Product Description

Featuring the popular characters from the award-winning Sandman series, THE SANDMAN: ENDLESS NIGHTS reveals the legend of the Endless, a family of magical and mythical beings who exist and interact in the real world.Born at the beginning of time, Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delirium and Destruction are seven brothers and sisters who each lord over atheir respective realms.In this highly imaginative book that boasts diverse styles of breathtaking art, these seven peculiar and powerful siblings each reveal more about their true-being as they star int heir own tales of curiosity and wonder.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #645966 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Released on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
With The Sandman: Endless Nights, bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to the characters (and medium) that made him famous. It's a collection of seven short stories, each illustrated by some of the best artists working in contemporary comics (eg, Frank Quitely, Glenn Fabry and Milo Manara) and focusing on the Endless--the anthropomorphic manifestations of seven universal concepts: Death, Desire, Dream, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and Destiny. So, it's a collection of fantasy stories, but don't let that put you off. Gaiman is much more than a typical fantasy storyteller--his strength has always been his ability to ground his epic concepts within a sympathetically human framework. That's one of the reasons why the original Sandman series was so successful--nowadays, thanks to the work of creators like Neil Gaiman (and, of course, Alan Moore), it's difficult to remember a time when comics (or graphic novels, or sequential storytelling, or whatever people want to call them nowadays) weren't taken very seriously as a "grown-up" medium.

That said, Endless Nights is a bit hit and miss. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best story here is Dream ("The Heart of a Star"), where Gaiman and artist Miguelanxo Prado revisit the Sandman's protagonist and tell a short, poignant love story from the character's past, carefully constructed to please fans without baffling newcomers. "15 Portraits of Despair", with Barron Storey's art and Dave McKean's designs, is not a story but a collection of darkly-toned, disturbing vignettes, while Bill Sienkiewicz's art for Delirium ("Going Inside") is appropriately manic and unhinged. But, unfortunately, some of the stories here lack any real depth: Frank Quitely's art for Destiny ("Endless Nights") adds a grandiose scale to a story that is little more than a character sketch (albeit a beautiful one), while the Destruction story ("On the Peninsula") squanders what could have been an interesting idea if Gaiman had had more time and space to flesh it out. Still, Endless Nights should be enough to keep Sandman fans happy, while acting as a useful introduction to these characters for any newcomers. And if it gets more people reading Sandman, that can only be a good thing. --Robert Burrow

From Publishers Weekly
Now that he's a bestselling fantasy novelist, Gaiman returns to the comics series that made his reputation with this new volume of seven gorgeously illustrated stories. Gaiman specializes in inventing fantastic allegories for the quotidian, in a voice that casually shifts between uneasy realism and Borgesian grandeur. In Sandman cosmology, "The Endless" are seven immortal siblings who personify abstract concepts: Dream, Death, Destiny and so on. This work devotes a story to each of them, drawn in distinctly different styles by an all-star lineup of American, British and European cartoonists and fine artists. Gaiman is famous for writing to his artists' strengths, and he does so here. P. Craig Russell draws the surreal fantasia "Death and Venice" with the opulent brio of his opera adaptations. "What I've Tasted of Desire" is a darkly sexual fable, painted by Milo Manara in the style of his more X-rated work. A couple of the stories find Gaiman working in a more experimental mode than usual, notably "Fifteen Portraits of Despair," a set of anecdotes and prose poems accompanied by Barron Storey's tormented, abstract drawings and paintings. Longtime comics fans will notice plenty of inside jokes in "The Heart of a Star," but most of this book is a red carpet-or perhaps a Persian rug-rolled out for Gaiman's prose readers to see his visions turned into lush, dramatic images.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
When Gaiman ended his phenomenally popular comic-book series The Sandman in 1996, he promised to eventually revisit the characters. Now he keeps that promise, with results that are everything his fans could have hoped for. The series centered on the brooding title character, also known as Dream, who rules over the realm humans visit when they sleep, and also dealt with his godlike siblings Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction, and Destiny, collectively known as the Endless. In this book, each of them is the focus of a separate story, illustrated by one of an array of world-class comics artists whose approaches range from the relative straightforwardness of P. Craig Russell (see Isolation and Illusion [BKL Ap 15 03]) to the wildly disturbing work of Barron Storey. The stories themselves vary, too, from accounts of mortals' encounters with the Endless to depictions of those demigods' lofty existence. Gaiman's eagerly awaited return to his most successful creation shows his mastery of the characters and their world to be intact, and if these shorter stories don't allow for the complexity of the original series, they still demonstrate the brilliance of his concept and the elegance of his storytelling. Gordon Flagg
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