Lately I’ve been reading more graphic novels and paperback collections than the old punctuation-paragraph-chapter style novels. I’ve run into a few interesting things, but mostly I’ve been left non-plussed by what’s out there.
It’s the Sandman’s fault.
Everything I read leaves a water mark. Most of the time the water mark just falls below the last one and nobody notices. Every so often a book raises the water mark just a bit, but even that little bit is relevant for something that has remained consistent for so long, and hence it causes an permanent impression.
And every few years, if I’m lucky, something comes along and causes such a watershed that all previous water marks are erased, ports are flooded, people need to be evacuated and the coastline is moved. People may come back and the effect of the tsunami may be dulled in everyone’s mind, but the fact that you can’t even see where the bay was before is something that is ever present, even if not consciously acknowledged.
All my life I’ve loved reading. I used to climb into my house’s inner ceiling with a flashlight, to read there undisturbed and with a greater sense of isolation. Even in my childhood I preferred Jules Verne to comic books and, even if at 3 I thought that Superman was pretty cool, by the time I discovered Poe at the age of 9 I had become an addict to prose.
It wasn’t until about 10 years later that I got into comics again, even if briefly. Somebody had ordered two copies of Matt Wagner’s Grendel: Devil Tracks (recently collected on Grendel: Devil Tales) and offered to sell me one - that is, if I liked the character. I remember going into the issue not expecting much and coming out shocked.
Never mind that the title character wasn’t a superhero in tights - I’d seen that done before in novels and stories plenty of times already. What impressed me was how well the story flowed, even if only through 30-some pages; how they were no pages wasted in frescoes of villain versus hero, but instead each page was loaded with small frames that made the story look more like an animation frozen in time; and how every little frame, with its minimalist detail, added something to the story.
But mostly, I remember that by the time I was almost finishing the comic, I dreaded the moment Grendel might appear. Indeed, he hadn’t shown up for a single frame, but his ominous presence hung over the main character’s every move, with his and the ones in supporting roles reacting to any mention of the criminal mastermind almost as if somebody was summoning the Devil himself.
By the time Grendel does show up at the very end of the story, you are already in as much awe of him as all his victims are.
I started haunting used-book stores, browsing through piles of comics trying to find something that matched the effect that Grendel had on me. Sometimes I flipped through the issues, trying to find something that would catch my attention, and other times I just discarded them if the idea seemed too preposterous to warrant even said flipping. During this time I managed to pick up Matt Wagner’s two-part story of Grendel and Batman (whose storytelling moved the mark even higher than he had already set it), but nothing else that really captured me. By the time I ran into Wagner’s later Grendel: War Child stories, in which Hunter Rose is nowhere to be found and the Grendel is treated like something of an infectious concept that jumps from person to person, I was already prepared to treat the two graphic stories I liked as an aberration, a freak of brilliant narrative in a world of refried storylines.
During this process, I vividly remember holding several magazines with artsy covers and a pompous title that went something like Sandman - Prince of Dreams and thinking “gods, they’re desperate for material” before putting them back on the pile.
My short-lived quest for graphic novels behind me, I went back to concentrating on reading novels and short stories. I spent hours in Mora Books, nee Book Traders, scanning the apparently endless rows of paperbacks stacked over paperbacks for something new. This search bore some tasty fruits (like my first encounter with Roger Zelazny) and involved consuming tankers of Diet Coke while Darren Mora and I argued over whatever movie we disagreed about at the moment; but while it was overall amusing it very rarely managed to bring to my attention any material worth mentioning other than a few classics (one of which was, coincidentally, John Gardner’s Grendel). The inevitable advent of Amazon.com didn’t do much to solve the issue, since it just widened the search space without providing any new pointers, with its main effect being felt in the monthly parting of this fool and his money. In the end, it came to pretty much the same thing that had worked the first time: somebody casually mentioned a book I might be interested in.
It’s actually all Jose Ulloa’s fault, then.
Jose is a friend. While saying that he lives for comics could be considered an exaggeration (he might argue the point, then again, he might not), it’s not that far off. He’s in his mid-twenties and a fan of Superman - a fact that gets him no end of mockery from me - and collects every different Superman series that DC might spawn with the intent of further milking their customer base. He buys Spawn comics even if he doesn’t feel they’re that good anymore, just because most of the times the art is nice and the series had some good ideas going on like fifty years ago. When I asked him how much he monthly spent in comics, he replied: “only those that I buy, or also those that my Mom buys for me?”. He is, in a word, indiscriminating, so I wasn’t too surprised when he offered to lend me a book in the Sandman series, a series that years ago I had already measured, weighed, and found wanting without having ever read a single page. I declined.
He insisted.
I agreed.
He brought the book over.
I read it.
Later, he asked what I thought.
I told him I had liked it. I had actually loved it. To be precise, after finishing the book I had gone online to Amazon.com (finally, a worthy use for the blasted thing!) and ordered half the series. To begin with.
World’s End was placed late in the storyline, but even without knowing much about the series itself I had already fallen in love with the characters. In yet another coincidence (my brain is wired for pattern matching) the Sandman himself appeared but briefly during the book, and Neil Gaiman’s attention to characters that might not even show up again in the series at all convinced me that this was a guy who really cared about the little things. Stars be damned, this guy cared even for the cameos.
The Sandman series is actually a mind blowing tapestry of stories. It’s not perfect, but the little imperfections you notice instead of detracting from the beauty of the creation, actually tell you it was hand-crafted by an artisan and not woven and assembled in a mostly-automated sweat-shop. And this time the water mark wasn’t moved, and no puny tidal wave threatened the port - Cthulhu rose from the depths and sank ships, destroyed cities, and turned this survivor into a rabid cultist that prowls the remaining land trying to gain converts.
It also slapped me around until I learned my lesson about not judging a book by its monthly publication schedule.
The problem with Sandman was that, having feasted on Adana Kebaps, lentil soup and some Aiola chianti, I had to go back to the land of McDonald’s.
Prose is still my first love, but after Sandman graphic novels and comics have grown from a passing fling into an affair, an on-off girlfriend that I can’t bring myself to just not see again. I probably won’t find anything else that causes the same impression (I’m not a fan of Alan Moore, probably because I’ve never liked messiahs), but I keep trying.
Which brings me around to the what I was going to write about in the first place, and didn’t - I was going to upload brief write-ups and reviews of a few graphic novels, from Michael Bendis’s mercurial Goldfish and Jinx to the unsatisfying but well-narrated Y: The Last Man, Book 1 and the too-general-to-be-actually-interesting Grendel Cycle.
I may end up going in more depth about those in the next few weeks, after I take a vacation from my current project. And while this ended up being all disclaimer and almost no opinions, I enjoyed it.
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