Sandman: The Dream Hunters: adapted by P. Craig Russell from a novella by Neil Gaiman and Yoshiaka Amano (2009): Writer-artist Russell adapted Neil Gaiman's illustrated 1999 Sandman novella into comic-book form to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first issue of Gaiman's hyper-popular Sandman series. The novella itself was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sandman. What will the 30th anniversary bring?
Told as if it were an old Japanese folk story (it isn't, though Gaiman's afterword to the 1999 novella convinced a lot of people, including Russell, that it was), The Dream Hunters chronicles the adventures of a female fox, a young monk, and a magician searching for a cure for his chronic fear. It's set in a legendary Japan of animal spirits, demons, and witches. The Sandman himself -- Dream, or Morpheus -- plays a supporting role, as he periodically did in his own comic-book series. The narrative focus is squarely upon the fox and the monk.
Russell's art is pleasingly legendary in its own way, as sometimes cartoony and sometimes nightmarish demons rub shoulders with realistically rendered humans, a slightly anthropomorphic fox, and some truly horrible witches. Or are they oracles? Russell's faces are always expressive, that expressiveness the product of just a few lines properly placed.
The colouring by Lovern Kindzierski apparently tries to replicate the palette available to Japanese print-makers of a certain era. It's a lovely, muted wash of pastels and faded primary colours. Much of the wording remains Gaiman's, but Russell has done a fine job of selecting what to keep in language and what to render as art. All in all, this is a marvelous addition to the Sandman library, and worth owning whether or not one already has the novella. Highly recommended.
Iron Wolf: Fires of the Revolution, written by Howard Chaykin and John Francis Moore, illustrated by Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell (1991): Baroque science-fiction story set in Chaykin's reworked version of DC's 1950's and early 1960's science-fiction stories. Humanity has gone to the stars and fractured into various empires and archipelagoes, many of them with their own 'Earth' at the centre. In one of these, the Renaissance-flavoured Empire Galaktika, Iron Wolf and a group of rebels with different aims seek to overthrow the corrupt Imperial government.
There's a fair amount of wit here, not the least of which is the revelation that the 'Empire Galaktika' is pretty small beans -- one solar system, a handful of planets -- swelled to self-importance primarily because of its long isolation from the rest of interstellar human civilization. Iron Wolf teams up with some explorers from those larger, outside civilizations, and revolutionary shenanigans ensue. Chaykin and longtime writerly collaborator give us the wry, sarcastic dialogue Chaykin first offered in his seminal American Flagg series in the 1980's. The team-up of a fairly young Mike Mignola and P. Craig Russell makes for lovely art.
Chaykin's introduction notes the influence of oddball space operas that include Dune and Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality stories, in which far-future tech mixes with social mores and structures borrowed from humanity's past. Chaykin has the 'Empire' and other little empires consciously borrow from humanity's social past, a mark in part of how bored certain pockets of humanity have become with the way things are.
Beyond the 'Empire', events chronicled in Chaykin and Jose Luis Garcia Lopez's Twilight miniseries have given humanity the curse of immortality, and one of the characters from that longer, larger epic shows up here. It would be nice if DC allowed for Chaykin's return to this particular universe, representing as it does one of the more successful attempts at adult science fiction in the history of mainstream comic books. Recommended.
