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chuckroA collection of Neil Gaiman’s work, mostly short stories adapted into graphic novel format. This was another bundle where they provide the uncompressed print pdfs, which I had to manually reduce to 1/10th their size (with no noticeable loss of fidelity!) to read on my ReMarkable.
A bunch of these are graphic adaptations of short stories I’ve read the prose version of in other places, like Murder Mysteries (a tale of the very first murder while the angels were still designing the universe), Chivalry (a modern-day old woman buys the Holy Grail at a secondhand shop and a questing knight shows up at her doorstep), A Study in Emerald (a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft mythos crossover mystery), and Troll Bridge (a man makes a bargain with a bridge troll that wants to eat him). All of them are solid stories, and the comic adaptations are generally also solid.
I’m also certain I had previously read The Problem of Susan and Other Stories, a musing on late-in-life Susan, many years after Narnia leaves her behind; and a few other fairytale-based yarns. These were also adaptations of prose stories, but the art was very familiar, so I think it must have been in another bundle.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties was definitely new to me, though it’s in the same vein of a short story that juxtaposes something normal (a nervous teenage boy who wants to talk to girls) and something otherworldly (the girls are all aliens on Earth as some sort of cultural exchange). It doesn’t feel quite as tightly thought through as some of the others—it feels like there’s more that should have been explored, or perhaps slightly less, if that makes sense.
Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire is a satirical take on the difficulties of writing when one lives in a world of gothic horror. The art is particularly reminiscent of Sandman.
Harlequin Valentine – A brightly-color harlequin, apparently a spirit of some sort, stalks a human woman in a lighthearted but utterly terrifying way. She recognizes his role as the Harlequin and turns the tables on him. I quite like the painted-photograph artwork here.
Likely Stories is a collection of four short stories, all of which I don’t recall reading before. I don’t think I had realized this, but Gaiman has a tendency to “wrap” some of his shorter stories in larger tales of “people telling stories”. Murder Mysteries does it most boldly, but he uses it in The Problem of Susan and Other Stories and here as well.
The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch feels like it was part of a larger story and was cut down to the parts Gaiman thought worked—Miss Finch herself doesn’t get enough screen time to make her departure sufficiently noteworthy, and the story seems to end abruptly with less commentary than I would have expected. “Hey, remember that time a vaguely-unpleasant woman we never met before went to a show with us and mysteriously disappeared?” “Yeah, whatever. No one would believe it, eat your sushi.”
Snow, Glass, Apples is a retelling of “Snow White,” from the perspective of a sympathetic queen, because the girl is a terrifying vampire. Which might have been better as part of Creatures of the Night, which is a pair of stories, one of a black cat who protects his chosen humans from the curse of the Devil, and one of a girl believed to be the child of owls. (Kind of a random pairing, honestly.)
Only the End of the World Again is a Lovecraft pastiche starring a werewolf who has recently moved to Innsmouth. It’s okay, and I think I might have seen it played as a game of Werewolf: The Apocalypse before. I was mildly irritated by the deceptive pdf—the story is only a prestige-format ~50 pages, like the majority of these books, but the pdf includes sketch pages of the entire book, bulking it to more than twice its actual size. (And honestly, the art isn’t actually that great; that much sketchbook is absolutely not justified.)
Norse Mythology (Volumes 1-2) lends itself particularly well to this format, because each of the story-myths is a standalone short story and there’s lots of cool stuff to draw. (Of course, Thor and Loki look a lot like their Marvel Comics counterparts…)
American Gods (Volumes 1-3) is a full adaptation of the novel, and credit to Gaiman that as someone who writes both comics and novel, he really understands how to translate from one medium to the other. It’s been long enough since I originally read it that I’d forgotten a lot of the smaller plot points (and some of the larger ones), so this was a particularly fun re-read.
Oh, and I’m reasonably certain I’ve bounced off the piecemeal art and fragmented text of Signal to Noise before, and I bounced off it again here.
Overall: I mean, Neil Gaiman is very good at what he does. Some of these stories are great and some are only okay, but they’re pretty much all entertaining. Do they need to be graphic novels rather than prose? Not really, but they aren’t hurt by it either, and a few ( Norse Mythology in particular) did benefit from the artwork.
A bunch of these are graphic adaptations of short stories I’ve read the prose version of in other places, like Murder Mysteries (a tale of the very first murder while the angels were still designing the universe), Chivalry (a modern-day old woman buys the Holy Grail at a secondhand shop and a questing knight shows up at her doorstep), A Study in Emerald (a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft mythos crossover mystery), and Troll Bridge (a man makes a bargain with a bridge troll that wants to eat him). All of them are solid stories, and the comic adaptations are generally also solid.
I’m also certain I had previously read The Problem of Susan and Other Stories, a musing on late-in-life Susan, many years after Narnia leaves her behind; and a few other fairytale-based yarns. These were also adaptations of prose stories, but the art was very familiar, so I think it must have been in another bundle.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties was definitely new to me, though it’s in the same vein of a short story that juxtaposes something normal (a nervous teenage boy who wants to talk to girls) and something otherworldly (the girls are all aliens on Earth as some sort of cultural exchange). It doesn’t feel quite as tightly thought through as some of the others—it feels like there’s more that should have been explored, or perhaps slightly less, if that makes sense.
Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire is a satirical take on the difficulties of writing when one lives in a world of gothic horror. The art is particularly reminiscent of Sandman.
Harlequin Valentine – A brightly-color harlequin, apparently a spirit of some sort, stalks a human woman in a lighthearted but utterly terrifying way. She recognizes his role as the Harlequin and turns the tables on him. I quite like the painted-photograph artwork here.
Likely Stories is a collection of four short stories, all of which I don’t recall reading before. I don’t think I had realized this, but Gaiman has a tendency to “wrap” some of his shorter stories in larger tales of “people telling stories”. Murder Mysteries does it most boldly, but he uses it in The Problem of Susan and Other Stories and here as well.
The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch feels like it was part of a larger story and was cut down to the parts Gaiman thought worked—Miss Finch herself doesn’t get enough screen time to make her departure sufficiently noteworthy, and the story seems to end abruptly with less commentary than I would have expected. “Hey, remember that time a vaguely-unpleasant woman we never met before went to a show with us and mysteriously disappeared?” “Yeah, whatever. No one would believe it, eat your sushi.”
Snow, Glass, Apples is a retelling of “Snow White,” from the perspective of a sympathetic queen, because the girl is a terrifying vampire. Which might have been better as part of Creatures of the Night, which is a pair of stories, one of a black cat who protects his chosen humans from the curse of the Devil, and one of a girl believed to be the child of owls. (Kind of a random pairing, honestly.)
Only the End of the World Again is a Lovecraft pastiche starring a werewolf who has recently moved to Innsmouth. It’s okay, and I think I might have seen it played as a game of Werewolf: The Apocalypse before. I was mildly irritated by the deceptive pdf—the story is only a prestige-format ~50 pages, like the majority of these books, but the pdf includes sketch pages of the entire book, bulking it to more than twice its actual size. (And honestly, the art isn’t actually that great; that much sketchbook is absolutely not justified.)
Norse Mythology (Volumes 1-2) lends itself particularly well to this format, because each of the story-myths is a standalone short story and there’s lots of cool stuff to draw. (Of course, Thor and Loki look a lot like their Marvel Comics counterparts…)
American Gods (Volumes 1-3) is a full adaptation of the novel, and credit to Gaiman that as someone who writes both comics and novel, he really understands how to translate from one medium to the other. It’s been long enough since I originally read it that I’d forgotten a lot of the smaller plot points (and some of the larger ones), so this was a particularly fun re-read.
Oh, and I’m reasonably certain I’ve bounced off the piecemeal art and fragmented text of Signal to Noise before, and I bounced off it again here.
Overall: I mean, Neil Gaiman is very good at what he does. Some of these stories are great and some are only okay, but they’re pretty much all entertaining. Do they need to be graphic novels rather than prose? Not really, but they aren’t hurt by it either, and a few ( Norse Mythology in particular) did benefit from the artwork.
