El arte de Neil Gaiman

Aunque no es la única, confieso que en cuanto he visto esto me he acordado de Darky   

The Art of Neil Gaiman

Hayley Campbell (who, at age seven, worked side-by-side with her father Eddie Campbell on the graphic novel classic "From Hell") has recently published a gorgeous, authoritative book on the myriad artworks created to accompany Neil Gaiman's many works. We proudly present several extracts from her book here.







"People are used to the idea of Death with a sickle and a cape. I wanted to do a Death that would challenge people's conception. I wanted to do the kind of Death that I would want to meet when I die."

As soon as she walked into the city square on page three of "The Sound of Her Wings" and bounced a baguette off her moping brother's teased hair, fans fell in love with her.

Nobody could help it; Death stole the show. The idea that at the end of your life you get to walk off holding the hand of a girl like that was somehow life-affirming, like everything would turn out all right in the end. Gaiman thinks one of the reasons she became so instantly popular was due to the fact that she was simply very nice in a time when there were very few nice people in comics. Characters were largely colorless or full of angst. "She's sensible, not naive, but innocent. She has the innocence of one who has been there and done that and come out the other side. It's almost a sort of holy innocence. She's the kind of person you'd like to meet and spend a day with."

Death is the peacekeeper among the Endless, likes hot dogs, parties, books with happy endings, and Disney films. She dresses entirely in black, wears too much eyeliner, and was about as far away from comic book characters as you could get. You could see Death in the street, and after Sandman, you frequently did. It was kind of Neil's fault -- he got a lot of women to read comics.

The point that I realized that was happening was about year two or year three, and I'd be going to places like the San Diego comic book convention. Fat, unwashed gentlemen in stained T-shirts would come up to me and extend their hands in gratitude and say, "Let me shake your hand! You brought women into my store." And there was a part of me that always wanted to go, "If you sweep it, they'll come back!"
What was great about Sandman was you had a comic that guys would hand to their girlfriends and say, "Look, read this." And the girlfriends would read it and say, "Have you got any more?" When the relationship would collapse, the girls would take the Sandmans, and they would hand them to their next boyfriend or their next girlfriend. Slowly, they became this sexually transmitted thing. Sandman spread. I was incredibly proud of that. It had always seemed to me just peculiar that half the human race didn't read comics. I was writing a comic for everybody, trying to keep a gender balance of the characters and trying to write something that wasn't the preadolescent male power fantasy (Steel, 2011).

Young gothy women wearing ankhs and eyeliner would drop in at the comic shop, pick up an issue of Sandman, and walk straight out. A lot of them bought other things of course, but there were those who were simply there for Morpheus and his sister.
Gaiman had been thinking about giving Death her very own miniseries for a while, until Karen Berger phoned in 1991 and gave him a reason to actually do it.





Before the whole summer convention season, I got a phone call from Karen -- and I'd been talking, actually, mainly with Mike Dringenberg about doing a Death miniseries for a while -- and she said, "Well, we're just about to do a poll, and we're going to put a load of DC supporting characters into this poll for the summer convention season and let the people at the cons just vote for who they want to see." And I said, "So?" And she said, "Well, we were thinking of putting Death on." And I said, "Okay, and . . . ?" And she said, "The thing is, if we put Death on, she'll win. So basically, do you want to do the series now? You know, do you want to do it within a year? If you don't want to do it within a year, we won't put her on the list."

So I thought about it and I figured, okay, it was a nice excuse to actually get me to turn the story from a nice idea and something I wanted to do one day, into something I was definitely going to do. So I said, sure, put her on the list. And she won. The fans voted for Death (Kraft, 1993).





Death: The High Cost of Living came out in three monthly parts from March 1993. Chris Bachalo, whose first professional comics job was on Sandman #12 in The Doll's House, where he got to draw old Bronze Age Sandman, jumped at the chance to do pencils. Mark Buckingham took on the inking duties. "What's interesting is it doesn't actually look like Chris Bachalo and it doesn't look like Mark Buckingham. I'm not sure who it actually does look like, it's sort of like a punk Brian Bolland or something" (Kraft, 1993).

The basic premise is much like Death Takes a Holiday, the old 1934 film starring Fredric March: Death takes on a physical form for one day every 100 years to better understand what it's like to be mortal. She spends her day eating things and getting stuff for free, and "wandering around with a young man by the name of Sexton Furnival, who's about sixteen and considers life unfair, not least because he got called Sexton Furnival." From Sexton's point of view, Didi is just some sixteen-year-old girl who thinks she's Death, figuring that anybody who claims to be the incarnation of death is probably nuts. And the thing is, she might well be just that. There's an element of doubt in the story in which it is "perfectly possibly that she really is just a young lady by the name of Didi, whose entire family was killed a few months back in a rather nasty accident, and who has gone a little bit crazy" (Kraft, 1993).

The thing that sets the story apart from Sandman -- which can, at its darkest, feel like a never-ending sleepless three a.m. -- is that Death is actually funny, which is something Gaiman hoped that people would pick up on. It's quirky and fun and reads in an entirely different way from an episode of Sandman. "It is genuinely terribly funny. And it's got this kind of, I don't know, Catcher in the Rye-ish feel to it in a funny kind of way. At least in terms of Sexton, who in some ways is the hero, and in other ways you just want to slap him around the face and stand him in a corner until he cheers up. You know, ‘What have you got to be weltschmertz-y about'" (Kraft, 1993)?

Didi, on the other hand, is so cheery she doesn't even get upset with old Mad Hettie who harasses her all day -- the one day she's allowed to wander around like a regular person -- because, as she explains to Sexton: "If you know someone really well, it's hard to stay mad at them for very long. I know everybody really well."





The film adaptation has been floating around since the mid-nineties, occasionally being kicked around different production companies, kicked back to the same pro-duction companies, greenlit, then extinguished, and then greenlit again. Said Neil: "Death: The High Cost of Living has been in development heck, which is like development hell but slightly more encouraging" (Sanderson, 2008). He has written several drafts and would like to direct himself. He hung out with Guillermo del Toro on the set of Hellboy 2 to learn how to make a film. But plans for Death change all the time. "It will happen unless it doesn't."

In 1997 the same creative team put together another miniseries called Death: The Time of Your Life, which brought back the lesbian couple Foxglove and Hazel from the Sandman arc A Game of You.

Death gallery





Said Gaiman in 1993: "We did Death: The High Cost of Living, which, categorically and with absolutely no contenders, was the bestselling mature readers comic there's ever been. Everybody would love more Death. And Chris Bachalo has set aside time toward the end of 1994 to begin drawing another Death story. But in the meantime, everybody seems to want more Death stuff, and we don't have another story for them. So it's like, what are we going to do here? The Superman Gallery and the Batman Gallery were very well received, and they primarily consisted of reprint material. So with this one, we thought, let's do a Death Gallery. I know she's one of the favorite characters for convention sketches, booklets, so okay, let's give people a chance to draw her. And let's assemble a great cast of artists to do it" (Previews, 1993).

The Death Gallery was released as a comic and had a run in a comic book art gallery in New York City's SoHo. It included pieces by lots of people, most of whom never had a chance to draw Death at any other point aside from convention sketchbooks.

El artículo completo aquí

No me extraña   
Thanks a lot. Necesitaré mucho tiempo y un diccionario para sacarle la sustancia al artículo. Pero bueno, todo es ponerse.

Prueba quizá a traducir la página completa con google u otro traductor. No son perfectos desde luego, pero pueden ser una ayuda.

  guapa. Reconozco que a veces le echo mano a los traductores, pero casi que prefiero ponerme y después comparar, pues me cuesta mucho entenderlos  

Gracias Anabelee   

¡Gracias, Anabelee!
(no sé inglés, pero lo que no entienda, me lo invento )