House of Dioxin

Decided I needed a fun blog project for the year so I'm biting some style from Sarah and Leesh (hey, I like to think I know a good idea when I steal one...) Anyway, I just finished reading the Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes. This is the first volume of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Somehow I managed to miss these when they were coming out and have never got around to catching up (altho I did read Death: the High Cost of Living back in the day). There's 11 volumes in the series. If I'm feeling calendrical, I'll read one a month and that'll be a nice, not-too-ambitious blog project, writing up my reviews of the Sandman books. (note: I also started on the Lemony Snicket books, but there's not that much to say about them beyond "hey, that was really fun; you should read it"). Preludes & Nocturnes covers the first 8 issues of the Sandman comic, written by Gaiman and drawn by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, and Malcolm Jones III. I pretty much agree with Gaiman's self-assessment in the afterword -- a bit clumsy and rough but there's something there. I found some of the art pretty distractingly mediocre (esp. in contrast to the Dave McKean covers) but some was quite good. Esp. #8 ("the Sound of Her Wings"), which intros Death and in which you really can see Gaiman finding his voice. Also, I'm amazed that the series survived at DC past #6 ("24 Hours") which is really seriously bent and quite bleak. That must have been an amazing downer to read in an open-ended, no resolution until at least next month, comic book. As clunky as some of this is (as Gaiman experiments with a variety of comix styles and works to shoe-horn his story into the DC universe) the story still grabbed me up. I read the whole thing in one big chunk last night.