06 August 2011

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part X: The Dream Hunters

Hardcover, 126 pages
Published 1999

Borrowed from the library
Read July 2011
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters
by Neil Gaiman
illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano

If I remember right, this is Neil Gaiman's first return to The Sandman after the series concluded its venerable run. It's not a comic book, but a prose novella with illustrations on almost every page. And it's brilliant-- possibly the second-best Sandman story after Brief Lives. It's a fairy tale in a vaguely Japenese style about a monk and the fox who loves him. Like many Gaiman stories, it doesn't know what its focus is, but that works so well here, as the story gently drifts from tangent to tangent, showing love at its best and its worse. The illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano are gorgeous, and invite the eye to linger over them slowly. It's hard to explain why I liked this so much; it just hits that primal nerve good stories should hit-- you feel like you've learned something new that you've always known.

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