Sandman: Fables and Reflections

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Neil Gaiman's fiction is dark and disturbing, but it can never really be called misanthropic. Though precious few of his stories lack murderers, rapists, liars, thieves and cheats, all of them depict a core belief in goodness. This sets Gaiman's work above most other alternative comics, which tend to have a relentlessly bleak worldview. The sixth collection of Sandman comics, "Fables and Reflections", has a generally positive outlook on the virtues of humanity, even if its subject matter is downtrodden.



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Sandman: A Game of You

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Neil Gaiman created such a rich and expansive world with Sandman that he could have potentially continued the series indefinitely. Gaiman himself acknowledges this and has made it clear that his decision to end Sandman after a healthy 75 issues (plus a few extras) was a creative one. Just because the Sandman universe has the potential for literally as many stories as one can imagine doesn't mean it ought to go on forever. The variety and limitless bounds of Sandman serve a less mercenary purpose than just perpetuating the series. By having access to as many private worlds as there are characters, the comics can tell stories that don't star Dream himself. This stops the story from becoming a dull chain of foregone conclusions, seeing as Dream is depicted as being more powerful than even the gods of antiquity.



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Sandman: Seasons of Mist

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Neil Gaiman's stock and trade has always been representing famous myths in ways that make them interesting, relevant and, most importantly, unpredictable for modern readers. He doesn't always stray from stereotype, especially when there's nothing wrong with the original understanding of the myth. Rather, he picks and chooses those aspects of human legend that don't really serve the tone of his stories and turns them on their heads, or at the very least interprets them in an unusual way. "Seasons of Mist", the fourth trade paperback compilation of Sandman comics, goes into mythology overdrive, depicting some famous figures exactly as they've always been depicted and reinventing others radically. Gaiman wouldn't attempt a mythological deconstruction as vast and varied as this for another decade when he wrote American Gods.



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Harvey Pekar: 1939-2010

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Famed alternative comics icon and reluctant TV personality Harvey Pekar passed away today at the age of 70. His cause of death has yet to be determined, though at the time of his passing Pekar was being treated for prostate cancer. He is survived by his wife Joyce Brabner and their adopted daughter Danielle.



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Sandman: Dream Country

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Several times throughout the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman took some time off from the main plot (or the closest thing the series ever had to a main plot) to indulge in some stand-alone stories that have little or nothing to do with Dream himself. These stories more often than not highlight how deep and malleable the Sandman universe was from the very start. They're stories about human nature and the consequences of desire, fun vignettes that display Neil Gaiman at his most imaginative and reverential. "Dream Country" highlights four stories from early in the series that alternate between funny, sad and delightfully strange.



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Sandman: The Doll's House

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When fans and critics discuss comic book art, they're usually just talking about technical skill and character consistency. Is the character gripping his gun realistically? Are the super hero's muscle groups anatomically correct? Is a figure's height comparable in two different scenes? This is why comic art doesn't often get the same treatment as high art or even other forms of pop art. It's art with a function and it is so often viewed as subordinate to the story written around it in speech bubbles and box narration. Sandman is special in this way. The art in the series, while certainly still in a comic book style, is a lot more varied, expressionistic and overall impressive than you'll find in the average comic. The images tell the story just as much as Neil Gaiman's writing.



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Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes

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How does one write a story about a god? This has been the central question of a large part of Neil Gaiman's work. He writes stories about incredibly powerful things, whether they're deities, legendary heroes or the keepers of secrets so important that they could unravel the very fabric of existence. Making a compelling narrative about even a partially omnipotent character is almost impossible. It's no fun to read about a hero who can't die, permanently lose anything of value or fall prey to mortal frailty. Perhaps that's why Gaiman's approach is so thoroughly postmodern. His gods are powerful, but they're also at the mercy of the very beliefs that surround them. It's this core of pop culture deconstruction that makes DC Vertigo's Sandman series so interesting.



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Maus: Part Four

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By telling his story as both a direct account of the Holocaust and as a personal narrative of a Jewish family in 1980's New York, Art Spiegelman provided an example of how the experience of European Jews during World War II echoed through several generations. Few Jews of my own generation can claim great grandparents as most of them were too old to survive the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi rule. This erased not just a generation but an entire history from the lives of millions. Unable to trace their lineage back more than one or two generations, post-war Jews were forced to build new identities from what little they had left. For people like Art Spiegelman, what was left was a family reduced to just a handful of people, all of whom bore the scars of genocide. All of Spiegelman's neuroses, all of his sadness and desperation come with the weight of that unfathomable tragedy.



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Maus: Part Three

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In the first half of And Here My Troubles Began, the second trade paperback compilation of Art Spiegelman's Maus comic strip, Art depicts himself in the mid 1980's when the first half of his award-winning graphic novel was a remarkably successful property. He's drawn as a human wearing a mouse mask, surrounded by other Americans who wear the animal masks of their ethnic heritages. When beset upon by journalists and marketing executives who all want something extra out of the first Maus book, Art literally shrinks into a child in front of them. Maus is every bit Art Spiegelman's search for own his place in the post-Holocaust world as it is a document of his parents' experience during the war. He wonders aloud whether or not he can actually capture the truth of life and death in Auschwitz, whether or not Maus says anything profound, or even anything that hasn't been said already in the countless books documenting Europe under Nazi rule. The responsibility of finding something meaningful in Maus may be up to us readers, not Art Spiegelman. He just recorded his father's words and tried not to spare any details.



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Maus: Part Two

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A lot of Holocaust survivor stories come down to a few good snap decisions and a lot of luck. So many people escaped death at the hands of the Nazis because they just happened to avoid getting caught one night or because they made a friend before the war who was willing to help them when the Gestapo came to town. For Vladek Spiegelman, that was exactly the case. The second half of My Father Bleeds History, the first of two trade paperback compilations of Maus, consists of Vladek watching his family dwindle before his eyes as the antisemitic laws in Poland become more ruthless and the Nazi extermination plan becomes more bald-faced.



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