Enter Sandman
11/14/2005 @ 4:24 pmThe writers and artists of comic books may live in the dead zone between novels and film, borrowing narrative technique from the one and visual vocabulary from the other- but that dead zone is defined by King, who gave Johnny Smith the power to see the past and future, and to step into alternate realities. The pages and panels of a comic book allow for infinite variations of composition and dramatic sequence, giving comic writers and artists the power to routinely rewrite storytelling physics, to not only stop time, but to treat time as a liquid and spin ripples in it. To make our eyes track from right to left and left to right at once, to read along verticals and diagonals- dreamweaving stunts that filmmakers and novelists rarely attempt and less often pull off. The most accomplished writers and artists in the narrative dead zone cause us to reconsider how we tell stories, how we hear and see our dreams. Some of these guys, who spin new myths for a living and walk in the long shadows cast by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, have become myths themselves. Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, J. O’ Barr, and Neil Gaiman, among others, dragged the comic industry from its death bed in the 1980’s and ’90s and laid the groundwork for the Hollywood behemoth that comics, for good or ill, have become since…
interview with Neil Gaiman now live at The Cult.
go.