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posies23's review
4.0
The SANDMAN saga bogs down a bit here in the middle 1/4 of the storyline. That's not to say there's not good material here, because there is, but the overall narrative slows to a crawl and there are a lot of interesting stories that just don't move anything forward. Still, Gaiman is a compelling writer, and it's heads and shoulders better than 90% of the comics being published at the time. It probably read better with a month between each issue.
mjfmjfmjf's review
4.0
Brilliant. Exhausting. Tedious. Long. As before there is not as much to the annotations as I would like, but still interesting to catch just a little more. Much of this I remembered from previous reads. But really much I had forgotten. Lots of death, a bit of horror. I don't think Sandman really is meant to be read in one go. But I don't think an issue at a time truly works either.
kjboldon's review
2.0
Sandman is great but I'm not at all impressed with these Annotated editions. There's not nearly enough annotation.
rouver's review
4.0
Seeing Neil Gaiman's annotations, thoughts, & notes accompanying the stories from Sandman was pretty interesting. If you haven't read the comics, I would not recommend these volumes, as the annotations give spoilers. Disappointingly, these are also black & white....you'll want to read the comics in color. I can appreciate that printing these tomes would have rendered them exorbitantly expensive.
books_n_pickles's review
informative
slow-paced
2.0
Probably not much more to say on this one than there were on the previous two.
Fortunately, this time I did not catch any errors where annotations were pointing to the wrong panel or even the wrong page. Unfortunately, there were more things than ever that went unglossed, mostly people who probably seem too famous to mention, but then you get to the note explaining what Star Trek is and that excuse doesn't seem to hold water. Things that should have had notes (or, at least, the ones I bothered to jot down): Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, "Like a Virgin" and other songs, the Savoy Hotel, the Hall of the Presidents at Disney World.
There were also a few things in the art that I recognized from the real world and which seemed like they ought to be explained. The two I noted were a many-breasted sculpture behind the priest at Orpheus's wedding in ancient Greece (I've definitely seen something like this before at a museum) and one of the halls in Haroun Al-Rashid's palace that is clearly drawn from the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. I will at least acknowledge that Klinger is annotating the <i>story</i> and not the artwork, but it did surprise me. Klinger mentions having referred to online, fan-created annotations and encyclopedias, so I'm surprised that none of them pointed these out.
Anyway, some of the notes that most interested me:
Issue 44, page 1820, panel 5: Death and Destruction (accompanied by the Corinthian) are walking the waking world in Restoration England, visiting the Invisible College (which is a much cooler name than the Royal Society that came later) and Destruction is starting to show signs of dismay at the inevitability of scientific progress leading to destruction. He quotes (as Klinger tells us) Isaac Newton's <i>Opticks</i>--"Are not light and gross bodies incontrovertible?"--which Klinger tells us that some of have suggested that if Newton could have found his way to E=mc squared in the late 1600s. And isn't that a fascinating, terrifying thought?
Issue 46, page 13: Klinger gives us one of Gaiman's personal notes from the script, in which he describes how he's been squeezing creativity around his daughter's illness. "There are people who assume that <i>Sandman</i> is written in marble observatories at midnight, and others who figure I jot it all down in ballpoint in smoky beatnik coffee houses, and yet more who probably figure it's dictated by me lying in a gutter somewhere; The floor of a terribly pink bedroom seems like the last place you'd expect it."
Issue 46, page 14: Okay, I really think Klinger stretched things way too far with this note. Dream asks Bast, Egyptian cat goddess, what she knows about Destruction's whereabouts. She tells him, "I <i>last</i> heard of your brother sixty years ago, in Paris. His companion <i>savaged</i> one of my people." Now, we already know from reading this book set in 1992* that Destruction's current companion is a dog. [*Thank you, Klinger, for being my kind of nerd and creating a timeline in the back of volume 4.] My assumption has always been that Barnabas chased a cat, and that the "savaging" Bast describes is the fur displaced from its perfect position by the effort required to escape. Maybe it's just me, but the cats I have known would certainly describe fleeing from even a friendly dog in the most horrified tones. Makes perfect sense in my mind. Klinger's explanation, however, is that Bast has misremembered the event by some 200 years, instead pointing to the "great cat massacre" that took place in the 1730s, when Parisian apprentices killed "sackloads of cats". I'm just not buying that kind of mistake at all. Why would she say only <i>one</i> of her people was hurt during a thing like that? Why would Destruction, who had that point would have recently abandoned his duties, be sticking around scenes of great destruction where he might be found? Nope, I'm not buying it. But at least Klinger taught me something new!
Among the books spotted in Dream's library is a sequel to a real one that sounds interesting: Hope Mirrlees's <i>Lud-in-the-Mist</i>, about a city on the edge of Faerie. I'll be looking that one up!
Issue 48, page 22: Here's another case where it's obvious that Klinger is focusing on the story rather than the art. Destruction is assembling a typical sack-on-a-stick, a bindle (a word I will probably only ever remember in context). I never gave this construction much thought; I mean, he'd just turned a cloth from all black to red with white spots. Klinger's note, quoting the script, tells us that Gaiman did not feel the same: "I don't know where he got the stick from. I don't care where he got the stick from. I promise that even if I get to be 100 I will never go back and pick up on the stick as a tiny bit of discontinuity that needs to be explained." But the really funny thing? If you're paying attention to the pictures as well as the story, or if you've read this book too many times, you might notice that one of the empty picture frames in Destruction's gallery is made of sticks, and that one of the four sticks that complete the frame is, once Destruction has assembled his bindle, missing one of its sides. The artist obviously felt the author's distress and solved the problem. It's so charming I just wish Klinger had noticed it and pointed it out!
Fortunately, this time I did not catch any errors where annotations were pointing to the wrong panel or even the wrong page. Unfortunately, there were more things than ever that went unglossed, mostly people who probably seem too famous to mention, but then you get to the note explaining what Star Trek is and that excuse doesn't seem to hold water. Things that should have had notes (or, at least, the ones I bothered to jot down): Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, "Like a Virgin" and other songs, the Savoy Hotel, the Hall of the Presidents at Disney World.
There were also a few things in the art that I recognized from the real world and which seemed like they ought to be explained. The two I noted were a many-breasted sculpture behind the priest at Orpheus's wedding in ancient Greece (I've definitely seen something like this before at a museum) and one of the halls in Haroun Al-Rashid's palace that is clearly drawn from the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba. I will at least acknowledge that Klinger is annotating the <i>story</i> and not the artwork, but it did surprise me. Klinger mentions having referred to online, fan-created annotations and encyclopedias, so I'm surprised that none of them pointed these out.
Anyway, some of the notes that most interested me:
Issue 44, page 1820, panel 5: Death and Destruction (accompanied by the Corinthian) are walking the waking world in Restoration England, visiting the Invisible College (which is a much cooler name than the Royal Society that came later) and Destruction is starting to show signs of dismay at the inevitability of scientific progress leading to destruction. He quotes (as Klinger tells us) Isaac Newton's <i>Opticks</i>--"Are not light and gross bodies incontrovertible?"--which Klinger tells us that some of have suggested that if Newton could have found his way to E=mc squared in the late 1600s. And isn't that a fascinating, terrifying thought?
Issue 46, page 13: Klinger gives us one of Gaiman's personal notes from the script, in which he describes how he's been squeezing creativity around his daughter's illness. "There are people who assume that <i>Sandman</i> is written in marble observatories at midnight, and others who figure I jot it all down in ballpoint in smoky beatnik coffee houses, and yet more who probably figure it's dictated by me lying in a gutter somewhere; The floor of a terribly pink bedroom seems like the last place you'd expect it."
Issue 46, page 14: Okay, I really think Klinger stretched things way too far with this note. Dream asks Bast, Egyptian cat goddess, what she knows about Destruction's whereabouts. She tells him, "I <i>last</i> heard of your brother sixty years ago, in Paris. His companion <i>savaged</i> one of my people." Now, we already know from reading this book set in 1992* that Destruction's current companion is a dog. [*Thank you, Klinger, for being my kind of nerd and creating a timeline in the back of volume 4.] My assumption has always been that Barnabas chased a cat, and that the "savaging" Bast describes is the fur displaced from its perfect position by the effort required to escape. Maybe it's just me, but the cats I have known would certainly describe fleeing from even a friendly dog in the most horrified tones. Makes perfect sense in my mind. Klinger's explanation, however, is that Bast has misremembered the event by some 200 years, instead pointing to the "great cat massacre" that took place in the 1730s, when Parisian apprentices killed "sackloads of cats". I'm just not buying that kind of mistake at all. Why would she say only <i>one</i> of her people was hurt during a thing like that? Why would Destruction, who had that point would have recently abandoned his duties, be sticking around scenes of great destruction where he might be found? Nope, I'm not buying it. But at least Klinger taught me something new!
Among the books spotted in Dream's library is a sequel to a real one that sounds interesting: Hope Mirrlees's <i>Lud-in-the-Mist</i>, about a city on the edge of Faerie. I'll be looking that one up!
Issue 48, page 22: Here's another case where it's obvious that Klinger is focusing on the story rather than the art. Destruction is assembling a typical sack-on-a-stick, a bindle (a word I will probably only ever remember in context). I never gave this construction much thought; I mean, he'd just turned a cloth from all black to red with white spots. Klinger's note, quoting the script, tells us that Gaiman did not feel the same: "I don't know where he got the stick from. I don't care where he got the stick from. I promise that even if I get to be 100 I will never go back and pick up on the stick as a tiny bit of discontinuity that needs to be explained." But the really funny thing? If you're paying attention to the pictures as well as the story, or if you've read this book too many times, you might notice that one of the empty picture frames in Destruction's gallery is made of sticks, and that one of the four sticks that complete the frame is, once Destruction has assembled his bindle, missing one of its sides. The artist obviously felt the author's distress and solved the problem. It's so charming I just wish Klinger had noticed it and pointed it out!
sookieskipper's review
More than half the pages lack annotations. The entire purpose of this volume is annotation. Why would anyone invest in this otherwise??
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