are liars. The two quotations set the mood - an artist-writer hybridising two great traditions of magic and modernity but not believing that anything he creates represents anything bigger than a human imaginative creation. Pragmatic, sceptical, Gaiman uses but is not part of the English mystical-magical tradition. Yet, at the end of the day, while the style is brilliant and the themes intriguing, the attempt to go beyond the comic book shows the weakness of the genre. In general, high quality books are far better than the films that they derive from - we think of Moravia's treatment by no less Directors than Bertolucci and Godard. On the other hand, films made from comic books and second-rate pulp fiction tend to be superior to their sources. There is an intellectual hierarchy here whether we like it or not, albeit with exceptions on all sides. This graphic novel is far greater than most graphic material and it deserves re-reading but you sense that it is a stepping stone to the prize rather than the prize itself and has lost something by trying to do more than graphic novels can do. Still, it has to be in any respectable collection and Gaiman certainly gets the best out of his illustrators. You will not regret owning it.

A Game of You

M. Sosotris

I don’t know if I can forgive Neil Gaiman for what happened to Wanda. I loved her.

This one is outstanding. A bit overly complex, in terms of the mechanics of what creates and ends the main conflict, but the character work is absolutely top notch.

Wanda deserved to thrive and succeed and prove her horrible family wrong. Not cool, Mr. Gaiman.

read it with the audiobook *chef’s kiss*

Preludes and Nocturnes

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