Wow, there’s a bunch there I’d not even heard of. I rather liked Lucifer at the start, but rather lost the thread after a while. Ditto The Dreaming.
Never heard of The Thessaliad, Bast, Petrifax, ‘Everything you always wanted to know…’, The Furies or the Corinthian series (all of which look interesting), and had forgotten about the Destiny mini and The Children’s Crusade - I’ll have to keep an eye out.
Merv Pumpkinhead: Agent of Dream is a riot. You’ll have met Merv, IIRC. Now, imagine him as a secret agent. Now, pick up the shattered shards of your sanity, and get the book.
Eventually I’ll get ahold of the Sandman series. Can’t pay for them now, though, and my county’s library system only has Death, the high cost of living. (In the notes it says “The image of Tori Amos is used to portray the character Death.” One of the more unintentionally funny statements I’ve seen lately.) I really liked American Gods, in fact I own it. Not really into author correspondence, but it’s nice that he’s so cool to his fans. I’m rambling now, so I guess I oughta stop.
Not to be pedantic (well, OK… I am), but Endless Nights is really more of a spinoff, isn’t it? My understanding is that it’s about the Endless as a whole, not so much centering around Dream as the Sandman series proper did.
And even if we did consider Endless Nights part of the Sandman series, wouldn’t it be volume 12, since we’d have to include The Dream Hunters (which does focus on Dream) in there somewhere?
OK, now I’ll really stop being nitpicky. Glad you got to meet Neil, Abby, he always seems to treat his fans well!
I’ll definitely be picking up Endless Nights either way… besides the fact that Gaiman wrote all the stories, they got some top-notch illustrators for it. Glenn Fabry, Milo Manara, P. Craig Russell, and Bill Sienkiewicz. I’ll be looking forward to see what they do with it.
And jeanster, let me also extend my thanks for that link to Sandman spinoffs – I’d read most of them but I didn’t even know about the Merv one-shot or the Corinthian series, so I’ll definitely have to go a-hunting for those. Two of my favorite characters from the series; I even dressed up as the Corinthian one memorable Hallowe’en. Scared little kids everywhere, though my own kids thought it was cool.
Interesting that the guy who put together that list was put off by Kiernan’s writing style in The Dreaming – I mostly felt the same way. The series had potential, but something about her writing, particularly dialogue, just seemed overdone.
I just finished reading Volume 7: Brief Lives. It’s difficult for me to say which volume of the series is my favorite.
I was surprised and delighted to see Morpheus and Delirium having such huge roles in this book, unlike the others so far.
Merv cracked me up. I must get the spinoff that features him in it. And I learned while reading this book that Lucien the Librarian is a head taller than Morpheus. See page 17 of chapter 6 of Brief Lives. I thought Morpheus was thin and tall, but Lucien towers over him. I never noticed it before if that was shown in the previous volumes. Oh, it was a nice change to see Delirium collected for once, even if it was only for a few moments. See chapter 7, pages 10 through 12 of Brief Lives for that rarity.
Many traditional manga (Japanese comics) are in black and white, so the lack of color and the small size of the volume itself were more homages to the style.
What Lou said. Now, if it were a real Japanese manga tankubon (collection), there’d be a few colour pages (most likely at the beginning), but that would have likely seemed weird to most of the readers, since a) a sizable proportion of the readers don’t read manga, and b) American translations rarely, if ever, reproduce the colour pages in colour, so even most readers who do read manga wouldn’t expect that.
Thank you. I did not know that. Now that I think of it, a few months ago when I was browsing in the Borders book store, I flipped through pages of an AstroBoy book. All black and white pages, if I remember correctly.
I received my copy of Little Endless Storybook. I love it! Tengu, you must order a copy from Lone Star Comics! It seems to be the only place that has it available currently.
And I give a thumbs up for The Sandman: The Dream Hunters.
I’m still trying to find a place that sells Merv Pumpkinhead: Agent of Dream.
I’m a rather new member reading through some of the older friends. Me and another Doper, KingLupid, got to meet Mr. Gaiman and a Dallas Comic convention back in the early 90s. For some reason where ever we went he was there, walking past him in the hall, getting on the same elevator, etc. Anyway, I was able to get a few of my Sandman books signed (at this point the latest book was A Game of You) and I think he must have remembered me. Instead of just signing the book he drew a picture of Dream. I was stunned and he looked up at me and said “So, what do you think of that?” I just gave him a dumbfounded look and mumbled something to the effect of how cool it was. He has signed about 6 different things for me and all have had different inscriptions so far. Finally, a question and answer session was being held for all of DC comics and they were giving away prizes for the best questions. I asked about the future of Sandman if Gaiman were to ever leave (they actually kept their word, they said the would not replace him on the title, though they did spin it off of course) and I was given a rare copy of the issue 8, the first appearance of Death. This issue was rare due to a special introduction and drawing it contains, I think only 1200 copies or so were ever printed. Neil signed this for me and asked how I got it, I told him and he was very interested in what DC said in response. This was well before it was announced that the series would end with issue 75.
