After dealing with the serialized books for a while I decided to switch to something more concise, self-contained, and found just what I was looking for in Scott Morse’s The Complete Soulwind. A tapestry of interwoven stories, all dealing with a legendary sword whether directly or tangentially, it’s a wonderful fairy tale illustrated just perfectly in black and white by Morse himself. Amazon seems to be out of them, but if you’re lucky you’ll have a friend who has it.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Endless Nights left me mostly non-plussed. So much so that until now I didn’t realized that I had read it almost two years ago and never even bothered to mention it here. Whether that is because the high quality of the original series left me spoiled or because the writing was indeed lacking, I’ll leave up to you.
Fortunately, Matt Wagner came to the rescue with some more published books of Sandman Mystery Theatre (barely any relation to the previous Sandman). I was left with a serious craving after reading The Tarantula a few years ago, but just recently they published The Face & The Brute, The Vamp and The Scorpion, which I promptly ordered and devoured. Wagner has an excellent hand for creating perfectly human characters, with both endearing qualities and horrible imperfections, and that talent shines through clearly on these volumes. Add on top of that the willingness and skill with which he treats some very ugly topics, and the very tender, slowly developing relationship between the two main characters, and you’ve got yourself something that towers over any other graphic narratives currently being published.
And then there’s Dave McKean’s Cages. A beautifully illustrated book where the somewhat disjointed narrative is there more to elicit specific feelings than to convey a plot, Cages is a beautiful work of art that actually had me in tears in one specific point. This is the only book written by him that I know of - since he usually just focuses on illustration - it had me wishing that McKean wrote more often. But if everything he’s likely to produce is of this caliber, he can take his time.
There’s still a few odds and ends to take care of, books that didn’t quite fit even in the loose categories that these entries seem to have grouped themselves at. I’ll wrap those up on Wednesday.