SYNOPSES, COMMENTS, AND LINKS
DEATH
SYNOPSES, COMMENTS, AND LINKS
DEATH
DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
(Originally printed as a 3 part mini-series)
"...one day in every century Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality: that this is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after." -SANDMAN #21
Sixteen year-old Sexton Furnival is less than impressed with life. There doesn't to be any point to it. First of all, he's not in love with anyone. Second, he doesn't hate anyone. And he doesn't even have a faithful sidekick. But all this is before he meets up with Death, who is spending her one day of the century on Earth as a normal human being. Spending time with Death teaches Sexton a few things about life. But others have been watching and waiting for that one day in every hundred years when Death wears mortal guise, including an English woman named Mad Hettie, who isn't a witch but has learned a few tricks during his 250-some years. Will Death make it to the end of her one mortal day? Features appearances by Hazel and Foxglove, who first appear in the Sandman series A Game Of You and are the main characters in the DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE series.
According to what I have read, DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING was the best selling DC comics release with a 'For Mature Readers Only' label ever. The first issue of the mini-series alone sold over 300,000 copies.
"On bad days I talk to Death constantly... She says things no one else seems to come up with, like let's have a hot dog and then it's like nothing's impossible. She told me once there is a part of her in everyone, though Neil believes I'm more Delirium than Tori, and Death taught me to accept that, you know, wear your butterflies with pride. And when I do accept that, I know Death is somewhere inside of me. She was the kind of girl all the girls wanted to be, I believe, because of her acceptance of 'what is'. She keeps reminding me there is change in the 'what is' but change cannot be made till you accept the 'what is'."
-Tori Amos, from her introduction to DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE
(Originally printed as a 3 part mini-series)
Death doesn't normally make deals. Once your time is up, your life is over. However, for Hazel and her baby Alfie she makes an exception. But there is a price, and Death has come to collect. Foxglove leads an ad-hoc rescue team to find out what has happened to Hazel and Alfie, and ends up taking them beyond what we know as reality. Will Foxglove and the others find them in time?
NEVERWHERE
From the Neverwhere book jacket:
"Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a gril bleeding on the sidewalk He stops to help her-and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.
"Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been reased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his landlord rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness-to a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.
"For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family's slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevalnce that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined-and possibly fatal-quest.
"For the dread journey ever-downward-through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time-is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a "real" world that is growing distrubingly less real by the minute.
"If Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera, if Jack Finney let his dark side take over, if you rolled the best work of Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Caleb Carr into one, you still would have something that fell far short of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. It is a masterful debut novel of darkly hypnotic power, and one of the most absorbing reads to come along in years."
Comments on Neverwhere
"I didn't ever want this book to end...Hunter, Islington, Door-these characters are part of my life now. I want to see them when I turn corners."
-Tori Amos
"A delirious, dream-like trip, a work of imaginative virtuosity-an eye-popping Alice In Wonderland for the new millenium."
-Mark Frost
"Gaiman's characters could have been conjured out of a Dickens fever dream-I can't wait for the next one."
-Christopher Moore
There is a good Neverwhere page by Avon Books that is worth checking out for more information.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
This book is a collection of short stories by Gaiman. Includes most if not all of the stories from another collection of Gaiman's stories, Angels and Visitations (which may be out of print), as well as some other stories. Among the stories found within are:
THE DREAMING
THE DREAMING is a DC Comics/VERTIGO line spin-off of THE SANDMAN series. It is not written by Neil Gaiman and it is not about Dream of The Endless. Rather, it focuses on some of the other characters introduced in the course of THE SANDMAN such as Cain and Abel (the ones from the Bible), and Lucien (who is the keeper of a library of books that were dreamed of but never written, and also acts as a sort of major domo for Dream) and Neil Gaiman does serve as some sort of consultant for the title. My personal favorite storyline featured in THE DREAMING to date has been "The Dark Rose" (THE DREAMING issues #20 and #21), written and drawn by Al Davison. It's about a young woman named Mathilda Thorne, a Victorian-era writer of children's stories who finds herself strangely attracted to the bizarre, depraved artwork of a man known only as The Roisin Dubh, a man whom she has never met. Stranger still, Morpheus' servant The Corinthian, a nightmare in human form, takes a special interest in Mathilda. I highly recommend this story for SANDMAN fans.
NEIL GAIMAN/SANDMAN RESOURCES ON THE WEB
THE
DREAMING A very good Neil Gamain info site, with information
on the under-development Sandman movie (including a link
to a rejected script for the
movie) as well as news on other Gaiman-related projects, some Sandman fan
fiction, interviews with Neil, and links to a number of Sandman image galleries.
THE WAKE Has annotations to some Sandman comics, including a set of annotations for DEATH: THE HIGH COST OF LIVING #1, a timeline of the release of Sandman products, a list of the artists who contributed to the Sandman series, Sandman fan fiction, and an extensive list of Sandman-related links.
THE NEIL GAIMAN COLLECTION Features a Neil Gaiman biography and bibliography, a collection of Gaiman links, and something I haven't seen on other Gaiman-related sites: reviews of Gaiman works submitted by fans.
HEART OF THE DREAMING A very interesting site with Neil Gaiman-related news and information, some stories submitted by visitors to the site, and some resources for aspiring writers, including information on various folk tales, fairy tales, and mythology, and some links to other resources for writers. Also features a very cool site design!
THE GATES OF IVORY A Sandman images gallery
CINESCAPE ONLINE Site with news on forthcoming movies, including a blurb on the Sandman and Death: The High Cost of Living movies.
DC Comics The DC Comics official website. Here you can find information about DC and Vertigo products and forthcoming releases, including THE DREAMING.
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