My favorite Sandman volume thus far, Gaiman managed to create an interesting and nuanced thread at the core of this story and surround it with his unique short stories about people and lives and myth and magic. It also had the best pencils the series has seen thus far, with the incredible Jill Thompson bringing the Endless and their weird, awesome world to life. All with McKean’s unrivaled covers that are fascinating and creepy and perfect.
What makes this story one of the best I’ve ever read was Gaiman’s ability to make the Endless feel really human whilst still remaining distinct and incomprehensible. I also really appreciated the subtlety with which they (and especially Dream) are changing and evolving, both as individuals and in the way they regard others (mostly the humans) as they interact more with them. He is also able to make the side characters, those who appear only for a couple of pages, at the beginning or the end, to feel real, feel important. He has the ability to make me care about most, if not all, of the characters that make up The Sandman.
Thompson’s art was key to my love for the Endless, being the artist that has best represented them. Her version of Desire was incredible, being the first to truly make it neither a man nor a woman nor both but something different. Her iterations of Dream and Delirium were also fascinating, as were her Despair and Destiny. Vince Locke’s inks and Danny Vozzo’s colors are also worth noting, as they are key to the overall appearance of the art.
Todd Klein’s lettering also needs mentioning, as he is able to make each character seem unique just by using different kinds of lettering. I especially like his work with Dream and Delirium’s letters, making them really pop and add to that character voice that was set up by the art and the story.
Last but not least, Dave McKean’s covers continue to be some of the best the medium has ever seen and pieces of art on their own right. His collages mixing reality and fiction, this time with brief sentences, create a unique experience of lyricism and creepy surrealism that serves as a great way to start each issue of this series.
Overall, I really liked this volume of The Sandman and would probably rank it amongst the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever encountered. Furthermore, the series’ unique blend of story and myth and magic and metaliterature makes it one of the boldest and most innovative stories I’ve experienced. As Peter Straub wrote in the afterword for this volume in 1994, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is.”
Spoiler Commentary:
Brief Lives is, at its core, a story about change; about Dream killing his son, about the Endless finding their stranded brother, about a woman who was a goddess of love and now is no more, about a man who lived fifteen thousand years dying in a construction accident, about things not being the same always, about time happening, about lives, always brief, even when endless.
Change, the infamous alteration of the status quo we all fear. Because change is difficult, disrupting and problematic. It generates chaos and instability. But it is unavoidable. As Jean (Moebius) Giraud once said in an interview; life is about having problems and dealing with them. It is this everyday concept brought into the lives of gods and mortals and Endless that makes Brief Lives one of The Sandman’s better stories; you understand the story even if you can’t comprehend its scope, or the subtlety and brilliance with which it was crafted.
Delirium is insane until someone else breaks. She can’t talk to people because she loses track of the conversation. She asks questions about words and is nonsensical and childlike. Yet, when Dream breaks after his conversation with Destiny, she becomes sane, because they can’t both be delirious. She is also the only one of the three siblings (her, Dream and Destruction) who comprehends Death’s words; sometimes pretending ignorance is the only way to cope with life and the problems it brings to our lives.
Dream denies having changed when Destruction confronts him. He avoids change, denies it, as we all do. Maybe because, in some ways, acknowledging change means dealing with our mortality, our short existence, our brief lives.
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