Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XVII: Endless Nights

Comic hardcover, 152 pages
Published 2003
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2012

The Sandman: Endless Nights

Written by: Neil Gaiman

Lettered by: Todd Klein

Neil Gaiman's triumphal return to The Sandman is a series of seven short stories, each one covering a different member of the Endless, those squabbling anthropomorphic personifications who exist beyond gods and time. Each one is drawn by a different artist, and they take place across a whole range of times.

Death: "Death and Venice"

Artist: P. Craig Russell

Colorist/Separator: Lovern Kindzierski

I'd actually read this story before, in The Absolute Death. You bet I love any chance to experience P. Craig Russell's glorious art, and it's as sharp and clean here as ever. He draws Death at her absolute prettiest, and that's how I prefer her. The story has its moments-- many of them, in fact-- but somehow never fully engages me. I'd nearly completely forgotten it until I reread it, except for the dancing paper men, and though that's not super-important, it's not a bad thing to remember, either.

Desire: "What I've tasted of Desire"

Artist: Milo Manara

This is about a Celtic village in the pre-Roman period, or something like that anyway, where a woman gains the power of Desire in order to make a man want her. Unexpected craziness ensues. Like before, there are some very great moments, but I'm not sure what they're all in aid of. Milo Manara's art looks like he's been tracing glamour models: every woman has big pouty lips, has long perfect legs, and is always on the verge of showing her ass if she leans over just a little bit more in that short skirt. It turns "desire" into something crass, which is against the whole idea here.

Dream: "The Heart of a Star"

Artist: Miguelanxo Prado

Though this story is about Dream, the character, it's not really about dreams. If anything it's more about Desire, the character, than "What I've tasted of Desire" was! Set near the beginning of the universe, this story shows Dream bringing his girlfriend Killalla of the Glow to a party with a number of the Endless in attendance. It's supposed to explain the antipathy between Dream and Desire, but it doesn't really. At the beginning of story, Dream has some super-exposition dialogue about how much he loves Desire, then Desire betrays him. We neither see the friendship between them nor understand the motive for betrayal.

There are some awesome ideas here, though, playing with the toys of the DC universe in a way that The Sandman has avoided for a long time, but what works about the story has little to do with Dream or dreams, as we understand neither better at its end.

Despair: "Fifteen Portraits of Despair"

Artist: Barron Storey
Designer: Dave McKean

This is not a comic story, but a series of collages, words overlaid on text, about people in moments of despair. You feel depressed and anguished after reading these things; they're definitely the best and most appropriate stories in the book.

Delirium: "Going Inside"

Artist: Bill Sienkiewicz

A number of delirious people are recruited for a mission by Daniel, the second Dream. Bill Sienkiewicz's art really captures the art and the concept, and though the ending doesn't make any sense, it's hard to imagine how a story about Delirium could. Matthew the Raven puts in a brief appearance, which is always nice. I think by the time this was published he had died in The Dreaming. Oh, and Barnabas is here, too. I like him. This story is clearly a fragment of a larger picture, one we'll probably never see, but it's probably better that way.

Destruction: "On the Peninsula"

Artist: Glenn Fabry

This one-- about an archaeologist digging up artifacts from the future-- is a nice little story. Probably my second-favorite in the book. A simple, personal story, and we get good appearances from Destruction and Delirium, picking up right from the previous story, in fact.

Destiny: "Endless Nights"

Artist: Frank Quitely

The art by Frank Quitely is of course very nice, but it's not a story. More a kind of poem maybe? Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold was pretty pointless, so maybe it's for the best that there's no attempt to use Destiny as the key character in a story.


I wanted to like this book more than I did. Most of the art is top-notch, and the imagery and ideas are great. But as I often find with Neil Gaiman, there's a noticeable gap between the story we did get and the story we could have gotten. These things could stand to be in focus a little bit more. Though, I suppose that if they were, he wouldn't be Neil Gaiman anymore.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part IV: Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 1999 (contents: 1989-99)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2011

Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days

Writers: Neil Gaiman with Matt Wagner
Artists: Stephen Bissette, John Totleben, Richard Piers Rayner, Mike Hoffman, Kim DeMulder, Mike Mignola, Dave McKean, Teddy Kristiansen
Colorists: Tatjana Wood, Danny Vozzo
Letterers: John Costanza, Tim Harkins, Todd Klein

This book collects much (all?) of Gaiman's non-Sandman Vertigo work, presumably so the dedicated Gaiman-ite doesn't have to sully themselves by buying comics by other people. (Actually, most of the work here had never been collected in trade paperback before, so I'm just being mean.)

Swamp Thing: "Jack in the Green"
This story is about a Swamp Thing from the Middle Ages. It's the second comic Gaiman ever wrote. It's okay, I guess. Nothing really happens.

Swamp Thing: "Brothers"
In this story, Brother Power the Geek comes back to the Earth. He's a character who hadn't appeared for years before this and no one cared about him. I'm not sure why anyone should after reading this. I guess that's kinda the point-- he's the hippie who can't let go. I did enjoy the two side characters, though, one of which who actually was a hippie who couldn't let go. The evil government agent (who was also an ex-hippie) was a pretty cool character. The Claw or whatever his name was, not so much. Oh, and Batman is in it.

Swamp Thing: "Shaggy God Stories"
what is this I don't even

John Constantine, Hellblazer: "Hold Me"
I've never read a John Constantine story before. This was pretty good. The resolution makes little sense on a plot level, but is nice emotionally. Poor Constantine, keeps the world at bay, and even when he lets it in... it doesn't actually like him. The art is amazing. McKean and Gaiman showed they made a good team in Black Orchid, but this is even better from an artistic standpoint.

Sandman Midnight Theatre
I've read this story before, on its own, and it takes up half the book! Why not throw in the Poison Ivy story that Gaiman mentions instead; I want to read that, since he did such an intriguing Ivy in Black Orchid. Sandman Midnight Theatre belongs in a collection, sure... but in a Sandman Mystery Theatre one instead, where it's an important part of an ongoing narrative. It was nice to read it again, though, and Gaiman's introduction to the story provides some nice insight into the way it was written. (Gaiman and Wagner worked out a plot in a hotel room, Wagner wrote detailed breakdowns, Kristiansen drew the art following these, Gaiman wrote the dialogue to match the pictures.) Other than that, I have nothing to say that I didn't say last time.

The collection as a whole is a bit of a jumble, really. Nice to have it all collected, but none of it really stands out or impresses on its own, except for maybe "Hold Me."

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part II: Black Orchid

Having taken my brief sojourn outside of the DCU with Y: The Last Man, I'm back inside it with the first set of what were very many spin-offs of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman. Well, sort of. Most of these stories predated Gaiman's work on The Sandman, and though there are some overlaps, they're very different. Given what the man became famous for, it's striking how integrated these works are in the DCU, even if sometimes obscure parts of it. They feature appearances by Superman, Lex Luthor, Batman, the Green Lantern, Poison Ivy, Firestorm the Nuclear Man, and more:

Comic trade paperback, 155 pages
Published 1991 (contents: 1989)
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2011

Black Orchid

Written by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Dave McKean

Lettered by Todd Klein

I don't know who Mikal Gilmore is, but he wrote the introduction this collected edition of Black Orchid. Gilmore seems very impressed with all the "unanticipated" things that the book does-- so impressed, in fact, that he tells you what they all are before you get to read them yourself. Which is why I don't feel bad about discussing them, but it's not like you were going to read the book anyway. I don't even think Neil Gaiman fans read Black Orchid, even if my front cover does try to grab the dozens of people who watched MirrorMask. (Seriously, I forgot that film even existed until I saw it mentioned here.)

Gilmore cites Black Orchid as "one of those books that has helped break modern comics history in two and signalled the rise of a new courage and a new spirit of aspiration within the medium," placing it alongside Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore's Miracleman, and Alan Moore's Watchmen. Frankly, I never thought I'd see The Dark Knight Returns described as having "a new spirit of aspiration," but I think there's a reason we don't remember Black Orchid alongside the potent critique of fantasized superhero and state violence that is Watchmen. Gilmore says it's one of the only comic books that critiques violence without being forced to resort to violence anyway, like Watchmen is... but that's not true. Or rather, it's a very defanged critique.

One of the primary villains is Carl Thorne, a disgraced LexCorp employee who Luthor has dumped off the docks. But the Black Orchid saves him, saying "too many have died today." But she doesn't do anything with him, leaving the man free to go on to murder people up as he pleases. Huzzah for pacifism? And then, at the end, Lex Luthor dispatches a squad of bad guys to capture the Black Orchid so he can science her up or whatever. Black Orchid doesn't battle this squad... but she doesn't have to, since most of them are conveniently killed by Thorne, and they conveniently kill him. Sure, she lets the last three go and they let her go, but it's hardly a damning indictment of comics violence.

I don't think it has to be, though. In Black Orchid, Gaiman and McKean take an obscure DC character, providing her with a fascinating and strange origin story and killing her off. The Black Orchid we follow is not the original, but another plant-creature grown from the same source, with fragmentary versions of her memories-- plus there's another one, a little girl version of the same. We discover the Black Orchid's origin at the same time that she discovers it herself, but here I think is where Gaiman really shines. The Black Orchid learns her origin story... but that doesn't actually tell her anything. I mean, we all know where we come from, but none of us know who we are either, right? So the Black Orchid (I wish I could call her by her name, but she's a plant-lady-- she doesn't have one) makes her way through Metropolis, Gotham City, the Louisiana swamps, and the Amazon rainforest, trying to find someone who will tell her what she needs to know. But there's no one, and so she (and her miniature clone-self) have to find their own way in the world.

Of course, the own way turns out to be hanging out in the rainforest talking about how great plants are, but I suppose you can't have everything.

The book's plot is disjointed, but it should be, and though Gaiman's villains are a little too thuggish to be interesting (and even his Luthor isn't great), the rest of the characters-- all the Black Orchids, Phillip Sylvain (her sort-of-creator), Poison Ivy, Batman, the Mad Hatter-- feel real. Thankfully, since the story isn't going to get you to the end. And then there's Dave McKean's jarring, gorgeous, disconcerting, brutal, realistic art, a perfect match for Gaiman's similarly so writing. He either manipulates photos or traces them, I don't know, but he's an artist who really makes that work as a technique.

Black Orchid is an interesting and intriguing read, all the more so because it is not an origin story where someone ends up deciding to fight injustice at the end. Once the story's over, the Black Orchid still doesn't know what to do with herself other than that she misses people-- so she returns to civilization. I like that it's open-ended, because it works well with what Gaiman's been doing. The Black Orchid doesn't know what she's up to any more than the rest of us. Apparently, this miniseries spawned an ongoing (not by Gaiman) about the Black Orchid, but I can't see what it would actually be about that wouldn't be hugely disappointing.