Death: The Time of Your Life

[gargoylekitty]

So the story starts off with a death and a deal, we'll get to that. Moving ahead it's months later and Foxglove, while leaving for the premiere of a movie that she sung a song for the soundtrack of, gets a call from Hazel, who's at home with baby Alvie.

She probably should have listened to Hazel.

Don't worry, she's not dead. I mean, that's Death, but Hazel's fine for now.
So, moving into the next issue...

...we get the story of Foxglove and Hazel.

Cute.



:(
So then we learn a little about why Death is there, going back to the death that started the story.

Get where this is heading?
Back in the world, or however you describe it, we see things aren't going so well for Foxglove as she learns she probably should have listened to Hazel. Her manager, Larry, dies of a heart attack. During the premiere she's ushered out to be told and, following that, she finds out some woman she slept with in France had told the tabloids about it and while she'd been planning to officially come out to the world, she was now being forced out. Not only forced out though, but also having her cheating on Hazel laid out for all to see. So, needless to say, she's feeling a bit messed up. At this point she realizes that she needs to get home.

So, dragging her beard and her bodyguard along, she goes from New York to LA only to find her house devoid of Hazel and Alvie. It's then that she realizes that Death has them, so a bit of improvised magic later...

And Hazel and Death continue their chat.



Go ahead and say it, this story is a bit depressing. It's okay though, give it a moment.

So Fox, the underwear model pretending to date her, and Boris(bodyguard) all show up, and after some quick introductions, Hazel and Death explain the deal.

Essentially, Alvie was supposed to die. Hazel, as you saw, then struck a deal with Death that allowed him to live a little longer(because Death once got "to touch life without taking it") though upon Death's return, now, she has to take one of them with her.

Gah, Hazel... Knock it off with the being adorable.

Anywho, as per the terms of the deal one of them has to stay. Fox volunteers for the classic 'noooo! why?!' moment but before Death can take her, Boris steps in.


And they all lived happily ever after. Well, except Boris... and Larry... and, well, they all lived for the rest of their lifetime.
The end(seriously though, you should totally track this down and read the cut stuff.).

Comments

[From: xammax]

Oh what the fuck Boris; you didn't deserve this. I could make an argument for anyone one else (besides the kid) but you damnit...

[From: robogeek]

You are missing a major detail.

Boris is/was Endymion, as Death said.

If he's the one from myth, that means he was an immortal.

[From: kiplingkat]

Was he immortal? I just thought he fell in love with Selene?

[From: box_in_the_box]

There were parts of this that were really good, but a lot of it felt just ... off. I couldn't help but notice that, in the collected edition, they added a few pages to the end, whose conclusion seemed incredibly abrupt otherwise, and I couldn't help wondering whether those were pages that had originally been intended to appear in the story all along, or if Gaiman was doing a bit of damage control to a story that hadn't gone quite right.

It didn't help that Buckingham (who actually did most of the artwork, rather than Bachalo), made Hazel and Foxglove look so different from how they'd looked in Death: The High Cost of Living, because it felt like one of those movie sequels where they hire new actors for the same roles, you know?

Then again, Death: The High Cost of Living was my introduction to The Sandman in the first place, so any attempt to do a sequel to it was bound to fall short in my eyes.

Back in middle school, I knew a girl who was so much like Didi, and when I opened those comics to find her staring back at me, I felt like I'd been punched in the chest ...

Excuse me, I have something in my eye.

[From: gargoylekitty]

Do you mean the pages of Fox and Hazel further along where Fox is retired from being in the lime-light? The issue has a those pages at the end, though with the size issues they didn't make the cut. :\

[From: box_in_the_box]

Yeah, the epilogue where they bridge the gap between "Foxglove as celebrity" and "Foxglove as small-town mom."

To be honest, that very tail end REALLY felt like a cop-out to me, because it was like it was saying, okay, you can have your family and be happy in obscurity, but you can no longer express yourself artistically, even though that's how Hazel and Foxglove met and fell in love all along.

Why couldn't the lesbian couple come out and be happy in public together? Especially when the alternative was Gaiman writing a cringe-worthy epilogue in which he, through Foxglove, actually wrote lines like, "The older I get, the more fond of cliches I get," to cover his own conclusion?

[From: thandrak]

Times have changed. For the better.

[From: koschei]

I seem to recall a follow up story line of sorts where everyone gets a happily ever after except a transsexual who's essentially punished for not being a real woman...

[From: weezus]

I don't know why, but Gaiman makes people nice.

I asked for this in the smaller, less popular LCS near me, but one of the guys that I sometimes talk to said they didn't have it. Next time I came back just to have a chat or something, he said he'd ordered it in for me and gave me it at staff discount price. I didn't even know the guys name and he didn't know mine, but it was just nice.

[From: leikomgwtfbbq]

It's infectious niceness. He seems to be an exceedingly nice bloke. I guess it just transfers. XD

[From: terrykun]

It's such a little thing, but when Death is being asked if she knows everything, I just imagine her responding with "Of course not, don't be silly. That's my big brother's job."

[From: aaron_bourque]

One of Gaiman's conceits in the his Endless-verse is that everyone knows everything. We just don't allow ourselves to know.

[From: pseudo_tsuga]

I just read all of Sandman for the first time the last two days, so I'm glad to see a bit more of the universe.