Seven Questions

[shewhomust]

In celebration of Free Comic Book Day yesterday.

And because I re-read Neil Gaiman's Endless Nights for my Reading Group recently. Rather than repeat what I wrote in my diary barely a year ago, I'll restrict myself to posting seven questions here, one for each story, some more rhetorical than others:

Who is the Count who has made a bargain with Death?

The Sandman is full of allusions to identifiable historical and literary figures: this story drops hints - the location, on an island in the Venetian lagoon, the date, May 23rd 1751: but the date of what? Is it the date of the Count's death, or is it the perfect day in his life which he has specified he wants to relive and refashion, time after time? There is even a name: death addresses the Count as "Alain". But if all this adds up to a historical individual, I have yet to identify him.

Has Manara ever seen a torc?

Kara finally agrees to marry the young man she desires when he has revenged himself on his enemy. He brings her a heavy piece of jewellery wrapped in a bloodstained cloth, saying "It belonged to the man who killed my father. I'll put it around your throat at our wedding, if you'll let me.". And he does:



Only on this second reading did I realise that this awkward piece of metal, which she wears suspended by a slender thread around her neck, must have been intended as a torc, a much more masculine loop of metal, which you bend open and shut by sheer strength, something that a warrior chief as well as a warrior's bride could wear around their throat.

If I like the Dream story best, am I really shallow, or just a sad fanboy?

It's certainly one of my favourites of the collection. It has the same sense of glee at being allowed to play in this wonderful toybox as Gaiman's later 1602, and the enjoyment is infectious. And it's very pretty

Is Fifteen Portraits of Despair a comic?

One of these days, I will write a piece for The Shadow Gallery about what distinguishes a comic from a picture book, or an illustrated text; one of those pointless explorations of the borders of genre designed to cast light on the nature of the thing, rather than to exclude. Is The Wolves in the Walls a comic? What about Where the Wild Things Are? And when I do, this wonderful, rich, searing piece of work will be a prize exhibit.

Who thought it was a good idea to put Bill Sienkiewicz's Delirium story immediately after Barron Storey's Despair?

I like Bill Sienkiewicz's work immensely; in many ways I find it more approachable than Barron Storey's. It certainly makes more concessions to narrative than Storey does. But what could be strengths, in another context, make it look like Storey-lite when the whimsical Delirium tale follows immediately after the emotional blockbuster of Despair.

What is going on in this story?

Destruction and Delirium are living on a peninsula where their presence has caused some sort of temporal disturbance. It throws up a rock outcrop, in which artifacts from the end of the world are embedded; and at once the archaeologists arrive to excavate it. Destruction helps with this, until the government and industry show an interest. Then he waits until the heroine defies them, and then - but only then - he destroys the whole place.
So what is Destruction up to, why does he allow things to go so far, why does he help with the excavations instead of preventing them from the first? Surely it isn't just so our heroine will have a story to walk through?

Why doesn't Destiny get a story?

Because this isn't a story; this is just a rundown of what we know about Destiny - he's the eldest of the Endless, he has a book, he has a garden... It's very static, and Frank Quitely's art, in which everyone strikes poses all the time, emphasises this. Destiny, says Neil Gaiman in his introduction to the book, is a theme all the stories in it have in common. So it seems particularly unfair that Destiny's own story isn't a story at all.