![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
The Sandman (1989 series) #1
Oct. 31st, 2019 04:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alicemacher
"Neil Gaiman is a writer who loves to overturn expectations, and there are ample examples of this in [the first issue]. In a standard epic quest, the hero starts out in ordinary surroundings, and then experiences some kind of shock that sends him into a shadow realm where he does battle with primal forces. In the Sandman's case, however, his ordinary surroundings are the shadow realm, because he's the personification of myths and dreams. Therefore, the shock he experiences is being dragged from his realm of mystery and nightmare to some penny-ante magician's basement. And instead of doing battle with epic forces, he remains a still and silent prisoner in that basement for seventy-two years.
"Nonetheless, this quiet experience has a profound effect on the Sandman. The extent to which it changes him isn't apparent until later in the series... and isn't something he even realizes himself. But we can deduce that a metamorphosis is occurring from visual cues, such as the Sandman looking like a fetus after he's captured; his being kept naked in a womblike glass bowl: and his feigning death to get his cage opened: after which he springs to life."
--Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion
Warning for suicide and gore.
( 'And I have showed him fear...' )
The Maxx by Alan Moore
Sep. 29th, 2018 12:31 amhistory79
"When I called Alan Moore to help kick off this new story line in Maxx, to say I was nervous is putting it mildly. But I wanted the chance to work with him even more than I was intimidated. I asked him if he'd gotten the comics I sent, and he politely assured me he'd gotten through all 16 issues, and that he really enjoyed them. I was trying to think of what I could possibly do to get him to consent to do this one issue – beg/plead/manipulate – but he said, “Sure”. He said that a lot of issues of The Maxx are paralleling things he's interested in his own life right now. We talked about our interest in Aleister Crowley and the English tradition of ceremonial magick, Carlos Castaneda, spirit animals and Jung.
I told him my concern about being too specific in The Maxx, about how I wanted to let people read what they wanted to into it, instead of getting caught up in dogma. It's eerie to meet somebody who has so completely and thoroughly studied the same subjects and interests I have.
So, I said, trying to sound casual but curious as hell, “What happens? Who is Sara ten years from now?” There was a pause and I felt my blood run cold. In his deep voice, Alan said “Something has happened; something's gone wrong on the Outback. It's building, and may or may not be bad, sort of like the REM song, “It's the end ofthe world as we know it, and I fell fine.”
Then he mentioned a dream he had in which tiny dolls were eating the landscape, and I flashed on the exploding fairies I had envisioned in Sara's Outback. As the conversation came to a close, we both agreed that the future was gonna be a lot worse and uglier, both in the book and in the real world, but leaving me with an odd sense that, somehow, that's OK."
- Sam Kieth
Warning for Rape
( from The Maxx #21 )
