From Marvel to Miracle (and Back to Marvel): Two Miracleman Reference Books

Having read my way through the complete (as of now) runs of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman (and their various artistic collaborators) on the character originally known as Marvelman and now known as Miracleman, I decided to pick up a couple reference books about the character. The first is Kimota!, published by comics reference publisher TwoMorrows. Originally published in 2001, there was supposedly a 2010 new edition, but I couldn't find it for sale anywhere at any price, nor was it in any libraries, so I settled for getting the 2001 edition via interlibrary loan. Poisoned Chalice, on the other hand, is self-published and thus not available in any library; I bought a print-on-demand copy via Lulu.

Kimota!: The Miracleman Companion
by George Khoury

Published: 2001
Read: August 2024

Together, the two books provide a lot on insight into the character, but they come at him from different directions. George Khoury's Kimota! largely consists of interviews with various figures: Mick Anglo (original creator of the character), Alan Moore, Dez Skinn (original publisher of the 1980s revival), many of the artists (Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Chuck Austen, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, and Mark Buckingham*), Cat Yronwode (publisher of the comic when it moved to Eclipse Comics), Neil Gaiman, Barry Windsor-Smith (who did a lot of covers), and Beau Smith (who worked at Eclipse when it published Miracleman). It also contains other features like Moore's original proposal for the revival, a timeline Alan Moore and Steve Moore worked out of how (among other things) Marvelman fit with V for Vendetta (!), an index to all issues of the comic, the script of Miracleman #1, the pencils for an unpublished Moore/Totleben collaboration, and more.

Poisoned Chalice is, on the other hand, a history of the character, mostly focusing on the legal issues. Pádraig Ó Méalóid dives into the various disputes that ultimately led to the existence of Miracleman: how Fawcett was accused of ripping off Superman and thus had to stop publishing Captain Marvel, how the company repackaging Captain Marvel in the UK ripped him off to create Marvelman once they ran out of Captain Marvel material, how Dez Skinn brought the character back in the 1980s but probably didn't do his legal diligence, how Marvel UK began sending cease-and-desist letters to Skinn once he published a book with "Marvelman" in the title, how the character ended up being renamed "Miracleman" so it could be published in the US, how the rights to the character ended up spread out all over the place, how possibly some of them fell into the hands of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, how McFarlane got caught up in a long dispute with Neil Gaiman over various characters Gaiman created for McFarlane, how publishers in the 2000s and 2010s began attempting to assert and consolidate rights to both Marvelman and Miracleman, and how the character ultimately all ended up in the hands of Marvel Comics (who finally republished both some of Mick Anglo's original stories and Moore's and Gaiman's runs, as well as continuing into new stories). Ó Méalóid does a lot of a research, drawing on primary source legal documents, interviews from various sources including Kimota!, and his own original interviews.

Between the two, you get a good sense of both the significance of the character and the legal disputes that without which the character would not exist, but also made the actual publication of the character a fraught issue. Kimota! is a quick and easy but informative read; it's the kind of "companion" book that doesn't focus on analysis really, but more on providing behind-the-scenes information. The interviews are interesting and fun. What were these people thinking when they did this work? There's good tidbits here you won't find anywhere else. Not everything here is going to interesting to every reader—I skipped over the script to Miracleman #1, the unfinished Moore/Totleben story, and the index, for example—but there's a lot to like here, and I tore through it in about a day.

Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman)
by Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Published: 2018
Acquired and read: September 2024

By contrast, Poisoned Chalice is a long, detailed read. Not content to start even just with the dispute between Fawcett and DC over Captain Marvel and Superman, Ó Méalóid goes all the way back to Philip Wylie's Gladiator and claims that it was ripped off by Siegel and Shuster when they created Action Comics #1. Ó Méalóid surfaces every single fact he can find about the legal ownership of the character—much of which was pretty thin on the ground before his investigations. As he shows, the character has often been mismanaged or used flat-out illegally; it's pretty clear from his investigations, for example, that Dez Skinn probably didn't really lay the necessary groundwork to use Marvelman in Warrior. Some of what was in here I knew already, either from Kimota! or my general knowledge of the character, but it's good to see it documented in detail. I think the most new-to-me information was contained in the discussion of how the rights to Miracleman supposedly ended up with Todd McFarlane, how  McFarlane ripped off Neil Gaiman, and how the two tangled in court for years until Gaiman was ultimately vindicated. I knew vaguely there was a dispute about a Spawn character named Angela, but I didn't know any of the parameters, or what it had to do with Miracleman.

The book's detail is, however, sometimes its downfall. There is a decent amount of repetition, and sometimes Ó Méalóid uses five examples when two would do. And though he's mostly scrupulous about the legal details, I did find that occasionally Ó Méalóid made statements that I don't think make any legal sense. Even if Marvelman was a rip-off of Captain Marvel, the collapse of the company that owned Marvelman would not somehow grant rights to the character to DC, that's just not how copyright (or any kind of ownership) works as far as I know.

On top of that, this is self-published—and oh boy is that obvious. Some paragraphs are indented, but most are not, resulting in huge blocks of text on many pages; footnotes are not always logically positioned; sometimes the little black bar dividing footnotes from the main text overlaps with text. On top of that, it needed a good content edit; there are way too many footnotes and Ó Méalóid is, at times, an overly digressive writer. For $18, one hopes for better! It reminds me a lot of Camestros Felapton's Debarkle, though, in that a professionally published version of this would be better in some ways (it would have been actually edited) but probably worse in others, because I don't think a professional publisher would want something with such a narrow focus and such detailed documentation. So you either get the roughness of a self-published book, or you get a different book, to be honest. 

I did really appreciate Ó Méalóid's critique of the pretty stupid way Marvel published the Marvelman and Miracleman material it acquired, fannish as it probably was. I appreciate all the hard work, labor, and love that obviously went into this book—Ó Méalóid has clearly read everything ever written about Miracleman, and dug up a lot of information no one else has ever bothered too, straightening out a lot of vague misconceptions people have around the character. I like that he interviews key figures in the history of the character, but also (unlike Khoury, who to be fair, just has a different project) puts those interviews in context of other interviews and actual facts. I also appreciated the times he showed what was bluster, such as that the disappearance of Marvelman from Warrior was probably more about Dez Skinn's deteriorating working relationship with Alan Moore than the threats from Marvel UK over the use of the "Marvelman" title.

Like I said, I had to read the 2001 edition of Kimota!, but even the 2010 edition wouldn't have been very up-to-date, as it would have predated Marvel's acquisition of the character and republication of the Moore and Gaiman's runs. That's probably its biggest flaw; there's just a significant piece of Miracleman content that the book does not and cannot say anything about. If TwoMorrows announced a third edition, I would pick it up... but maybe they need to wait until The Dark Age is done. I was worried that, as it predates the publication of The Silver Age, Poisoned Chalice would be out-of-date a bit, too, but actually in terms of the legal issues, Ó Méalóid is pretty much up to the moment; things have stabilized since his book was published even if it was six years ago.

Are these books for everyone with a casual interest in Miracleman? Probably not. (Though—do people with a casual interest in Miracleman actually exist? Seems to me you're probably either in or you're out.) But if you're the kind of person who's into 1) Alan Moore, 2) the development of superhero comics as a genre, or 3) literary histories and copyrights, (and I'm into all three) these books are must-reads.

* I think John Ridgway is probably the significant omission. Of course, as a Doctor Who Magazine fan, he's one of the ones I'd like to hear from the most!

Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

Miracleman: The Silver Age

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1990-2024
Acquired: May 2024
Read: August 2024

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Co-Writer & Artist: Mark Buckingham

Color Art: Jordie Bellaire, D'Israeli

Lettering: Todd Klein

This volume finally extends and continues the story of Miracleman from where Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckinham left off in the early 1990s; my understanding is that it contains a few issues they completed then (though with alterations to the art and coloring) and a few issues only published in the 2020s (mostly or entirely written in the 1990s, I think, but not illustrated until the 2020s). Even though Marvel began reprinting Miracleman back in 2014, it was only this year that they finally wrapped up Gaiman and Buckingham's second volume in single-issue format and thus finally released a collection—its release finally being my impetus to sit down and read all the Miracleman comics I'd been picking up.

While book one of the Gaiman/Buckingham run gave us a series of one-off snapshots of Miracleman's utopia, this volume consists of one continuous story. Or rather, half a story, as it ends with a declaration that the story is "TO BE CONTINUED IN THE DARK AGE." But given it took us ten years to get The Silver Age, which had largely already been written, I'm not optimistic that we'll get The Dark Age anytime soon. Maybe in the 2050s?

Anyway, as part of his project to bring the dead back to life, Miracleman revives Young Miracleman, who died before the events of Alan Moore's first book. Richard "Dicky" Dauntless is thus thrust from the world of the ordinary(-ish) 1950s straight into Miracleman's utopian 2003. The book covers his difficulty adjusting to this new time and place, as well as to his discoveries about his own history. How does someone with 1950s attitude toward gender, sexuality, and other social constructs fit into a benevolent libertarian dictatorship?

The story moves slowly but strongly, especially thanks to the work of the always dependable Mark Buckingham. While The Golden Age saw him working in a number of styles, this volume keeps him what I think of as his "default" style (as seen in works such as Dead Boy Detectives); he's good at capturing emotion and character, which works well for the highly contemplative tone of this volume. The best material, in my opinion, was Richard's trip to the mountains, where he seeks out a man who was given powers by Miracleman but voluntarily gave them up, and this causes him (as well as his traveling companions) to think about his place in this new world.

Moore's original run hinted that Young Miracleman was gay; Gaiman picks up on that here, but in a way that made me a bit uncomfortable with its implications. I'm curious to see where this goes in The Dark Age, however. 

Overall, I found this interesting but unfinished. It very much depends on The Dark Age. It seems like it could have some interesting things to say, but it also seems like it might end up being a reactionary take on utopias, undermining what made Olympus and The Golden Age so interesting. Hopefully we find out before the 2050s.

Also, I have to complain that while the first four Miracleman volumes were originally released in hardcover, this one only came out in trade paperback. C'mon Marvel, what the hell is this? Your target audience for releases of long-lost 1990s comic books is also the exact kind of people who want their collected editions to go together and will pay for a hardcover! The release strategy of this whole series has left a lot to be desired... I fervently hope they don't end up doing a hardcover later, though; I don't want to have to fight off the temptation to rebuy this.

Miracleman: The Golden Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham

Miracleman: The Golden Age

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 1989-91
Previously read: March 2012
Acquired: March 2016
Reread: August 2024

Story: Neil Gaiman

Art: Mark Buckingham

Color Art: D'Israeli

Selected Painted Art: Mark Buckingham

Lettering: Todd Klein

Back when I originally got into Miracleman, this is the one volume I was actually able to source via interlibrary loan, so this is the one volume I have read before, in a 1993 trade paperback published by Eclipse. But, of course that time I lacked the context of the preceding three volumes by Alan Moore.

What Alan Moore did in the final issue of Olympus was genre-shifting: take the premise of the superhero genre to its logical conclusion. If superheroes use violence to improve the world, isn't their ultimate goal to force a utopia? In his continuation, Neil Gaiman extrapolates from that, telling us stories of what that utopian world might actually look like. The Golden Age contains a number of short stories from around the world of Miracleman; these issues were originally published 1989 through 1991, though it was two issues after this that right issues would result in the series fizzling out, only to be continued decades later.

Rereading my original review, I have to saw, I largely agree with my past self. Each of the stories here examines some aspect of what it might be like to live in a perfect world—and who are the people who might not fit, what are the ways in which people might be left behind. The only story I didn't really rate in my old review was the spy one, about how Miracleman sets up an artificial city for spies to play out their dramas because there's nothing for them in the new world; I dismissed it as derivative of The Prisoner. And maybe that's true, but the twist isn't the point. The point here is that the spies are all of us. So many of us would rather exist in comfortable but destructive routines than embrace an uncomfortable but perhaps redemptive way of living. (It reminds me of that Jameson canard about the end of capitalism versus the end of the world.) 

Perhaps it's a hot take, but Mark Buckingham is probably the best artist on Miracleman so far, a series that has been blessed by a succession of admittedly strong artists! His beautiful work is well suited to the utopian vibes of the post-Miracleman Earth, but I also really like how adaptive he is, with lots of varied artistic styles across the book's eight chapters, always choosing one suited to the particular story being told.

It's almost a shame the series was continued. At the point I write this review, I've already read The Silver Age, and I kind of agree with something I wrote back when I read The Golden Age on its own a decade ago:

It's a shame that we'll apparently never see more of this story to come, but in a way, I like that. The Golden Age explores the sadness that comes with the passing of a way of life, but if what comes next is a genuine utopia, it really would be impossible for there to be a sustained series of stories. The Golden Age really only succeeds at that by using Miracleman as a god, not a character. Without Gaiman's planned next two volumes, we'll never see the degeneration and corruption of Miracleman's utopia, and we'll be able to forever stop on that image of the people of Earth floating away on balloons. It makes The Golden Age a much more unconventional work than it might otherwise have been, one that shows a utopia that though it has cause for sadness, has much larger cause for joy and wonder.

Review: Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

Published: 2020
Acquired and read: November 2020

Doctor Who: Adventures in Lockdown

edited by Steve Cole

This slim anthology collects Doctor Who material created or published during 2020's coronavirus lockdown; some of it was for the Doctor Who web site, some of it was released as part of the series of tweetalongs organized by Emily Cook, some of it is original to this book. I always like a good Doctor Who anthology, and this is a great one. Steven Moffat explains what the terror of the Umpty Ums is as the Doctor faces down the DeathBorg known as Karpagnon; Russell T Davies gives us a glimpse into the way the Time War could have ended if Paul McGann had regenerated straight into Christopher Eccleston; Neil Gaiman reveals an incident in the life of the Corsair; Pete McTighe discovers that the Doctor also enjoys watching her past adventures; Paul Cornell revisits both Daughter-of-Mine from "Human Nature" and Bernice Summerfield; Mark Gatiss reunites the Doctor with her granddaughter. All this and some great illustrations, too; my favorites included Valentina Mozzo's of the Doctor fist-bumping a Judoon and Chris Riddell's of the Corsair.

It reads briskly but it reads well. Moffat shows that he can always craft an engaging Doctor Who story by mixing the fear of a child with the solace of the Doctor and yet always find something new and fun to do with it. Plus, of course, good jokes! Davies's closing pages of a faux Time War novelization are an utter delight, firing off more great Time War ideas in ten pages than Big Finish has in ten dozen box sets. 

I really like Paul Cornell's "Shadow" trilogy: three linked stories of the Doctor coming to doubt that her punishment for Daughter-of-Mine in "The Family of Blood" was just, though the best one is probably the one that has the least to do with that premise; "The Shadow Passes" focuses on the thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan spending time in a bunker on an alien planet. Cornell has a good grasp of the voices of these characters, especially the Doctor and Yaz, and make them likeable. I like the Doctor and her companions well enough on screen, but I feel that series 11-12 haven't done a great job using them. In fact, I think all of the authors here render a pretty great Doctor: Chris Chibnall, Moffat, Joy Wilkinson, and Gatiss also really shine. The promise of the thirteenth Doctor was, I think, a light of compassion burning in the darkness. The tv show struggles to make this work, often giving us a Doctor that seems ineffective and a "fam" that just stands there, but Adventures in Lockdown plays to her strengths, with Whittaker's compassion echoing off the page in a time where we need it most.

The only thing that didn't work for me is that seeing the script for "Rory's Story" is pretty pointless; that segment only worked for the novelty of getting to see Arthur Darvill play Rory once more. And though I did like "Shadow of a Doubt," it definitely loses something in not being read aloud by Lisa Bowerman.

My Hugo Awards 2017 Votes: Book Categories

This final post covers my votes in the three Hugo categories for book-length works: novels, graphic stories, and nonfiction. If I did a full review of a work, I'll link to that here. (Note that if you're reading this before 22 August, not all of those full reviews will have gone live yet.) I only did that if I owned the book: I didn't do it for anything I read an e-version of from the Hugo voters packet, or borrowed from the library (as in the case of Princess Diarist). If the work is freely available on-line, I'll link to that. (Thankfully there is no work of which both of those things is true.)

Best Graphic Story

6. Black Panther: A Nation under Our Feet, Book One, script by Ta-Nehisi Coates, art by Brian Stelfreeze

I wanted to like this, and possibly I will like this. The four issues collected here are clearly just the opening act of a larger story; A Nation under Our Feet is apparently slated to run across three volumes of Black Panther. But what's here is alienating, assuming the reader knows more about Blank Panther backstory than I did. What happened to Black Panther's sister, and why doesn't he have any control over his own country? Or, if this stuff isn't preexisting backstory, it's just alienating. There are definitely some neat things going on here. I liked the sense of Wakanda as a real place with factions and tensions and multiple competing histories, and I liked the two lesbian warriors who go rogue (though no one properly explains what is the organization they went rogue from), and Stelfreeze occasionally does some really arresting stuff with his visuals, and the idea that a superhero whose core identity is being a superking has to confront a popular revolution is cool, and leads to good quotations about power and leadership. But at times this book felt like epigrams strung together with imagery, not a story.

5. Monstress: Awakening, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda

In the discrete story stakes, Monstress is somewhere above Paper Girls and below Ms. Marvel. Events come to a climax, but there's clearly a much bigger story we're only beginning to see. But what a story. Sana Takeda's art is absolutely gorgeous, a pointed contrast to the often horrific events it depicts. In a fantasy world inhabited by five races-- humans, gods, Ancients, Arcanics (human/Ancient hybrids), and talking cats-- a seventeen-year-old Arcanic girl goes into the dark heart of humanity to root out the secret of her own existence, something relating to the Old Gods. There's sometimes too much to keep track of, but the core characters are pretty great; I particularly enjoy Maika's friend the world-weary cat Ren, and also I have a lot of affection for the improbably cute fox Arcanic, Kippa. Lush stuff, and a series I will definitely continue to read. If it loses out to Paper Girls, it's only because Paper Girls just hits my buttons in a way this does not, as I tend more toward sf than fantasy.

4. Paper Girls 1, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang

A group of bicycle-riding children living in the Midwest in the 1980s encounter something out of this world. I guess 2016 was a bit of a moment for this-- it's like Stranger Things but with preteen girls. Anyway, this was good: funny at times, horrifying at others, inventive in the way that Brian K. Vaughan often is of late (I mean, I liked Y: The Last Man a lot, but this and Saga show that he's upped his game since), and Cliff Chiang is one of my favorite comics artists, so I'm happy to see him show his stuff on something creator-owned instead of being relegated to Green Arrow and Black Canary or whatever. This is clearly the first chapter in a larger story, not a story complete in itself, which partially motivates my placement of it here. Stands on its own more than a volume of Black Panther but less than one of Ms. Marvel. I don't have a problem with that in a general sense, it's one of the things that attracts me to the whole serial comic book medium, but will Vaughan and Chiang stick the landing? I want to know that before I praise it too effusively. I guess this is a limitation of the Best Graphic Story category I don't know of a way to overcome, except maybe in renominating the entirety of Paper Girls as complete work whenever it comes to a conclusion.

3. Saga, Volume Six, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples

I ended up being very torn about the relative rankings of the two Brian K. Vaughan comics, and torn about potential tie-breakers: do I break the tie by going with a return to a world I enjoy? Or do I count inventing something new as superior? In the end I decided that I could appreciate Saga, Volume Six more than Paper Girls 1 because there's a coherent story and thematic unity about prisons (the ones we're put in and the ones we put ourselves in) in volume 6 of Saga, while Paper Girls feels more like it just stops without resolving story or theme. Plus it might just be the familiarity that makes me like the Saga characters more, but that's still something, and I'm going with it. There are no cute walrus farmers* or exiled robot princes in Paper Girls.

2. Ms. Marvel: Super Famous; script by G. Willow Wilson; art by Takeshi Miyazawa, Adrian Alphona, and Nico Leon

Ms. Marvel is one of two comics I buy on a monthly basis, so this was actually the only finalist in this category I'd read already; I brushed back through the issues (vol. 4, #1-6) instead of rereading the whole thing. In the two story arcs collected here, Kamala fights gentrification in Jersey City (it turns out to be a HYDRA plot) and accidentally creates an army of duplicates of herself. There's a lot of good teen stuff here: learning how to deal with friends in romantic relationships, learning how to find your limits, learning how to deal with family members in romantic relationships. The second story is in particular just brilliantly hilarious; Nico Leon draws an amazing army of Ms. Marvel duplicates, and the bit where Kamala's friend Bruno summons Loki is delightful. Ms. Marvel is one of the best things going right now in superhero comics. The only bad thing about this volume is that Adrian Alphona, who drew most of G. Willow Wilson's original run, only draws ten pages of it. I have actually liked Takeshi Miyazawa since Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, but Alphona defined Kamala and her world, and I'm sad that as it's gone on, he's drawn less and less of it for whatever reasons.

1. The Vision: Little Worse than a Man, script by Tom King, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta

It was a tough choice for me between The Vision and Ms. Marvel, but I guess in a tie I give the pip to the first volume of something new over the fifth volume of something not quite as new. The Vision places the Avengers' best synthezoid in the D.C. suburbs with a newly constructed family (one wife, two kids) as he takes up a new job as the president's Avengers liaison. Things quickly get out of control, though, as the Visions are subject to prejudice from the locals and assault by supervillains in suburbia. King is a brutal, economic writer (if I'd been a supporting member of Worldcon earlier, I'd've nominated his excellent Omega Men run) who brings something really special to the way he tells this story (great captions!), and Gabriel Hernandez Walta matches his sensibilities, with a simple style that belies the brutality underneath this world (our world) and a great way with facial expressions. Walta's Visions hit the uncanny valley perfectly.

Best Novel 

6. Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

This was the only Best Novel finalist I just completely bounced off of-- I enjoyed everything ranked above it to varying degrees, but I just could not get into this book. That said, I wouldn't object if it won; it seemed like the kind of book that could be someone else's cup of tea (and it must have been many people's cup of tea to end up a finalist), but it very much was not mine. Too frustrating and inexplicable to be interesting or enjoyable.

5. Death's End by Cixin Liu

The top three books were hard to rank; the bottom three much more easy. Though Death's End probably has more of sfnal interest than A Closed and Common Orbit, sf is about more than neat ideas-- a good novel also needs a compelling story or stories, and Death's End did not, whereas as I got emotionally involved in A Closed and Common Orbit... despite not wanting to! And the ideas in Death's End just weren't as interesting as those in the first two Remembrance of Earth's Past novels in any case. If all three books had been as good as The Three-Body Problem, I could see this ending up higher on my ballot, but Death's End was not as good as the first two, so oh well.

4. A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

Even if I did end up getting a bit misty-eyed while reading A Closed and Common Orbit, and even if it provides a complete adventure in a way that The Obelisk Gate and Too Like the Lightning it did, it's still hard for me to claim that it's better than those books. I mean, it's very good, but if science fiction should invent new realities for the purposes of thought experiment (and though that's just one thing it does, but it's an important one to me), A Closed and Common Orbit is just not as ambitious as the other two. It's a strong slate that could push a book this emotional this far down, I think.

3. The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin

I found this tough to rate versus Too Like the Lightning, I think partially because both are incomplete works-- The Obelisk Gate is reasonably satisfying on its own, but it is pretty clearly the middle chapters of a longer story, meaning that in some sense it will have to be judged retrospectively, once I have complete information on how that longer story succeeds. But I did really like it regardless.

2. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

I will note that this is, like, impossible. All the Birds and Obelisk Gate and Closed and Common and are all three very strong books that did not nail things 100%. Each book has elements that makes it award-worthy, and aspects that hold it back no matter how great it is. I ended up ranking All the Birds here because I felt like it satisfied me more than Obelisk Gate, yet lacked the ambition of Too Like the Lightning. On a different day I could probably totally rejuggle everything under my first-place choice and still be satisfied with the resultant list.

1. Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Though this is no more a complete story than The Obelisk Gate, possibly even less so as the book doesn't really have an ending, kind of just coming to a stop that will be picked up in Seven Surrenders, Too Like the Lightning feels like the greater achievement to me, in that Jemisin is revisiting a world (even if she is fleshing it out in doing so) while Palmer is establishing a new one, and quite successfully at that.

Best Related Work

7. Women of Harry Potter by Sarah Gailey

Not actually a book (I guess a "related work" doesn't have to be but usually is), but a series of blog posts on Tor.com, five as of the end of 2016 (six now), discussing female Harry Potter characters. Gailey doesn't write academic-style criticism; these are very enthusiastic tributes more than anything else, which often felt like they reflected what fans want the characters to be like more than what they actually are like. Well written, I guess, but they left me cold.

6. No Award

I'm having a hard time justifying the idea that the Hugo Award would go to a series of five so-so blog posts. (Kameron Hurley won the category in 2014 for a single blog essay, but that essay was much better than any of these.) On the other hand, even though I didn't like Traveler of Worlds very much, I can see how someone might like it, so I ranked it higher than No Award.

5. Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

If you hang on to Robert Silverberg's every word, this might be the book for you. It's hard for me to imagine why you would, though, as I found the questions and answers here largely superficial. Zinos-Amaro rockets through scintillating questions such as, what kind of food does Silverberg like to eat? and how does he organize his day? But even when Zinos-Amaro asks interesting questions, Silverberg largely fails to answer them interestingly; a big deal is made about Silverberg's travel and how it broadened his mind, but when Zinos-Amaro asks for an example, the best Silverberg can do is to explain that he got lost once and his wife's iPhone's GPS saved them, so he learned smartphones aren't that bad. Whoa! It also would have been nice if Zinos-Amaro had edited out the bits where he asked Silverberg a question and Silverberg said he had no opinion on the topic. Plus Silverberg goes on rants about how people in their thirties have no manners when they eat out. Scintillating! I haven't read much of Silverberg's fiction (no novels, just a few short stories); possibly if you did, you would like this more than me. Silverberg rags on Thomas Hardy for a few pages and, well, I know who I think will endure in that contest.

4. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

This book collects a diary Carrie Fisher kept during the filming of Star Wars in 1976, a mix of poetry and prose written about her relationship with Harrison Ford, framed by Fisher's take on that relationship now. Interesting enough for what it is, and I suppose it's nice to have story out there-- but there's actually not much of a story there. Ford was in his mid-thirties and married and away from home (Star Wars was filmed in the UK), while Fisher was nineteen and acting more worldly than she actually was, and they had sex on the weekends but little connection-- Fisher was kind of in love, but then they flew back to the United States and it was all over. There is the occasional real interesting moment, like an incident where she really connects with Ford when she flawlessly imitates his walk. Fisher's thoughts on the way Leia and the Star Wars phenomenon shaped her life are interesting, though it would have been nice to have heard more about her returning to the character for The Force Awakens, which she only alludes to. Like a lot of the book, though, this section feels padded, as if Fisher is vamping to fill up space to justify this being its own volume. It's quite short, but it's still too long.

3. The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman

This was a fun collection of various pieces of nonfiction Gaiman has written across his career, ranging from 1989 to 2016. It's a hodgepodge (or an olio as the LA Times crossword might say) of speeches, introductions, newspaper columns, and all sorts. There's a lot to like here: Gaiman is a lively, engaging writer, enthusiastic in his appreciations, and usually humorous. There are only so many introductions you can read in a row, though, especially as Gaiman comes across as vaguely skeptical of the whole concept of the introduction, but my main takeaway from reading this was how invested Gaiman is not just in the genre of speculative fiction, but its fandom and its fans. We could do a lot worse. (Also, his thoughts on genre contrast in interesting and productive ways with Le Guin's below.)

2. The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

A collection of essays on topics related to feminist geekdom, some previously published (mostly on the author's blog), some original to the book. The very best one is an analysis of masculinity in True Detective, which really effectively blends the critical, the personal, and the political in a way that illuminates both True Detective and general cultural trends. I also really liked the last essay, about llamas as a metaphor for how stories shape our perceptions of history. If they had all been as good as those two (and some others were), this would have got my top spot, I think, but Hurley has a tendency to wax in generalities that prevents her from being as insightful as she might.

1. Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin

I'd place this book almost on a par with Gaiman's collection, as they're pretty similar works. What gave Le Guin the edge for me was its focus (at over 500 pages I eventually got tired of Gaiman's ideas in a way I didn't with Le Guin's 300) and her book reviews, which are more critically successful than anything in Gaiman's book, as fun as it was to read.

Overall Thoughts

I feel like both Best Graphic Story and Best Novel were very strong categories this year. I remember looking at some shortlists a few years ago when Best Graphic Story was first being implemented and being flabbergasted at the abysmal quality of some of the stuff; though I didn't like Black Panther, I can see how someone else might, and the other five works ranged from very good to great in my estimation.

Similarly, I'd be pleased if anything in my top four won in Best Novel; I thought they were all great books in very different ways, and ranking the top tier especially was completely impossible. Space opera, epic fantasy, utopian sf, hybrid speculative fiction-- all very different breeds of genre fiction, but all doing what it ought to do best. I look forward to reading the follow-ups to A Closed and Common Orbit, The Obelisk Gate, and Too Like the Lightning. My guess is that Too Like the Lightning or All the Birds will win, but I think it will be tight.

Related Work I enjoyed the least of these categories. Le Guin is great, of course, but if the other two book categories are pushing the genre forward in new and interesting ways, there's something retrograde about a category dominated by authors who came to prominence in the 1950s (Silverberg), the 1970s (Le Guin), and the 1980s (Gaiman), and one who's famous for being in a movie. I mean, this category is always going to be backward-looking by nature, but I don't feel like it needs to be this backward looking.

In Two Weeks: I react to the actual award winners, and also sum up my thoughts on this whole Hugo process.

* A walrus who farms, not a farmer of walruses.

Review: The Children's Crusade by Neil Gaiman et al.

Last year, I read DC's long-time-coming collection of the 1990s Vertigo crossover The Children's Crusade. At the time, I remarked that it actually made me more likely to want to pick up the original issues, not less, as the collection replaced the middle five of the seven issues with newly written content, to provide a smoother reading experience. So what was the original like, if it seemingly necessitated such a reworking?

The answer is that it's actually not that bad. I mean, these stories don't cohere tremendously, or seem to have much of a point, but I'd argue that's no different from many of DC's 1990s annual crossovers, like Eclipso: The Darkness Within, Armageddon 2001, or Bloodlines. Though, I suppose DC hasn't collected any of those, so maybe that tells us something. In my comments here I'll focus on the issues not collected in Free Country collection, as I covered the bookends pretty well in my original review.

In the first bookend, The Children's Crusade #1, we learn that children are disappearing, spirited away to a mysterious realm known as Free Country, and that five special children are being targeted next: the children principal characters in five Vertigo ongoings of the early 1990s (Suzy from Black Orchid, Maxine from Animal Man, Tefé from Swamp Thing, Dorothy from Doom Patrol, and Tim from The Books of Magic). Edwin and Charles, the dead boy detectives, set out to find and protect these five children. You might expect that these stories would be pretty formulaic, with an agent of Free Country coming and taking each character in turn, but they're actually reasonably distinct from each other.

The Black Orchid story, for example, inserts an agent of Free Country into the history of the series, showing that the mini-Black Orchid known as Suzy has actually met Junkin Buckley repeatedly before, and that he was responsible for some of her decisions in earlier issues (unbeknownst to the readers at the time). Then he returns for Suzy one last time, recruiting her to Free Country. On the other hand, the Animal Man story is mostly part of the ongoing events of that series (somewhat confusingly; there are lots of characters who are never clearly introduced to the new reader), but at the very end, when Maxine ends up in a tight spot, Jack Rabbit convinces her to escape with him to Free Country. (And to leave a clone of herself behind, an occurrence that would be expanded upon in The Children's Crusade #2. I don't know if this ended up playing into the events of the Animal Man ongoing.)

At this point, I figured each annual would end with a child recruited into Free Country, ready to play their part in the big crossover, so I was surprised when in the Swamp Thing tale, Tefé goes to Free Country on page 8, and most of the issue (they're all about 58 pages long) concerns her adventures in Free Country with Maxine, and ends with her leaving Free Country, clearing up a point that confused me in the Free Country collection. The way Free Country is depicted here doesn't really line up with what we see in the bookends, but then again, much of it seems to be an illusion created for the benefit of Tefé and Maxine.

The Doom Patrol story is a lot like the Swamp Thing one, showing both Dorothy's recruitment and the events that drive her back home, only of all of these, this one made the least sense to someone not reading the relevant ongoing. Like, why does Dorothy normally hang out with feral children who live in the woods?

Finally, the Books of Magic story shakes things up again, but in a way that's baffling: it has two parallel stories, one about Tim being kidnapped into a mystery realm by a mystery assassin, none of which is ever explained, and one about the Free Country agent sent to recruit him wandering London, which was actually pretty cute. I guess maybe the kidnap plot is a set-up for something that happens in Tim's ongoing series? But I don't even get how he escapes, he just does.

In my review of the collected edition, I complained that in the middle chapter, the dead boy detectives just pointlessly turn up too late to help Maxine and that's about it, but in the original it's actually worse. Their quest having been set up in the first bookend, they don't even appear in the first two middle chapters-- then in the third, they claim they got to both recruitments a moment too late even though we never saw them. It's a little goofy, and of course they fail to accomplish anything in the chapters in which they do appear-- but such, I suppose, is the very nature of the crossover, whose design requires they can't make it to Free Country until the final issue. Amusingly, we see Tim travel into Free Country in both the Books of Magic issue and in The Children's Crusade #2, and the dead boy detectives are shown to be there in the second instance, when they clearly weren't in the first!

The final part isn't really rendered any more enjoyable by reading the middle issues. Some parts of it make more sense because we've seen them dramatized, but other ones make less sense, because the collection fleshed them out. It's still kind of a disappointment, because the dead boy detectives are set up as the main characters, yet Tim Hunter saves the day-- and it's still a disappointment even if you focus on Tim because he doesn't actually do anything, he saves it by accident! Still, Gaiman and his co-writers on the final issue provide some good jokes at least. Actually, they're probably the best part.

So, overall, this is a weird story, and not one I can particularly recommend-- you probably really are better off reading the Free Country collection with its new middle chapter. The original issues are much more part of their ongoing series than they are parts of The Children's Crusade, as they almost all read just fine without the bookends, but not vice versa.

The Children's Crusade originally appeared in The Children's Crusade #1-2, Black Orchid Annual #1, Animal Man Annual vol. 1 #1, Swamp Thing Annual vol. 2 #7, Doom Patrol Annual #2, and Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual #1 (Dec. 1993–Jan. 1994). The story was written by Neil Gaiman, Dick Foreman, Jamie Delano, Nancy A. Collins, Rachel Pollack, John Ney Rieber, and Alisa Kwitney. It was illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Mike Barreiro, Gary Amaro, Jason Minor, Charlie Adlard, Phillip Hester, Bruce McCorkindale, Russell Braun, Tom Sutton, Rafael Kayanan, Mark Buckingham, Dennis Cramer, Kim DeMulder, Mark Wheatley, Peter Gross, and Peter Snejbjerg. Colors were provided by Daniel Vozzo, George Freeman, Tatjana Wood, and Suart Chaifetz, and the issues were lettered by John Costanza, Clem Robins, Tim Harkins, John Workman, and Richard Starkings. The crossover was edited by Stuart Moore, Tom Peyer, and Tom Stathis.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXII: The Sandman: Overture: The Deluxe Edition

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2013-15)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

The Sandman: Overture: The Deluxe Edition

Written by Neil Gaiman

Art by J. H. Williams III
Colors by Dave Stewart

Letters by Todd Klein

There have been a lot of Sandman spin-offs over the years. This is the 32nd one that I have read, not counting independent ongoings like Sandman Mystery Theatre, Lucifer, or House of Mystery. But this is probably the only one people were ever really asking for: what was it that left Dream depleted and powerless enough to be captured by a human sorcerer before the events of issue #1 of Gaiman's series? Finally that story is being told.

Overture, first and foremost, is a beautiful book. J. H. Williams III is always a dependable artist, but it seems unlikely to me that he'll ever surpass the work he's done here:

This took me forever to work out, but the lights at the top spell out "FOUR" because J. H. Williams works the chapter number into the beginning of each chapter. For a while I saw "FOV" and didn't recognize the "R" at all.
from The Sandman: Overture #4

And it's not just beautiful, as Williams uses the layouts and form of his art to really tell a story:

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXI: Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 1993-2015)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2016

Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade

Writers: Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Rachel Pollack, Alisa Kwitney & Jamie Delano

Artists: Chris Bachalo, Mike Barreiro, Peter Gross, Al Davison & Peter Snejbjerg
Colorists: Daniel Vozzo & Jeanne McGee

Letterers: John Costanza & Todd Klein

It's probably impossible to discuss this book without discussing its means of production. Though it would be interesting to discuss it as a purely standalone book, its strange genesis will always influence anything you can write about. The Children's Crusade was a 1993-94 "annual" crossover, by which I mean a crossover through annuals of ongoing series (like Eclipso: The Darkness Within or Armageddon 2001), not a crossover that took place annually. It was Vertigo's first and last attempt at such a thing, spanning Black Orchid, The Books of Magic, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol. In addition to those five issues, it was bookended by issues featuring Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, the so-called "Dead Boy Detectives" from The Sandman, which were (mostly) written by Neil Gaiman. The crossover has never been collected, I guess because the middle parts didn't make a lot of sense on their own, and didn't connect into the last issue in the way they were supposed to. But because printing Neil Gaiman is like printing money, DC has finally collected the bookends he wrote, commissioning a new middle chapter by writer Toby Litt and artist Peter Gross to bridge the gap between the two Gaiman-penned issues, covering all the ground needed to get you from The Children's Crusade issue #1 to issue #2. Litt and Gross also add extra pages to the closing issue, I guess to clarify or expand rushed aspects of it.

I actually meant to scan a different sequence of panels on the facing page, but I messed up and I'm too lazy to redo it, so this'll have to do.
from The Children's Crusade #1 (script by Neil Gaiman, art by Chris Bachalo & Mike Barreiro)

The opening issue is Neil Gaiman at his most typical and his best, aided by Chris Bachalo and Mark Barreiro on art. Charles and Edwin, the two boarding-school ghosts who eluded Death in Season of Mists, have set up a detective agency, finally answering a long-standing point of bafflement for me. Their first case is brought to them by a girl whose brother has vanished, along with every other child in their village, plus a huge number of children the world over. In typical Gaiman fashion, though, their investigations (such as they are; they're delightfully poor detectives) are interspersed with tales of lost or missing children from throughout history: a chronicle of the Children's Crusade, a boy telling the Victorian poet Robert Browning about the Pied Piper's visit to the town of St. Cecile, and a very grim story of how a group of children trapped in a pit managed to escape.

Review: Doctor Who: Nothing O'Clock by Neil Gaiman

Mass market paperback, 67 pages
Published 2014 (originally 2013)
Acquired December 2014
Read November 2015

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor: Nothing O'Clock

by Neil Gaiman

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 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.

Next Week: We reach the end of this literary Doctor Who adventure with a twelfth Doctor adventure, in Lights Out!

Review: Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012 edited by Clayton Hickman

Hardcover, 162 pages
Published 2011
Acquired September 2012
Read September 2013

Doctor Who: The Brilliant Book 2012
edited by Clayton Hickman

Okay, the cover's not as nice, but in most other ways this is an improvement upon its already-quite-good predecessor. I remember not liking the 2011 series very much as it aired, but this book got me appreciating it-- even if the plots don't hang together, surely it's one of Doctor Who's most stylish and gorgeous-looking seasons? The episode guides are still good, but there's even better features than ever before:

• notes from Amy and Rory to the Doctor during their honeymoon(s)
• cut sequences from episodes (including a Fiddler on the Roof song in "The Impossible Astronaut," and all the drafts of "The Curse of the Black Spot"... including the ship-less one!)
• an explanation of the three-month gap between "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" (complete with map)
• "The Changing Hats of Doctor Who"(!)
• a scrapbook of Madame Vastra's history (including Henry Gordon Jago reference)
• report cards for Rory, Mels, and Amy
• a Teselecta user's guide ("The Teselecta comes with a range of pre-programed dance moves for scenarios when it is required to dance convincingly.... NEVER attempt manual improvisation - IT CAN COST LIVES!")
• a TwoStreams Kindness Facility PR brochure
• The White Flag, the newspaper of the always-surrending planet of Tivoli
• Charles Dickens's twitter updates

Particularly awesome is a Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham comic strip prequel to "The Doctor's Wife" and the Doctor's job application for the department store in "Closing Time."

There's a real emphasis in here on how the show is made, which is both pleasing to someone like me and sure to inspire and thrill a whole new generation of younger fans. It's a shame that there don't seem to be any future Brilliant Books on the horizon-- no doubt a victim of the awful scheduling decisions that have plagued the show of later...

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXVIII: Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Comic hardcover, n.pag
Published 2009 (contents: 1989-2009)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Artists: Andy Kubert, Scott Williams, Simon Bisley, Mark Buckingham, Mike Hoffman, Kevin Nowlan, Bernie Mireault, Matt Wagner
Colors: Alex Sinclair, Nansi Hoolahan, Tom McCraw, Joe Matt

Letters: Jared K. Fletcher, John Costanza, Agustin Mas, Todd Klein

This is close to the end of my Sandman spin-off runthrough. It's also stretching the definition of "Sandman spin-off," though no moreso than when I included Gaiman's early DC work like Black Orchid and Legend of the Green Flame. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? actually teases you with an appearance of someone who might be Death... but turns out not to be. (Or so I think, anyway. Some evidently disagree!) The story takes place after Batman's death in Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, with all of his old allies and enemies gathering in Gotham to pay homage to him. Only... everyone thinks they did it. So we get a succession of stories told, by Catwoman, Alfred, the Mad Hatter, Joker, Robin, Clayface, Superman, each telling completely contradictory stories about something they did (or did not do) that lead to the death of Batman.

The stories range from a few pages to a panel or two to just dialogue, but each of them manages to be completely and utterly Batman. It's the greatest hits of Batman deaths, if he was allowed to have more than one. There are a lot of nice details-- my favorite part is the guy outside the club where the funeral is being held who watched the villains' cars-- in both the (beautiful) art (by Andy Kubert) and the writing. It's the perfect tribute to the Batman, the man who never gave up, no matter how crazy he seemed.

The whole funeral is overlaid by two people talking in caption boxes, who turn out to be Batman and not Death ("I don't think death is a person, Bruce."), and Batman passes from the funeral, from life, into something greater and beyond reality. Here, Bruce gets a chance to reflect on who he was and why he did everything he did. There are a lot of great lines, my favorite being, "Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman." And then he's done... or as done as Batman can ever be, because he's apparently got to pass on somewhere else. I know that when Darkseid kills Batman in Final Crisis, Batman actually goes tumbling into the past, so I assume this is all tied into that, but it works on its own as a story about the endurance and struggle of Batman, too.

The still-thin book is padded out by everything else Gaiman wrote related to Batman, which amounts to a weird set of stories. "A Black and White World" is about what Batman and the Joker do "off-panel" in their comics, but Simon Bisley's art is just a little too "gritty 1990s" to work for me. Check out those ears on the Batman! And those R. Crumb-style women. "Pavane" is about a Suicide Squad agent trying to recruit Poison Ivy, giving her origin story-- pretty good stuff. "Original Sins" and "When is a Door" are two linked stories about a news team visiting Gotham to do a feature on supervillains.

I like the frame a lot, being filled with big and small character moments, and jokes at the Penguin's expense, but "When is a Door," the teams encounter with the Riddler, ended up being a long metafictional rant about the death of fun in superhero comics. Well, Neil Gaiman, go write some fun superhero comics then. This is your world; as I was just reminded, Batman and the Riddler just live in it.

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

Comic hardcover, 126 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Original words by Neil Gaiman

Graphicplay and art by P. Craig Russell
Coloring by Lovern Kindzierski

Lettering by Todd Klein

I expected to love The Dream Hunters, P. Craig Russell's comic adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano's The Dream Hunters. After all, the original was excellent, and Russell's last adaptation of a Gaiman prose original, Murder Mysteries, had also been excellent. But The Dream Hunters somehow, despite typically strong artwork from Russell, never takes off. Perhaps it's that after Amano's amazing imagery, even P. Craig Russell pales in comparison? This isn't bad, but it's not sufficiently better or different than the original to justify its own existence, sadly. But maybe I went in with too-high expectations-- it's had to imagine what a work as good as The Dream Hunters original and Murder Mysteries combined would have been like.

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.