Review by
Written by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by Jill Thompson and Vince Locke
Afterward by Peter Straub
For some reason, I never read Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic while it was still being regularly published within the helm. For the life of me, I can't explain why: now, taking my first taste with Sandman: <b>Brief Lives</b>, I realize just water was the people have been talking about.
Neil Gaiman and is one of those creators like Dave Sim of Cerberus fame, who with apparent effortlessness can bring, writing to entirely new levels. The difference between them is that where Dave Sim has spent his career chronicling every single thoughts of the characters in his Cerberus universe, Neil Gaiman has been remarkably prolific across several fields of writing penning novels, screenplays, and recently even moving into translation with Miyazaki’s American release of Princess Mononoke. Isn't that cause to wonder, though, that it is in comics that Gaiman is his most ambitious?
The characters in the Sandman universe are brilliant creations, as likely to be walking embodiments of symbols as they are to be ordinary people. Central to this book, <b>Brief Lives</b>, audio eternal beings known as the Endless. They are, for those view for his new to all this is I am: the Hamlet-like, ennui-ridden Dream; the childlike Delirium, who once upon a time was known as Delight but now wanders the dimensions unable to hold a cogent thought; the grotesque, sadistic, and lonely Despair; the impossibly beautiful Desire; and a large and lovable Viking-like destruction. These are characters we see to be represented as flesh and blood, but we learn that they only exist because the people in the world recognize their concepts as having power.
As we open <b>Brief Lives</b>, we learned that destruction has been gone from his post (as the overseer of destruction on earth) for three hundred years. Delirium, whose conversations are so dreamlike that sometimes her sentences come across and splotches of mere color, you're in his to find her brother. She approaches her siblings one at a time until she gets Dream to say yes, he’ll help look for Destruction. (He’s depressed, and it sounds like a good diversion. He also thinks they’ll fail.)
And so, as with any journey story, the two siblings set out to cross the waking world-- the mortal world-- as well as ay other dimension in search of the Atlas that, as Ayn Rand put it, shrugged.
The wonderful thing is the story plays out in so many <I>levels</I>. Gaiman writes layers within layers; every line has both meaning for the plot and meaning for the whole Gaiman-Sandman concept, that our world is changing and with it, so is the way we perceive it. That change is terrifying and yet beautiful.
And it is beautiful-- from Delirium, childlike and innocent, who doesn’t find exactly what she’s looking for (she hopes for a time when her family can “all be nice to one another again”) but finds a new guide, to Dream, who comes to term with his son, Orpheus, an immortal head on a pedestal in Greece (long story.) To the little chocolate people who smash together, living their brief lives gloriously before being eaten.
Best of all is Destruction, a loveable mug who realized people no longer needed a Concept to guide destructiveness (when they were unlocking the secrets of the atom, etc., and getting good at it themselves.) Gaiman suggests that Destruction is drifting away happily, and that soon all the other Endless Concepts may do the same.
And yet, I still have hardly described it. Wow. Gaiman’s work is like this: It’s intimidating at first, then terribly absorbing. But it never stops intimidating, and your brain never stops picking it apart.