I am always surprised by how the series does not seem to get the praise that it deserves.

Wait, what?

Maybe I am not traveling in the right circles or hearing the right podcasts ... but when the great works of comics in the last couple of decades are discussed I never really hear Sandman being mentioned in that mix.

 

Hmmmm, or was your question intended for the "deserves" part?

Still listening...

Wood, I haven't read much Sandman either but I can wholeheartedly recommend Sandman: The Dream Hunters by P. Craig Russell. It was a Vertigo mini-series that came out a few years ago. It's Russell adapting a Gaiman story and it's basically a Japanese fairy tale. It's also one of my favorite comics of the past decade and it's nothing like Lucifer. Russell's at the top of his game.

Sandman is all kinds of pure awesomeness. It is the series that brought me back to comics. To me it is right up there at the Watchmen, V for Vendetta level.

I am always surprised by how the series does not seem to get the praise that it deserves.

Aren't we forgetting the most awesome couple of all: The Midnighter and Apollo?

The Element Lad was written with a lot of gay undertones, but I think the closest that came to the surface was during the Giffen run with the revelation involving Shvaughn Erin.
Danny the Street ... does he/she count?
Coagula from Pollock's Doom Patrol run. She was transsexual and showed some lesbian tendencies.

[great]

I just finished the fourth TPB today and can't decide if this is great or the greatest Eilis work.  I'm leaning towards the later.  So many great characters and moments.  I want to see the continuing adventures of the pulp characters. 

Between this, The Authority, Sleeper and Wildcats 3.0, Wildstorm was the shee-it back in the day.     

I look at it as a collection: Stormwatch, The Authority, and the Planetary. All three are excellent, but I think The Planetary is the complete statement. And it was also his playground where he got to play with comic book archetypes.

I agree with others who said it's his best work thus far. 

I hated it back in the day, but re-read it about 6 months ago. 

I don't hate it anymore; but I don't love it like 'Returns.  That said, the book does have moments of brilliance though...

...I could've read an entire mini-series with the Atom living in a petrie dish. 


--Andy

Yep ... a couple of good ideas, but otherwise it's really a low point for a remarkable writer. I don't know why he went back to that world,  whether he really felt like there was another story to tell, whether he thought this was the story to tell about that world. Either way. I don't think it worked. I generally pretend like it didn't happen.

To me, that’s the natural experience, and it puts the emphasis on the actual content of the issues and the stories. You could never get away with doing the death of Gwen Stacy today. Not only would you have to conceal that she dies in #121, but then you’d be soliciting all the way up until like #124, before that issue even came out. It would just get more and more difficult, because how do you describe the follow-up stories? “It’s the funeral of Gwen Stacy!” Well, y’know, we can redact it, we do all the same tricks that we do —we’ll black out figures, we won’t tell you that much. The double-edged sword is, the better we inform retailers, particularly when something important is going on, the more likely they are to get on board and order up, and be able to sell it.

It's not like they haven't done this ... and very recently: Someone dies in this issue. You won't believe who we kill. Funeral for the fallen. The Spiderman family feels the loss ... and on and on. There are probably 16,000 ways to hype this up without spelling out who dies.  The big two turned that into an art form. I don't know why he thinks it can't be done.

Besides, every step these people take in how they market the  death of a character has probably been studied to death before they decide how they will handle it. If the death is made public ahead of time, that is because the marketing division decided that the buzz would sell more books.

The problem is not the solicits or the internet rumor mill. It's that the marketing division drives these decisions at the big 2 (my guess).

I think the better moment came in the penultimate volume when Bryan Vaughan and Tony Harris were picked to chronicle Mayor Hundred's story. It wasn't earth-shatteringly new concept as self-reference goes, but it added a cool flavor to the story.

I thought the whole interdimensional demons thing was a bit if "deus ex machina", so to speak. It was a device that came out of nowhere to wrap up the story without any precursors and it didn't tie in with anything else. But then maybe that was the idea ...

If you come across the collected volumes, give Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's "Modesty Blaise" from early 60s and on. It is a product  of its time obviously, but it is all kinds of awesome. 

I also remember loving Frank Bellamy's Garth when I was growing up but those are harder to come by. I tracked down two collections but haven't had the chance to catch up with them yet, so I don't know how well it holds up today.

Can Neil Gaiman be tempted?

No Doom Patrol ... [sigh]  ... Next issue will be the last.

Unusually quiet two days at work:

If: 2
Iggy Pop: Lust for Life
The Dirtbombs: We have you surronded
Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon 2
Trombone Shorty: Backatown

If Wood is unconcerned w/ anachronism, maybe he should consider using Battlestar dialog?   
...or maybe a combo: "It gets fracking cold for thine moogies, yo."

What the frell are you guys are talkin' about? 

Narrative captions and thought balloons mated and produced the offspring "thought captions".  (A variant of this uses color coding to keep track of whose thoughts are being captioned.)

 I feel like the end of narrative captions played a role in the eventual emergence of decompressed storytelling. I can't formulate the connection right now. It is more of a gut feeling.

See, to me, Deadwood is perfect TV. My favorite, or at least one of my favorite, shows of all time. To my ear, the profanity there was ideally used, at just the right times.

And an often overlooked fact: not everyone swore the same way. Not everyone swore period.  And when they swore every character swore in their own way and integrated the swear words into their  own personal speech style seamlessly.

Of all the shows I've watched over the years, Deadwood has to qualify as the one with the most awesomely well-written dialogs ever. Every character on the show more or less had a distinct voice, speech style and vocabulary. You could almost look at the transcripts without any identifiers and pretty much guess who says which line.

It was masterful writing in that respect (as well as the almost Shakespearean soliloquys while doing the most soliloquy-discordant acts).

Now I'm seeing people take stabs at what "art" is (we've moved beyond comics), I guess.

They're inextricably related, IMO.  Though I feel that "what is art?" is more abstract a discussion than "what is comics?" or for that matter, "what is jazz?".

Then, by your definition, thoughts are art.

Some would agree to that ... I remember having that argument with my art historian mother whose specialization is in 20th century modern art ... after we visited Temporary Contemporary, a branch of MOCA in LA, I believe. There was an installation with a shelf of beer bottles on it. I pointed out to her that if she took that shelf and put it in a bar it would not be called art. She said "that's right" and went on to talk about Duchamp's urinal and I completely lost it. A urinal is a urinal and just because it is displayed in a museum, it doesn't become art. At least I just can't look it any more differently than any other urinal that I pissed in ... except I hope it was washed or something.

That was a very tense visit after that.

About 7, 8 years later I had my picture taken right next to Duchamp's urinal in the Pompidou center in Paris. 

The narrative is a product of the passage of time. Rock-bottom scenario: Image A features a tiny black dot centered in a field of white. Image B features the same dot against the same field, yet the dot is moved a perceptible distance to the left. The viewer is instantly made aware that a passage of time has occurred, at least enough to enable something to move the dot. Could have been the dot itself, an unseen hand, the wind, whatever. Doesn't matter one whit. Pretty scant for a narrative, true, but it's there. The dot moved. Comics.

I would counter with this: Image A is is the jubilation of a soccer player who obviously just scored a goal. The image shows the happy player with bright colors in the background and the ball is hanging in the air.  Image B is by stipulation, the image of the exact same moment in time.  The ball is again hanging in the air at the same exact spot. This image contains the stunned face of the goalie who knows he just blew it. The background is in darker shades.

I would claim that the connection between those two images is a comic-type connection even though both depict the same exact moment but from two different perspectives. What connects them is the narrative progression: Image A sets up the event as something to celebrate and the reader is invited to share a joyous moment, perhaps by having them relive a comparable moment that they've experienced. Image B shifts the reader's mood by showing the flip side of the same event.  Now they are asked to consider the possibility that their personal great moments in the past have come at the expense of someone else's pain.  A connection is made, and event is narrated, by simply looking at the same instance from two different points of view.

A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format. comics, song, movies, and etc. are all narratives. they are mediums that communicate ideas to the viewer, reader, and etc...

Narrative doesn't even need to be fiction. When you attend a class by your favorite teacher just look at how they are going from point to point connecting events and threads between ideas, facts, numbers, whatever. That's also narrative.

When you're writing a piece of scholarly work, no matter what area it's in, if you want to make sure your ideas are getting across, you need to keep an eye on your narrative in that work.  Attention to the narrative and being able to master it is crucial to a well-written essay or term paper at school.

I do believe that there is good art and bad art because of intent. Intent is a vital part of a successful piece of art work. Intent is the divider of good vs. bad art. Just because a viewer does not understand the intent (which I have been victim of plenty of times) it does not devalue the statement of the artist. I do believe that it is important to read about or research a particular piece of art if it truly engages you as the viewer. An appreciation of the piece is compounded when more information is added to the end result.

Well, let's be honest ... there is such a thing as badly-crafted art.  I mean, art is not just some abstract idea. It's gotta be executed somehow and there's craftsmanship involved in that.

There is also art that says nothing new and rehashes the same thing without adding anything to it.

So yeah, I do believe there is such a thing as bad art ... if you don't believe me, I can draw you a picture, and you will change your mind about that.   

Why not? It's as essential to the medium as the images themselves. Without the passage of time, you don't have comics.

I think I would like to suggest a revision that and say that it is not necessarily the passage of time, but a narrative progression. You could have two images that depict the same moment in time but from different angles, or from different emotional backdrop producing a narrative effect that I imagine that you would consider to be comics the same way you consider sequence of temporally linked images to be comics.