2007 Reading Challenge: Book 42
The Sandman: The Dream Hunters – Yoshitaka Amano and Neil Gaiman
This, as you will perceive from the title, is a Sandman story, although you wouldn’t necessarily realise it on first glance. Gaiman’s collaboration with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano has produced, rather than your standard-issue comic book, an object that is exceedingly beautiful in its own right. Full of exquisite paintings of all shapes and sizes, the quality of the artist’s contributions, and the foresight of the publishers in making this such a lovely book, means Gaiman’s prose story (as opposed to comic-book script – this really is a departure) needs to work very hard to compete.
Luckily, it is equal to the challenge, and it is positively unsettling how easily this seemingly-traditional Japanese folk tale segues into the Sandman universe. The story starts out by telling the tale of how a fox and a badger (the Japanese kitsune and tanuki) set out to make life difficult for a young Buddhist monk tending an out-of-the-way temple. It soon becomes apparent that fate has more trouble in store for the monk than the fox and the badger could possibly have imagined. Before you know it, our old mate Dream has turned up and… well, I’d better leave something for you to find out for yourself.
If you had to come up with a one-word summary of Neil Gaiman’s style it would undoubtedly be “mythic”. (How many authors can be summarised in a word?) This story continues that theme – the seemingly trivial wager between the two animals that starts the story is skillfully ramped up into a truly universal story in a way that appears seamless. It’s fascinating to see the Dreamlord portrayed by an artist from a totally different tradition both for the differences and the similarities that are portrayed. It’s very hard to see how anyone but the most blinkered and die-hard comics fan would be disappointed for this. For everyone else it’s a visual and imaginative treat on a scale not often encountered.
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