ase | Endless Nights (Neil Gaiman)

The Sandman: Endless Nights (Neil Gaiman et al): Latest, shiniest spinoff of the Sandman comics. It is slim, it is hardcover, it is crammed with excellent art. The Despair and Delerium stories are exquisitely painful to read. Overall, I'm impressed with the pretty, but didn't see much depth in the collection. A lot of that may be attributable to how short each story is. It's hard to work in plot, characterization and the fantastic - in the older sense, not necessarily the approving sense - the fantastic ideas fantasy and SF like to play with. "Death in Venice" is beautiful classy Sandman, as is "What I've Tasted of Desire" (about a girl who gets the man she wants - for a while - and plays her husband's killers like music). "The Heart of a Star" is the obligatory Dream story, also gorgeously illustrated, and I think my favorite because it's set so far back that the Endless themselves interact with each other differently than in most of the canon. Also, personifying the stars is a nifty idea, and one I'm glad I noticed before I finished the story. "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" is strange, and awful, being a number of anecdotes stripped to the minimum words needed to show that fairness and good intent do not translate to success, with the most jagged, uncomical art illuminating each sentence. "Going Inside" is the story of five people finding one of the Endless, trapped in their own realm, because they're the only people mad enough to navigate that realm, with artwork so diverse it's only held together by its own range of styles, black-and-white comic to oil paint. "On the Peninsula" moves a woman from dreaming the reflection of destruction to meeting him. I think I entirely missed the point of “Endless Nights.”

Unifying themes: Endless, gorgeous artwork. Reader comprehension: minimal. Viewer art drooling: very high.