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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
Sandman and Watchmen are both pinnacles of comic storytelling, the blending of image and text to create a new method to tell stories.
Sandman started a sjust a horror comic, and became something bigger as Neil Gaiman matured in his writing style.
The Watchmen is not a critique of golden era superheros. Everyone gets this wrong. It is a crititique of the comic book companies themselves and how they portray these "heroes." And it rules all.
and Borges would have liked it. Borges was blind though, so he would have missed like 75% of the story as it is told visually.
If you had read Watchmen when it came out, as I did, it would have blown your mind away.
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Well, Watchmen did kinda blow my mind when I first read it, to be honest.
Also wow, I always assumed I was one of the older people on this board, but if you were reading Watchmen when it came out and Symbols is old enough to have a chip on his shoulder about millennials
then perhaps I was off.
Anyway, I do agree that Watchmen is often misunderstood, but it’s been a few years since the last full read-through (around the time that Doomsday Clock crap was happening I think), so it’s not super fresh in my mind.
Sandman, on the other hand … I actually don’t think I read the whole thing until SYMBOLS told me that any fan of Gaiman’s novels absolutely can’t not read Sandman. I took that to heart and read every volume of the thing including the early ones I’d previously read, and my GOD what a fucking masterpiece.
Just an absolute literary achievement.
Yes, it did broaden and grow over time. You stopped seeing quite the same shocking gore and Justice League members stopped popping up, and it became more of an almost anthropological exploration of the meaning of myth (Gaiman’s all-time favorite subject). So yeah, it grew more nuanced and refined as the story progressed, but in my opinion the series as a whole just absolutely shits bombs on pretty much anything else in comics.
Watchmen is definitive in one way, Sandman is definitive in another. But I don’t think there’s really any comparison when it comes to the quality of the writing. Alan Moore is brilliant, but the prose in Sandman is unmatched.
Sandman and Saga. Those are the best things to come from the graphic novel medium in my opinion. And Saga’s not done, so there’s a chance it will take the top spot for me.
ETA:
OH! ROB!! … Have you ever read Alan Moore’s “Miracleman”? (Which coincidentally Neil Gaiman attempted to take over once Moore was done, but Gaiman never had a chance to finish his story.)
Anyway, Moore’s Miracleman is fucking INSANE. I think it preceded his other big works, and I think it got his “recreate/reimagine comic tropes/characters and consider the real-world implications of their existence” juices flowing.
If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s probably my favorite thing he’s done. It’s absolutely bonkers and twisted as hell and there’s an up-close-and-personal scene of a woman giving birth to a super-baby which is unnecessarily graphic and it’s got some Dr. Manhattan-style post-human philosophizing. And it’s meta as all hell. The thing is simply not of this world.