The Sandman: Act II by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Graphic Novels Are Still Better, But-- The Sandman Act II (2021) is Dirk Maggs’ audio adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels Season of Mists (issues 21-28, 1990-91), in which Dream tries to right a 10,000-years-old wrong done to a former lover and ends up becoming the reluctant new owner of Hell and A Game of You (issues 32-37, 1991-92), in which Barbie’s dream world begins merging with NYC, leading to some complications and adventures for her, her dream companions, and her real world neighbors. Both story arcs are moving, frightening, funny, imaginative, original, and unpredictable. Wanda is one of the first sympathetically depicted transgender characters in popular culture (though in the early 1990s Gaiman couldn’t get past biological gender as determining destiny). Before and after A Game of You come seven of the fine stand-alone short stories from Fables and Reflections (issues 29-31, 38-40, 50, 1991-93): “Thermidor”: Lady Johanna Constantine, Dream, the head of Orpheus, and Robspierre converge during the French Revolution’s Reign of Reason. “August”: Augustus Caesar does some pleasant slumming and some unpleasant reminiscing, while planning the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. “Three Septembers and a January”: Dream knows better than his siblings Despair, Delirium, and Desire what a failed entrepreneur in 19th century SF really wants. “The Hunt”: the virtues of staying with your own people in/from the old country pale for teenagers in contemporary New Jersey. “Soft Places”: young Marco Polo is lost in a desert where “the geographies of dream intrude upon the real” and meets Rusticello of Pisa--who is dreaming whom? “A Parliament of Rooks”: Cain, Abel, Eve, and a special baby enjoy a storytelling tea party. “Ramadan”: Haroun al Raschid wants to preserve Baghdad, the Heavenly City, the jewel of the Arabs, forever in dreams. The long story arcs and short stories are imaginative, funny, moving, and unpredictable and express important themes (e.g., we carry our own hell with us; we should accept people who are different from us; the world of the imagination is real). To adapt the graphic novels to a radio drama, voice actors, sound effects, and music are employed. The text is virtually identical to that of the graphic novels, the main differences being that some descriptive text, especially at the beginnings of scenes, has been added to compensate for the lack of pictures in the aural medium, as when Loki’s wife is said to be “thin to the point of emaciation” and the Perth beach on which Lucifer is reclining is described. Interestingly, some of the imagery in the audio adaptation is stronger than in the graphic novels, perhaps because of early 1990s censorship. For instance, the original picture of the total-body pierced demon of hell doesn’t reveal his pierced double penises, but Gaiman the narrator relishes relating that detail in the 2021 audiobook. Most of the voice acting is excellent: James McAvoy as dry, wry, and gloomy British Dream, Kat Dennings as perky punky American Death, Michael Sheen as jaded Lucifer, and the demons of hell, Cain and Abel, Barbie and her friends, and Eve. (I do wonder why the Aesir have Gaelic accents.) As for Gaiman as narrator, I like his manner and voice, BUT I did notice that he tends to pause oddly (almost distractingly) in places where no commas appear in the text: e.g., “since his father [pause] left the country,” “reading a tattered copy [pause] of The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and “The school [pause] is in the south of England.” There are plenty of effective sound effects: Thor smashing a boulder, Dream cutting off Lucifer’s wings, a mother bearing a baby, etc. But there is also plenty of overdone music, especially the Tim Burton movie-type synthesizer stuff that tries too hard to enhance moods and introduces each chapter. One of the most visually impressive features of the graphic novels that the audiobooks cannot approximate is the varied fonts and balloons for different characters: Desire’s erotic font, Dream’s gloomy black speech balloons, Lucifer’s elegant demonic font, the angels’ angelic cursive fonts, Delirium’s giddy colored speech bubbles and font, Matthew the Raven’s jagged caw-like font and balloons, Order’s computer font text, the “Arabic” calligraphy of “Ramadan,” and so on. Some other things are also more impressive visually than aurally, like the dramatic double page spread depicting the shattering of the Porpentine, with small figures dwarfed by a blinding blast of yellow aurora borealis and stars, or the page where a shooting star morphs into Morpheus’ eye close-up, and he’s there with Barbie et al in the Land. Some things are better left to the imagination than physically heard, as when in the original “Thermidor” the story and pictures potently evoke the strange power of Orpheus’ song, while in the audio version, we hear a Greek voice singing a timeless kind of song, but then in the conclusion it’s replaced by soaring (overdone) synth movie score music. The song in the graphic novel is more marvelous in my imagination than actually hearing it is. And *seeing* Wanda looking beautiful and natural and happy with a cheerful goth Death at the end of A Game of You moved me more than listening to the scene. A last example: all the sound effects and pseudo-Arabic music of “Ramadan” can’t approximate P. Craig Russell’s beautiful art in the graphic novel, and the ending shift to present day Gulf War ravaged Baghdad is more potent visually than aurally. All that said, imagining sublime or horrible things by hearing them described by excellent voice actors may be more affecting than seeing them depicted by mediocre graphic artists. The art quality in Season of Mists is not SO great, so some images of hell or of Dream’s castle, etc., don’t look awesome enough. Finally, both versions are excellent in their own ways. Dream’s incantatory words to unmake the Land are left to readers’ imaginations in the graphic novel, as Barbie says, “I don’t know what language the words were in, but it felt like I ought to have understood them—or rather that part of me did understand them, on some deep, buried level.” In the audio version Dream directly says, “Land, I unmake you.” It’s a powerful moment, but the graphic novel leaves more to our imagination aurally while providing much visually. As the audio version leaves more to our imagination visually while providing much aurally. Why not read the original graphic novels first and then listen to the audiobook adaptations if you want to hear a visual medium adapted into an aural one? View all my reviews
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The Sandman by Dirk Maggs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Fine Adaptation, but the Graphic Novels Are Best For The Sandman (2020), Dirk Maggs adapts to an audio format Neil Gaiman’s first three Sandman graphic novel collections. I reread the graphic novels while listening to the audio version and renewed my appreciation of the former while being (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the latter. Preludes and Nocturnes (1991; issues 1-8 1988-89) introduces Dream, aka the Sandman or Morpheus, one of the Endless (his siblings are Death, Desire, Delirium, Despair, Destruction, and Destiny), anthropomorphized aspects of life predating all gods. In this first story arc Dream is mistakenly captured by a 20th-century black magician who wanted to capture Death, resulting in strange effects on mortals when Dream isn’t able to give people dreams. Dream manages to escape after seventy-two years of imprisonment and subsequently attempts to retrieve his powerful artifacts, including a trip to hell, an adventure with John Constantine, a duel with the horrible and pathetic Dr. Dee, and a neat conversation with his cheerful sister, Death. The Doll’s House (issues 9-16 1989-1990) continues the first story arc as Dream puts things back in order in his realm the Dreaming that had been messed up by his long absence, including dealing with a “dream vector” and four “major arcana” gone AWOL from the Dreaming and making mischief in our world. The arc begins with stories introducing Dream’s former lover Nada and his one (at first mortal) friend Hob, goes on to depict Rose Walker’s travel with her mother to England to meet her grandmother Unity, and then features a creepy serial killers’ convention (not unlike a comic book convention), an abused youth, and a moving superhero parody. Dream Country (issues 17-20, 1990) is a set of four standalone short stories: Calliope (an ambitious writer discovers that there are worse things than writer’s block), Façade (a former CIA operative tries to come to terms with being a “metamorph”), Dream of 1000 Cats (the dreams of our feline friends are revealed), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare’s troupe performs A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the King and Queen of Fairies and their court). Maggs includes about all of the elements from the plots of the graphic novels, while trying to approximate in an audio radio drama format the information and atmosphere evoked by artistic images and styles and layouts and so on. Their adaptation retains pretty much all the text from the graphic novels, much of it quite witty, cool, beautiful, or challenging, like: “Light drips from the ruby like drops of blood,” “It is never only a dream,” and “It was a dark and stormy nightmare.” The main text added by the audio adaptation is description to set the stage and characters’ appearances etc. For instance, an era marker is spoken each time Dream meets Hob a century later, whereas in the graphic novel each later era is conveyed by pictures of clothes and references in the dialogue (e.g., Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth, slavery). The audio adaptation adds sound effects, like Rose flying on a jet liner, Rose typing a letter, and the Corinthian eating eyeballs. It also adds music by James Hannegan—too much—grandiose synthesizer music to start and end chapters like Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton movie soundtracks on steroids. That said, when restrained during quiet and moving scenes, as in The Sound of Her Wings, the music is effective. The voice acting is mostly fine. Luckily, the moments when average actors try and fail to impersonate famous people like John Wayne are few. Most importantly, James McAvoy as Dream is perfect: lugubrious, intelligent, wry, condescending, and vulnerable. My first reaction to hearing American actress Kat Dennings doing Death was that she should be British like her brother! And they cut her line from the graphic novel mocking Dick Van Dyke’s atrocious British accent in Mary Poppins. But Dennings is finally appealing as the perky punky Death. Except for Calliope, the other major characters like John Constantine, Lucifer, various his demons, Lucien (Simon Vance!), Cain and Abel, Dr. Dee, etc., all sound great. There are things that the graphic novels do better or more impressively. For example: When the layout shifts from vertical to horizontal when Rose falls into a dream. When the art style suddenly changes to Windsor McCay’s Little Nemo. When Rose’s motley housemates dream in completely different art styles. When Dr. Dee is suddenly a small figure on a full blank white page. When Dream gets his purpose back in a ¾-page picture with gold behind his outflung arms. The audio drama cannot replicate the impact of such visual moments (made potent by form and color and layout and text in the graphic novel), even with voice acting, sound effects, and music. The audio version also cannot approximate the different colors of the speech balloons and the different fonts of their texts, like Dream’s black balloons, Lucifer’s ornate font, and Delirium’s multi-colored balloons and meandering fonts. Voice acting may try to simulate that kind of thing, but it is an example of something that comics can do uniquely well (but that most other comics don’t take enough advantage of). Dream of 1000 cats is a story that works best as a graphic novel, because it leaves up to our imaginations what talking cats would sound like, whereas voice actors are too obviously people, so the fantasy doesn’t work well in audio form. There are, to be sure, places where the audio adaptation is more impressive than the graphic novel, like the scene where Rose and her mother meet their grandmother/mother Unity. The fine voice acting and subtle and beautiful music make the scene more moving than when I read it in the graphic novel. Finally, I confirmed my suspicion that the graphic novel is superior as a medium for Gaiman’s story, and that the special strong points of the aural medium are not as impressive as those of the comics medium. But Dirk Maggs and co. did the best they could with translating it from one to the other, and I will listen to the future ones they produce. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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