The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes - Neil Gaiman

   2018; 236 pages.  Volume 1 (out of 11) in the “Sandman – 30^th Anniversary Edition” series.  Full Title: Sandman Volume One: Preludes & Nocturnes.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Graphic Novel; Horror; Dark Fantasy.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite contemporary authors.  I first became acquainted with his work 16 years ago via his collaboration with Terry Pratchett in the fascinating novel, Good Omens.  Within a year-plus I’d also read his solo efforts, American Gods and Anansi Boys, both of which I consider to be masterpieces.

 

    I’ve read most of his solo novels since then, with only The Graveyard Book still on my TBR shelf.  But over the last 10 years he seems to have slowed down in his writing of full-length novels.

 

    Then I heard about his series called The Sandman.  “Aha!”, thought I, “Neil Gaiman has turned to putting out graphic novels!  Awesome!”

 

    Actually, the first volumes of his Sandman comics came out slightly before his first novels.

 

What’s To Like...

    According to Wikipedia, there were 75 issues in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book series.  Preludes and Nocturnes is a 2018 re-release of the first eight comic book issues, comprised of

    1.) Sleep of the Just  (loc. 11)

    2.) Imperfect Hosts  (loc. 53)

    3.) Dream a Little Dream of Me  (loc. 77)

    4.) A Hope in Hell  (loc. 103)

    5.) Passengers  (loc. 128)

    6.) 24 Hours  (loc. 154)

    7.) Sound and Fury  (loc. 180)

    8.) The Sound of Her Wings  (loc. 205)

 

    Our protagonist goes by several names in the series, including Morpheus, the King of Dreams, Dream, and the titular Sandman.  At one point he is caught and imprisoned by a mortal who mistakenly thinks he’s captured the King of Death, which confused the daylights out of me.  The character "Death" does finally show up in the final book, and is an equally interesting character.

 

    Each of the eight books has its own storyline.  Needless to say, our hero escapes his prison early on, but is in a weakened condition and without several of his important artifacts: a pouch, a helm, and a ruby.  The overall storyline chronicles Dream’s efforts to retrieve those items.  Along the way, Neil Gaiman weaves in mythological references (such as the Hecateae), Reality “Slam Contests”, and a couple cameo appearances by other comic book stars.

 

    I read the e-book version of Preludes & Nocturnes, which is usually a clunky way to read a graphic novel.  But Kindle starts you out with a couple of tips for navigating the images on each page, and once I got the hang of things, I was amazed how smoothly things went.  Scrolling is ultra-slick, and the artwork, lettering, and storytelling are all incredible.

 

    Since this is a compilation of eight comic books, there is no discrete “ending”.  Book 8 does stop at a logical point in the saga, with a lot of the plot threads being explained and cleared up, and the stage being set for the next 67 installments in the series.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.8*/5, based on 5,823 ratings and 368 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.24*/5, based on 254,869 ratings and 8,898 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “Do you know what dreams are made of, Rosemary Kelly?”

    “Made of?  They’re just dreams.”

    “No.  They aren’t.  People think dreams aren’t real because they aren’t made of matter, of particles.  Dreams are real.  But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.

    “The ruby seems to turn them into matter.  It forces them to translate themselves into forms we can recognize in this world.

    “It also controls dreams in their raw state.  Your dreams.  Anybody’s dreams.”  (loc. 144)

 

    “You could have called me, you know.”

    “I didn’t want to worry you.”

    “I don’t believe it.  Let me tell you something, Dream.  And I’m only going to say this once, so you’d better pay attention.

    “You are utterly the stupidest, most self-centered excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane!  An infantile, pathetic specimen!  Feeling all sorry for yourself because your little game is over, and you haven’t got the—the balls to go and find a new one!”  (loc. 214)

 

“Mother? They took my dreams away from me!”  (loc. 62)

    There’s nothing major to gripe about in Preludes & Nocturnes.  There is some cussing (10 instances in the first 25%), and a smidgen of sex and nudity, albeit those are done in a non-pornographic way.

 

    The Table of Contents either doesn’t work or is non-existent.  You can’t highlight text, but that’s because the whole e-book is scanned images of the pages from the comic books, and that's a small price to pay for the marvelous artwork and lettering.  And like any e-book consisting solely of images, this was a memory-hog on my Kindle.  Amazon lists it as eating up 811,037 KB of space.

 

    My biggest beef concerns the plethora of reissues of this series.  These include trade paperbacks, deluxe editions, 30^th Anniversary editions, Absolute Editions, annotated editions, and an Omnibus edition, all of which divide up those 75 issues in different proportions.  So even though my “Kindle 30^th Volume 1” was Issues 1-8, my “Full-Sized Paperback Volumes 2 and 3” are Issues 21-37 and Issues 38-56.   Do I hunt down something containing Issues 9-20 for the sake of completeness, or just shine it on and skip to the volumes/issues I already have? 

 

    These are all quibbles.  I’m not a big reader of Graphic Novels, yet Preludes & Nocturnes was a real treat for me, both from a storyline and an artistic angle.  Somehow, someway, Neil Gaiman is capable of adding a “Wow Factor” to any project he undertakes.

 

    9½ Stars.

The Complete Maus - Art Spiegelman

   1997; 296 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Graphic Novel; Biography; Holocaust History; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1992 Pulitzer Prize: “Special Award in Letters” (winner), 10 other awards won plus 2 other award nominations (listed at Wikipedia).  Overall Rating: 10*/10.

 

    What was it like to live under the iron fist of Nazi Germany before and during World War 2, aka “The Holocaust”?

 

    Unfortunately, six million Jews, plus millions of Poles, Russians, gypsies, and Communists are unable to give an answer, since they perished in the concentration camps and ghettos, being beaten, shot, starved, and gassed to death.  To find out what it was like, it’s necessary to find those few who beat the odds and somehow survived.

 

    Art Spiegelman is an Jewish-American cartoonist, artist, and editor.  He had an “in” when it comes to researching the Holocaust: his father, Vladek Spiegelman, was a survivor, not only of the pre-war Jewish ghettos in Poland, but also the death camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and several more.

 

    In 1978, Art began interviewing his dad, with the result being Maus, both the history of the Holocaust and Vladek’s biography, rendered in graphic novel format, and serialized from 1980 to 1991.

 

    Oh, and banned by a Tennessee school district earlier this year because it contains “profanity, violence, and nudity”.  Of course that caused it to become an instant bestseller, in such high demand that it took Amazon three months to be able to ship me a copy.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are two main storylines in The Complete Maus.  The first, biographical, is the recounting of Vladek’s hellish Holocaust years, where the tasks of staying alive and keeping one’s family alive, were almost impossible to achieve.  The second, autobiographical involves the present-day strained father/son relationship between Vladek and Art, as the latter tries to coax out his dad’s painful WW2 memories while trying to live up to papa’s expectations, an almost impossible combination to achieve.

 

    The Complete Maus combines two volumes published earlier by Art Spiegelman: Maus I – My Father Bleeds History, and Maus II – And Here My Troubles Began.  It’s done in graphic novel format, which is very unusual for a work of non-fiction.  Timeline-wise, Art’s arrival at the Auschwitz death camp is the dividing line between Maus I (1986) and Maus II (1992).

 

    The artwork is in black-and-white, with little shading, and in a “minimalist” style: eyes, for instance, are nothing more than dots.  The characters are rendered as heads of animals atop humanoid bodies.  The choice of animal identifies its type: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, French are frogs, Swedes are reindeer, Roms are gypsy moths, and Red Cross workers are birds.  The book cover shows Hitler as a cat, but I don’t recall his image appearing in the text itself.

 

    I got a nice “feel” for Jewish home life, and learned some interesting Yiddish vocabulary that was sprinkled throughout.  A couple examples are given below, plus there’s the ever-so-popular “Oy gevalt!”

 

    I was impressed by the story’s evenhanded approach to characters.  Vladek may be the protagonist, but a strain of racism runs through him.  He is not so much heroic as pragmatic, he’ll do whatever needs to be done to stay alive, including bribery, black-marketing, and occasionally cozying up to Germans.  Art renders himself with equal objectivity – the tenseness in the father/son relationship is just as much his fault as Vladek's.

 

    The main reason for reading The Complete Maus, obviously, is to experience the Holocaust.  In this respect, the book succeeds superbly.  The reader experiences the hopelessness and helplessness that millions of Jews felt when they were trapped in Nazi-held lands.  Vladek and other Jews don’t just instantly go from living normal lives to dreading a trip to the gas chamber.  It was a gradual process, carried out one outrage at a time by the Nazis.

 

    The ending is an oxymoron: a happy tearjerker.  To say more would entail giving spoilers.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.8/5 based on 8,029 ratings and 1,489 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.55/5 based on 177,310 ratings and 10,687 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Nu (n., Yiddish) : an interjection that can mean a number of things, including “Well/”, “So?”, “Come on.”, and “Go on.”

Others: Gefilte Fish (n., culinary); Meshugah (adj., Yiddish).

 

Excerpts...

    One time a day they gave a soup from turnips.  To stand near the first of the line was no good.  You got only water.  Near the end was better – solid things to the bottom floated.

    But too far to the end it was also no good.  Because many times it could be no soup anymore.

    And one time each day they gave to us a small bread, crunchy like glass.  The flour mixed with sawdust together – we got one little brick of this what had to last the full day.

    And in the evening we got a spoiled cheese or jam.  If we were lucky a couple times a week we got a sausage big like two of my fingers.  Only this much we got.

    If you ate how they gave you, it was just enough to die more slowly.  (pg. 209)

 

    In the morning they chased us to march again out, who knows where.  It was such a train for horses, for cows.  They pushed until it was no room left.  We lay one on top of the other, like matches, like herrings.

    I pushed to a corner not to get crushed.  High up I saw a few hooks to chain up maybe the animals.

    I still had the thin blanket they gave me.  I climbed to somebody’s shoulder and hooked it strong.  In this way I can rest and breathe a little.

    This saved me.  Maybe 25 people came out from this car of 200.  (pg. 245)

 

“It was nothing to eat, and nothing to do, only to wait and to die.”  (pg. 253)

    The Complete Maus was a fantastic read for me, so coming up with quibbles is difficult.  The art style is admittedly “spartan”, but I think that adds to the only stark tone of the message.  There was nothing pretty about living through the Holocaust, and if you were shipped off to Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, or Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Vladek spent time in all these death camps), it was pretty much assured that you were going to die in the near future.

 

    Some critics disliked the using of animals to denote ethnic identity.  I suppose if I were a Pole, I wouldn’t appreciate them being typecast as pigs.  Ditto for the French being rendered as frogs.  But I don’t think Art Spiegelman was intending racial slurs by this.  In his minimalist style, he’s making it easy for the reader to figure out what nationality any given character is.

 

    I'll give The Complete Maus a rare 10-star rating.  Its portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust is bone-chilling.  Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the only graphic novel ever to do so.  This should be required reading in every high school or college class teaching  20^th Century History.

 

    10 Stars.  One final exercise: let's evaluate the McMinn Country Schools decision to remove The Complete Maus from its shelves.

    Profanity.  I counted 16 instances in the entire book, mostly scatological or eschatological terms.  That’s remarkably clean.

    Violence.  There are corpses.  There was a war going on.  At one point, prisoners are burned alive.  The Holocaust was by nature inhumanely violent.  To depict it otherwise would be a lie.

    Nudity.  I only recall two times (pgs. 185/86 and 218).  Both involve only adult male prisoners, and both were drawn in the author’s minimalist style.  If these offend you, or worse yet, arouse you, seek professional help.

Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm - Phil and Kaja Foglio

   2010; 144 pages.  New Author? : No.  Book 9 in the “Girl Genius” series.  Full Title : Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm – A Gaslamp Fantasy with Adventure, Romance & Mad Science.  Genre : Graphic Novel; Gaslamp Fantasy.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    We’re going to eschew most of the format we usually use in these reviews, since this is essentially a reread of one of the Agatha H novelizations that I finished a short time ago.  That review is here, and Agatha H. & the Heirs of the Storm constitutes the last third of that book.

    I’ve been wanting to compare the Graphic Novel format to the Novelization format for some time now, and felt that this was a good opportunity to do so, since the storyline was fresh in my mind.  I also just recently figured out where my local library has been stashing these graphic novels; there is a small “Teen Library” section tucked away on the fourth floor of the main branch that I was hitherto unaware of.

What’s To Like...

    The artwork is stunning.  The book’s credits list Phil & Kaja Foglio as creating the story, Phil for the “penciling”, and Cheyenne Wright for the colors.  It is all a visual treat.

    There is a handy, 1-page “The Story So Far” section at the very beginning.  The novelizations cover the entire Graphic Novel series, three per volume, and I’ve read them all, so  it’s hard for me to judge how helpful this brief backstory is.  It felt very “bare bones”, but perhaps it’s like picking up a comic book; say, Wolverine Issue #88.  You don’t really care much about all that went before.

    There are no page numbers.  Amazon says Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm has 144 pages, and that feels accurate.  The storyline in the two formats seemed to jive closely, so I don’t think you’re missing much by choosing one or the other.  There’s a way-kewl “Jagermonster Comics” section at the end.

    There’s nothing R-rated at all in the graphic novel.   I had heard rumors to the contrary.  The worst that can be said in this regard is that all the girls are “buxom”, but that’s standard fare in any comic book series.

Paperback Details...

    Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm sells for $21.48 at Amazon.  There appear to be 13 volumes in the Girl Genius Graphic Novels series, and they all in the $15-$25 price range.  This feels steep to me, but I know very little about pricing graphic novels.  The only other graphic novel I’ve read is Watchmen, which sells for $11.99.

The verdict…

    I had a bit of trouble determining who’s who in the graphic novel, which inherently does not occur in the novelization.  OTOH, you have no trouble envisioning the people, the environs, etc. in the graphic novel; there is much more inherently left to the imagination in the novelization.

    So it’s a toss-up.  You basically can’t lose no matter which format – or both – you select to follow this series with.  Reading the graphic novel was a delight, but I will probably continue to wait for the novelizations to come out.  This is mostly due to my reading habits; even as a kid, I preferred books to comics.

    8½ Stars.  Listen, Girl Genius is still a fantastic series, and I highly recommend it no matter what format you read it in.