Fiction Book Reviews

I’ve mentioned before that I like Neil Gaiman, which is true. I still haven’t really read Sandman, though, the series of graphic novels for which he really first became famous. The biggest problem there is that there are so many volumes collected so many different ways, and my library site…is really messed up and confusing about what’s what. The only volume I’ve read so far turned out to be number 6 of 10 collected volumes, and it’s basically a series of one-shots that insert members of the Endless into real-world history. I’d really thought it was the first volume when I checked it out.

So that’s my disclaimer: these are, essentially, my first impressions on Sandman from having read one volume out of order. Go me.

Anyway, while I did quite like it–I adore Death, Dream is kind of fascinating, and the way it weaves itself into the stories of all these historical figures is really pretty awesome–it’s reconfirming for me the fact that I just don’t like American-style comics, or possibly comics in general, and why. I do seem to remember the Firefly comics (Those Left Behind and Better Days) being drawn in a style I liked and that actually looked like the actors in question, while I don’t particularly care for the style in the Buffy Season 8 comics (I’ve only looked at a couple of each–I don’t want to buy them because they’ll take me about 20 minutes to read, but Barnes & Noble doesn’t have all of them, either), but Sandman’s just reminding me–well, it’s not like I even have that much experience with comics, but something in every style used in Sandman (and there are several different ones, but all at one level or another of photorealism) is very familiar, maybe because of my dad’s old comics (all of which are adaptations of classic novels. What, you thought I was the first geek in my family?), and it’s not a good kind of familiar. Maybe it’s the uncanny valley effect–it’s comic photorealism in the wrong way and that’s why I find most of the characters off-putting (but less so people like Dream, who aren’t entirely realistic to begin with).

And the thing is, I’m not an anti-comics person by any means. I loved Maus; thought the unconventional style served to shock readers out of seeing the Holocaust as familiar and almost boring. Hated 30 Days of Night, of course (I spent five years in Barrow. The author’s never visited and appears to have neglected even five minutes of Google/Wikipedia research. What did you expect?), but I thought some of the art was nice–they did, for instance, manage to depict blowing snow in a quasi-blizzard very well. I don’t browse manga on my own to try finding new ones, but I read everything my friends loan me, and I’ve fallen pretty intensely in love with certain series (Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Black Cat, Dazzle, D.Gray-Man, Tactics, Fruits Basket–there’s some real awesome in there, let me tell you). I’m also pretty quick to defend anime and manga as styles of art rather than genres, really, and sometimes I do the same for comics in general.

So why is Sandman making me go “well, this is cool, but I’d like it about ten times more if it were a normal book or a manga”?

I’m not really sure. Maybe it’s the vast difference between the gorgeous cover art and the interiors. But I do know a couple things: first, that American-style comics in general, for some reason, have a much greater tendency to make things grotesque–even when they’re not trying to. Sure, there are plenty of things in Sandman that are supposed to be grotesque, but they do that in a way that seems more…I don’t know, just plain gross rather than anything else. And because of the style, a number of images that aren’t supposed to be unsettling, strike me that way anyway. If they don’t, half the time they just look silly. (Dream seems to be about the only character who’s immune to this–even Death looks weird sometimes.)

And second…as I said, I’m not an anti-comics person, I can see their value as a medium, and I like some of them (manga are graphic novels, after all), but Sandman kind of makes me wonder just why it wasn’t written as a novel instead. Really, why this medium? A good graphic novel shouldn’t make me ask that question. I don’t think I’ve ever read a manga that has. And I think it’s because in the American style, or at least the sort that Sandman is, you get a lot of virtually identical images while a character talks and talks and not much happens, and you have a lot of narration boxes, and eventually what you end up with is a whole bunch of pictures and talking heads that are mostly overwhelmed by text.

Which begs the question: if you’re going to have that much text anyway, and when the graphics are mostly showing stuff that would be really easy to describe, why isn’t it all text? And no, I don’t have this problem with Maus or with manga I like, mostly because while they have plenty of text, they almost never use narration boxes, and the art always drives the storytelling.

Take Tsubasa. We have, on one hand, a main character who’s in love with a princess. She used to return his feelings, but she had her–well, her memories, but really her life force, or something, is bound up in them–stolen, leaving her unconscious and dying. Our hero is willing to do anything to save her, and it turns out that the price for getting that chance is that she’ll never remember him as anything but a really nice guy who’s helping her for no good reason. He agrees without a thought. He’s earnest and selfless and intensely determined to save her–and it shows in the art. There are only so many ways to describe someone in that way and only so many times you can say it, but when you see the way he’s drawn, the look on his face, it doesn’t need to be said. That same manga has multi-page battles with little dialogue, generally made of little more than magic-powered explosions, and while some of that might just be the artist having too much fun, it does give a visual sense of the characters’ improving skills, and it also shows battles on a semi-epic scale that would be very hard to render in text. Sandman…doesn’t seem to have an awful lot of this sort of thing.

And–this is more relevant with the Joss Whedon comics–there’s also the whole fact that comics are tiny and apparently take forever to produce. Manga are in black and white, which speeds things up, but they’re also reasonably thick graphic novels, as in novel-length–so even though you might wait longer, you also get a bigger chunk of story at once. Waiting a year or more in between comics that take me 30 minutes tops to read would get really old really fast–and then how much do they cost, too? Too much for what you’re getting, to my mind, despite the full-color pages and all.

That’s not to say I don’t like Sandman, or even the Jossverse comics if I could get them without paying so much–or that I won’t read more Sandman once I figure out whether my library has the right ones. I just wish more comics artists would take some cues from manga.

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