I have shamelessly stolen used this concept of community blogging to start my own form of “stuff <some people> like”. Mine has a twist though – you guys don’t get to contribute posts, mwahaha.
Ahem. So, Neil Gaiman. What this really boils down to is that geeks really like comics, and he happens to be the most high profile graphic novelist, mostly due to his Hollywood activities. Which have incidentally been disastrous. Beowulf was a fun experiment in motion capture but both casting and script were horrific. Just to give you an idea, Beowulf is this ace 13th century Danish epic hero who has a magic sword and kills dragons as Anglo-Saxon heroes are wont to do.
This is who they cast to play Beowulf.
Ray ‘I’m a second-hand car dealer’ Winstone. He also decided that the Danish accent would be best conveyed by a hybrid of Welshish, Scottish, Irish and cockney. Still, motion capture did wonderful things although apparently there’s no escaping the fact that Angelina Jolie obviously has fish genes, even in cartoon.
But die-hard fans still remember the early 90s glory days of the Sandman series. Beautiful artwork combined with rich, intelligent intertextuality took the medium to unforeseen artistic heights. So much so, he won the World Fantasy Award for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – the first Gaiman I ever read. For all you English students out there, it’s a nice metastory about a performance of Midsummer where real ‘fairies’ decide to take part. There’s also a nice Hamlety twist at the end.
Everyone cool features in the Sandman – Morpheus, king of Dreams, Death, Calliope, plus the odd cameo from the Norse gods. If you even slightly got off on the faux-intellectualism of Harry Potter, it’s worth exploring the Sandman’s multiverse.
