(Originally published in Rolling Stone India, April 2008)

Absolute Sandman Volume 1
Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artist: Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones et al.
Publisher: DC/Vertigo

“I will show your fear in a handful of dust.”
In 1987, when DC advertised a new horror series with this tagline, accompanied by an image of a pale, gaunt man with dark eyes and wild hair, not many readers recognized the source of the words (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland, in case you didn’t either) and no one really thought the series, a re-imagining of a lesser-known Silver Age DC character would go on to become the flagship title of Vertigo comics and one of the cornerstones of graphic literature. Two decades later, Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is being republished as a set of four over-sized ‘remastered’ hardcover books – referred to as the Absolute Editions. The first volume covers the first twenty issues of this seventy-five part series, which introduce us to the world of the Sandman and some of its cast of characters.

The story of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, the anthropomorphic manifestation of dreams begins in tragedy, when members of a cult, in 1916, capture the dream lord and ensnare him in a magical barrier for the better part of the twentieth century. His subsequent escape seventy years later is not the end of his troubles, because without his tools – a helmet, a bag of sand and a ruby, all of which were taken away by his captors – he cannot regain control of the Dreaming. The first seven episodes of the story then takes the form of a fairly straightforward quest, in which Morpheus interacts with the various beings in the DC Universe, including the mage John Constantine and the Justice League of America, and visits Lucifer in Hell – all to reclaim his rightful powers.

In the eighth episode, Gaiman produced a quiet, introspective story that introduces Dream’s sister, Death, re-imagined as a kind, perky sixteen-year old girl, contrary to genre conventions. The positive reactions to that story made Gaiman bolder – like Alan Moore, his spiritual guru in comics, he began to experiment with different techniques, weaving an intricate tale of 22-page chapters that hop across centuries and include an immense cast of characters, taking his own sweet time to create a world that built upon the previous history of the character. The Sandman began as a horror title, and believe me, there are moments of creeping terror in the early arcs – like in the Dr Destiny sequence ’24 hours’ or the Cereal convention subplot in The Doll’s House, but as it progressed, the series slowly morphed into something that was a combination of literary wit, high fantasy, mythology, and solid storytelling. Greek myth, Shakespeare, superheroes, Biblical characters and African legends rub shoulders in these early stories, notable ones being ‘Calliope’, in which Gaiman tries to answer the perennial question faced by writers – “where do you get your ideas from?” and the heartbreaking ‘Dream of A Thousand Cats’, in which, and this is all I can say without spoiling your first-time experience, the origin of the world is explained.

The refurbished collection, encased in a faux-leather cover is a bibliophile’s (dare I say it?) dream come true. The volume has series colorist Daniel Vozzo redoing the murky colors on the first eighteen issues, originally the result of primitive printing techniques. One of the mainstays of the Sandman series is the use of rotating artistic teams for the different storylines, each artist interpreting the characters in their own style. The art nouveau influences of Charles Vess and Michael Zulli are used in period pieces set in medieval times, the dark, sooty ink-work of Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg bring out the malevolent nature of the early storylines, and Dave McKean’s abstract imagery graced all the 75 covers. The high-quality paper and the larger size of the Absolute Edition make the artwork leap off the page with spectacular clarity. Adding to the joy is 70 pages of extra material at the end of the book, which includes Gaiman’s original proposal for the series, concept sketches by various artists, and to top it all off, the original script and art breakdowns to Sandman #19, the only comic to win a World Fantasy Award. What more could you ask? Buy this book before it goes out of print, your bookshelf will thank you for it.

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The Complete Don Martin
Writers: Don Martin, various
Artists: Don Martin
Publisher: Running Press

Mad Magazine treads into coffee-table territory with a series of hardbound collections called Mad’s Greatest Artists. The first such offering, The Complete Don Martin is a gorgeous behemoth of a book, collecting the entire oeuvre of the great creator in a two-volume slip-cased edition. Printed on high-quality paper with flawless reproduction are all of Don Martin’s strips, the all-too-rare TV and movie adaptations, cover paintings, posters, postcards, and even pencil prelims. A neat bonus is the inclusion of occasional essays by Martin’s colleagues (‘the usual gang of idiots’, to use Madspeak), with names like Sergio Aragones, Dick DeBartolo and Al Jaffee relating anecdotes and opinions about the great artist’s work.

Martin, often billed as ‘the maddest Mad artist’, started his career with the venerable magazine in 1956. As you leaf through the early reprints, you realize that the first years suffer from the malaise common to most long-running strips – that of the creator trying to find his groove – and floundering in parts. These early strips, while funny in their own right, have Martin experimenting with verbal gags, a little unsure with his figure structures and trying his hand at extremely dark humour. While these are far from unfunny, they are nowhere as bizarre and laugh-out-loud as what his later work would be, and one feels the urge to skip these parts as quickly as possible.

From the sixties, the change in his style becomes apparent, the figures attaining their trademark extended shape, the strips hitting their stride, and the trademark sound effects – exploding flowers (SKLISHK!), dead fish ricocheting off a face (GLUP! SHPLIPPLE! FLADDUP!) and my personal favorite, two frogs catching each other with tongues. (ZAP GING GING TWONG SPLAT!). By the time we are into the second volume (which covers 1975-1988), Don Martin has become the Don Martin we all know and love.

Highly recommended!

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The Art of Sin City
Writer & Artist: Frank Miller
Publisher: Dark Horse.

In case you’ve not read Frank Miller’s Sin City yet, do yourself a favour. Stop reading this right now and go buy the series. Miller’s chiaroscuro masterpiece is not only a ripping good yarn; it’s also got the most eye-catching artwork in comics today. And after you’ve read all nine of the trades and are tempted to pick up The Art of Sin City, my advice would be to save the trouble, and buy something else.

Art books based on comics aren’t uncommon –Alex Ross’s Mythology and Mike Mignola’s Art of Hellboy comes to mind as two of the recent good publications that raised the bar for creators and publishers. But unlike these two, and all the other art books that actually give an insight into a creator’s mind and a deeper understanding of his craft and his process, The Art of Sin City concentrates on reprinting key panels from the actual series, blown to full size, with an odd preliminary pencil drawing or two thrown in. This, truth be told, is not entirely a bad thing if you are looking to admire the minimalist style that goes into the making of Sin City. Also, some of the images are from trading cards, alternate covers and advertising artwork, most of which are hard to find, making this the only book in which you will get to see them.

But staring at 150-odd pages of poster-quality artwork of naked women and men with guns with gets tedious, especially when apart from the preface, there’s no text to be seen anywhere. Miller’s conceit seems to be that his drawings alone have the clout to justify a price tag of 39.95$ (roughly Rs. 1350). Strictly for completists and hard-core Sin City fans.

(This was published in the first issue of Rolling Stone India, cover dated March 2008)

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: Kevin O’Neill
Publisher: DC/Wildstorm

What if the protagonists of the numerous novels of the nineteenth century co-existed in a fictional world? Writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill led this idea forward through two volumes of comics called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, each spanning six issues, in which Mina Murray from Stoker’s Dracula, the rugged hero Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo from Verne’s stories, Mr Hyde (with Dr Jekyll in tow) and Wells’s Invisible Man fought Oriental villains and Martians. At the end of the second volume, the League was disbanded, its members at odds with each other. The third installment, called The Black Dossier was released recently, and it differs from the previous volumes in three respects – one, it is a standalone volume; two, it is no longer confined to the setting and characters of the Victorian Era; three – and the most important difference of all, it’s not really a comic book.

The year is 1958, and a remarkably youthful Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain are in London after a file called The Black Dossier, which contains confidential information about all the previous incarnations of the League that were formed throughout history to carry out covert operations for England. They have to escape a posse of MI5 espionage agents led by a spy referred to as “Jimmy”, Emma Night and Hugo Drummond, and if you cannot identify two out of these three, you probably wouldn’t enjoy this book – and make their way to the fourth dimension. In the middle of the pursuit, they read sections of the dossier, and this brings out the real meat of the book, as Moore and O’Neill narrate the history of this fictional world in the form of letters, segments of literary works, maps, schematics, excerpts of autobiographies and comic book sections, including an example of Tijuana Bibles.

In every section, Moore writes in a style corresponding to the genre and content. For instance, Faerie’s Fortunes Founded claims to be a lost play by William Shakespeare written in the style of the Bard himself, The Crazy Wide Forever is a stream of consciousness ‘beat’ novel supposedly by Sal Paradise, the narrator of Kerouac’s On The Road, and the most hilarious pastiche of them all (and my personal favourite), What Ho, Gods of the Abyss by Bertie Wooster is a look at the Lovecraft canon in a Wodehousian vein.  Kevin O’Neill’s artwork shines in all these sections – he is equally at home drawing dynamic action sequences , cartoony meta-comics and detailed ink etchings echoing early twentieth-century illustration plates. At the end of the book, when the duo reaches the Fourth Dimension, the sequence is represented as a 3-D sequence (yes, you have to wear cardboard glasses that come with the book) and even there, Moore and O’Neill make use of the technology to come up with stunning effects – a Lovecraftian elder god speaks in illegible runes, close your right eye, you see the English words form behind the gibberish.

The book is more of a framing device and less of a story, an ambitious attempt to map all of known literary fiction into a single coherent world, with the story leading in to the actual third volume due next year. Nearly every page of the main graphic novel contains references to fictional characters from British literature, TV series, comics and popular culture.  And as is normal in a work of such ambition, the question here is this.

Would you enjoy it?

If you are a fan of comic books and comics alone, probably not – which explains the lukewarm response the book got from those who embraced the boy’s adventure spirit of the earlier two volumes. The Black Dossier is a different beast altogether, it requires you to come to the reading table with an awareness – if not in-depth knowledge – of pop culture, an ability to context-switch between different time-periods, storytelling devices and above all, with time on your hands. There is just too much going on in the book to take it all in at one sitting, and there is a high chance that the volume of content and information proves to be overwhelming. It took me nearly two weeks to get through all the segments, in case you’re wondering.  That said, it truly is a tremendous piece of work, quite unlike any comic book that has come before. Not quite ‘the best thing since sliced bread’, as Moore mentions in his pre-release interviews, but definitely one of the best graphic novels of 2007.

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Essential X-Men vol 1

Essential X-Men Volume 1
Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin
Publisher: Marvel comics.

If you like the X-men movies and want to get into the comics without treading into confusing continuity, check out this particular reprint edition, that presents Giant-size X-men #1 and the subsequent issues 94-119, the 70’s stories that resurrected the classic X-Men team from a comic on the brink of cancellation to a best-selling title. Chris Claremont’s scripts laid equal emphasis on multicultural elements of our favorite mutants, space opera, inter-team friction and individual character development, while artists Dave Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin brought in realism with their dynamic line-work. The first appearances of Storm, Colossus and Nightcrawler, the death and subsequent rebirth of Jean Grey into Phoenix, arch-villain Magneto’s triumphant return, and Professor Charles Xavier’s romance with intergalactic Empress Lilandra – these are the stories that laid the groundwork for (arguably) the greatest Marvel story ever – the Dark Phoenix Saga. And who would have thought that a B-grade character called Wolverine would be catapulted to superstardom – becoming the poster-boy of the grim and gritty comics of the eighties – by virtue of being included in this title?

Reading this volume brings back a warm feeling of nostalgia at how straightforward comics were back then – villains indulge in bombastic monologues outlining their plans in detail, every fight sequence has characters talking nineteen to the dozen, and in different dialects too! But make no mistake about it, these stories are groundbreaking and classic – modern Marvel writers (as well as the scriptwriters of the X-men movies) are still borrowing the mythic elements Claremont and Byrne put in place in these initial issues.  Consider your money well-spent.

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Lucky Luke: Jesse James

Lucky Luke: Jesse James.
Writer: Goscinny
Artist: Morris
Publisher: Tara Press, India.

All you Tintin and Asterix lovers, time to rejoice! The classic series Lucky Luke, written by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Morris is now available in India. Lucky Luke is a madcap adventure series about a fearless, resourceful and slightly loco cowboy his equally loony horse, Jolly Jumper as they travel through the Wild West, helping those in distress. In the first volume, ‘Jesse James’, the villain tries to be a modern-day Robin Hood – he robs a rich man, gives the money to a homeless vagrant, and when he finds out that his gift has made the latter wealthy, proceeds to rob him. He finally decides to keep the money for himself, to avoid any such moral quandaries in the future.  With his Shakespeare-quoting elder brother Frank, and a witless associate named Cole Younger, Jesse James strikes terror in the West with his bank and railroad heists. Until one fine day, two Pinkerton detectives employ Lucky Luke to capture the James gang before they rob the bank in Nothing Gulch, Texas.

The book is, in one word, fun! Unlike other European cowboy comics like Blueberry and Tex Willer, Lucky Luke eschews realism in favor of humor, substitutes spaghetti violence with cartoon lunacy and is appealing both to kids and adults. I laughed aloud throughout the book, and look forward to reading the remaining four volumes as soon as I can.  Thanks are due to Tara Press for bringing this classic series back into print, with a brilliant translation and an album-sized release.