howl_at_the_sun

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/05/quick-useful-sandman-slipcase-post.html

A hasty post...

There's a slipcased set of Sandman on the way. It's going to be published in November. I'm so happy. This is something that I have been asking DC to make for a very long time, and I am genuinely thrilled it's going to exist. It will look almost like this. (If you look carefully you'll notice that the final book in the box shown here is not The Wake. That's because that edition of SANDMAN: The Wake has not been published yet.)

(Here's the Amazon listing for it -- they've dropped it from $200 to $125. And I'm sure there are other such deals elsewhere on the web.)

DC are also going to be selling the Slipcase with some copies of The Wake. So if you have the rest of the  books already, you can simply put them into the slipcase.

According to Bleeding Cool, retailers have until this weekend to get their orders in for November to guarantee that they'll get them. So if you want one, either if you want a copy of The Wake with a Slipcase, or the set of all the books, you should talk to your Local Comic Shop now. (How do you find your local comic shop? You could always use http://www.comicshoplocator.com/)

(The current edition of paperbacks contains the same colouring as the Absolute editions, although, obviously not all the extra material in each of the Absolutes. If you already bought the Absolute Sandmans 1-4, feel proud of yourself. You are not required to buy the books again. You are never required to buy again what you already have.)

Originally published at Dylan Meconis. You can comment here or there.

Page 253 now online!

(permalink to this week’s page)

Mother knows best. Or does she?  Maybe next week you’ll find out what that leather neck strap is for, at least…

This weekend I’ll be in beautiful British Columbia, at the first ever Vancouver Comic Arts Festival! You can’t miss me – I’ll be right by the entrance at Table 30. I love Vancouver and I’m really excited to finally have a comics convention that gives me an excuse to visit.

Admission to the Fest is FREE, so Vancouver residents, please come by and support the show! (And avoid international postage on a lot of excellent stuff from me and my fellow American cartoonists.) I’ll see you there!

Originally published at Vylar Kaftan. You can comment here or there.

After my adventures getting to Madison, I was thrilled to keep my original plans of local touring. Anaea Lay picked us up, and we enjoyed brunch with apple mimosas at La Brioche. Then we went to the Forevertron and the Circus Museum, both in Baraboo.

The Forevertron is the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world. It was way cooler than I expected and the pics don’t do it justice. It looked like a giant playground set for kids who’d had their tetanus shots. There was a metal bird orchestra and some giant cherries which needed a Pac-Man. Lots of the sculptures have windchimes, which jangled when the wind blew. There wasn’t much signage for this place, so it felt like a big secret. We all thought it was awesome.

After that, the Circus Museum was pretty close by, and it was equally but differently cool. It was a lot bigger than I expected. In three hours, we saw about half of the place. They had normal museum exhibits about circus history, and they also had old circus wagons–some of them very old. There was a collection of costumes that you could actually touch, and a model train of all the circus cars. My favorite part was the Theatre of Illusion; the magician was very good and his jokes were hilarious. He liked to pretend he was screwing tricks up a lot (of course he wasn’t). We also saw a Big Top show, and the trained Pekinese dogs were cute. The contortionist passed his body through an unstrung tennis racket, which I might have been able to do when I was less than four feet tall.

We ended by picking up Mike Underwood and going for South American food at El Rincon Tico. Oh my god, it was _fabulous_, and I can forgive the slow service and too-hot dining room, because that is the best meal I’ve had in ages. I had a caipirinha, a bean empanada, the vegetarian curry, and Holy Crap Fried Plantains with some sort of caramel sauce. Okay, they weren’t officially called Holy Crap, but I hereby dub them so.

I decided that all the good things from yesterday drained into today, and that was why yesterday sucked so much.

Looking forward to WisCon!

Ten years ago, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh.

It wasn’t Platform 9 3/4, but it might as well have been. My life changed the moment that train pulled out of the brick archways and into the rolling green countryside beyond London–it was just beginning to be autumn then, and the trees were full of crows. I remember thinking about bird magic, auguries, every story I’d ever heard about England and Scotland. I was a tiny thing, a maiden in all but the technical sense. I knew, as the old novels say, nothing of the world. My EuroRail photo looked absurdly, hilariously, preposterously like an illustration of Snow White. I had a bacon sandwich. My mother was with me, a psychopomp in knock-off Prada sunglasses, bearing me across the wall and into the life I didn’t yet know I was in for. It was the first time I wanted something with that desperate, pure fire–and made it happen, by myself, with will and work. After all, if you grow up loving fairy tales and King Arthur and saints who battle monsters, you want the British Isles the way some kids want boyfriends. Edited to add: is that a silly reason to want to go to a country? Yep. Is it a direct outgrowth of the complicated relationship of American culture to British culture? Yep. Was I 21 years old, pretty silly, fully of inchoate dreamy nonsense and trying to learn how to be a real person? Absolutely. In fact, a big part of that growing up was going to a place I'd dreamed about and figuring out what reality there was like.

I lived there for something over a year. I came back to America for stupid reasons–but that’s what you do in your twenties. Make stupid decisions while meaning so earnestly well.

My interviewer in Finland asked me: you’ve written about everywhere you’ve lived but Edinburgh. Where is Scotland in your books?

I laughed a little, pressed my lips together as I always do when I’m thinking, looked out the window of our car at the swans nesting in the golden Nordic estuaries. This is what I told her:

A poetry professor once told me that you can never name the thing you’re writing about. If the poem is about death, you can’t say the word death. Poems about memory shouldn’t go on about the thing itself. If you’re writing about grief, you can’t actually say grief, or sadness, or even tears. If you want to talk about love, love is the one word you can’t use.

Edinburgh is the thing I am a poem about and do not name.

Today, not long before the Queen’s Jubilee, I boarded a train at King’s Cross Station for Edinburgh. It was Platform 7. It’s just beginning to be summer now, and the fields are full of chartreuse flowers. The old churches spring up out of them like strange, huge blossoms. The train rushes over a stream so full of swans the current is pure white.

I think about bird magic again. Auguries.

I am no longer small. I know something of the world. Maybe not much of a something, but something. I have made things with my hands and heart. I look a bit pugnacious in my passport photo, like I still have something to prove. I had a bacon sandwich. My husband is with me and this time I am bearing him across the wall, to show him this object that sits at the bottom of my mind, a grey stone city with a castle and a mountain, a place that was once wholly full of fairy fruit and temptation and the rich mess of becoming bigger, becoming grown. That fairy fruit made everywhere else look dimmer for awhile. My goblin city, that swallowed me whole. I think it took falling in love with Maine to fix me–before then I always had the idea that of course I’d go back, that somehow, somehow, this was where I’d live when I could choose.

I’ve been near tears most of the morning, riding north through sheep and cattle and chapels and flowers. When you love a place, it’s hard to leave, and harder still to come back. You hope it will be proud of you, of all you became when you left to seek your fortune.  You hope it will be as you remembered; you hope you are still as it knew you.
You hope it will forgive you long neglect, lines in your once-clear face, a hard blue edge of cynicism.

O goblin city, I hope you will forgive me for never writing a book about you.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.