28.4.05

 

death and dreams

i've enjoyed a lot of the great sandman comix (written by neil gaiman, drawn by all sortsa people), and seemingly, i'm not alone in finding the main character's little sister, death, even funkier and more compelling than the sandman, morpheus himself.
they are two of a fairly dysfunctional but closeknit family of seven siblings; destiny, despair, desire, dream, death, delirium and destruction, avatars of unending natural forces.
so i was pleased to find "death - the high cost of living" in the library this week.
a great spinoff starring the stylish goth chick, along with a teenage boy who starts the story about to commit suicide, and mad hettie, a two hundred and fifty year old english vagrant woman who has appeared as incidental character in some of the sandman stories. it's the story of the one day in every century that death has to spend as one of us lowly mortals, in order to keep her compassionate towards us.
the genius of these books is all in the characterisation: the two facets of death are entwined so well that you can't help but believe in death both as a real 'person', and purely as the incarnation of what she represents.

Comments:
my bro was really obsessed with the Sandman stuff in college, but mostly Death. he had pics of her everywhere. she's pretty cool.
 
she's witty, she's cute, and she kills people. what more cld one want?
 
Through a strange twist of fate, I actually read Death: The High Cost of Living, and, erm, the other one ... Death: The Time of Your Life, yes, that's it, before I read any of the Sandman books. Both are written with sufficient clarity and encapsulation (?) that they were really entertaining and made sense with only the tiniest bit of info from one of my friends about how the Endless work.
 
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