Dream Hunters (The Sandman)

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Interspecies Romance: The kitsune heroine falls in love with a human man. Fox Morpheus cautions her that these things don't end well. Most of all, I got to see Dream again! God I love that character so much. I would’ve read it for that alone.

Edit: dopo avere letto il fumetto che adatta la storia in prosa, si scopre che Gaiman si era totalmente inventato la genesi di questo racconto, dovendo riempire diverse pagine di postfazione poi diventato un trafiletto scritto piccolo piccolo per via della mole di illustrazioni. Gaiman does a convincing job of writing in a faux-translation style. His prose in The Dream Hunters is more direct, less full of digressions and figurative wordplay. It reads like a story adapted from a British retelling of a Japanese folktale. Which is, of course, exactly the point. So I will forgive myself and everyone else who fell for the ruse, because the master storyteller did what he does: told a masterful story. And the way of telling is just as important as what is told. A fox spirit and a badger ( tanuki) wager that whichever of them drives a Buddhist monk from his temple, can claim the temple as its own. Both of them fail, and the badger flees in disgrace, whereas the fox apologises to the monk, and he allows her to stay in the temple.Did Dream learn a lesson from this story that would so closely mirror his own? Did this tale of the monk and the fox who loved him inform Dreams own decisions when it came time to pursue his own loved ones and possibly sacrifice his own life in exchange? P. Craig Russell is one of my favorite comic artists. He's known for his adaptions of classic plays and operas. He's also adapted a bunch of Neil Gaiman stories including Coraline. I'm not sure why Russell likes adapting Gaiman so much. I prefer his adaptions of older stories, but the setting of this story actually works really well for Russell's style. So he took versions of the old Japanese story from the likes of Reverend B. W. Ashton and Y. T. Ozaki and pulled in some of the familiar Sandman components like Dream’s raven and a brief cameo from a pair of famous Biblical brothers. Sandman: The Dream Hunters ended up as a prose story retelling of that foreign tale, with the great artist Yoshitaka Amano (who you may know from such character designs as Gatchaman anime and the Final Fantasy video game series) providing sumptuously painted illustrations. Morpheus, Lord of the Dreams, will have to intervene in this tragedy since their actions put them right in Morpheus’ realm. With cool cameos of Cain and Abel, and one of Morpheus’ ravens, but the real identity of this particular raven isn’t clear, definitely isn’t Matthew or Lucien, but due a clue in the narrative and the time period of the story, I supposed that it must be Aristeas.

The Dreaming • House of Whispers • Lucifer • Books of Magic • John Constantine: Hellblazer • The Dreaming: Waking Hours • Hell & Gone • Nightmare Country La storia era però destinata ad altro, a essere un racconto in prosa illustrato dal disegnatore giapponese, quindi non se ne fece di nulla. But the pale king chose not to answer and remained wrapped in silence,” writes Gaiman. “…and after some time the raven flapped heavily away into the sky of dreams, and left the king entirely alone.”While the artwork is lovely and complements the story, I’m detracting a star because I didn’t really get anything new from this version. The original novella is already beautifully illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano, and while Sandman was always at home in the graphic novel world, I find that the original format chosen for this particular story works better. A fox and a badger make a wager: if they can get a young, solitary monk to leave his tiny, remote temple, they will share his humble abode, as it is more comfortable than their dens. They try to fool the monk into leaving, but he sees through their deceptions. The badger eventually gives up, but the fox becomes unexpectedly attached to the young man, and when she hears demons whisper about a plan to kill him through his dreams, she undertakes a long journey to try to save the man she loves. The story is set in feudal Japan, where a kitsune, as part of a bet to draw a young monk from his temple, shapeshifts into a beautiful young woman. She eventually falls in love with him. When she learns that there is a plot by a Kyoto onmyōji to trap the monk in a dream, she sets out to save him and appeals to the Dream King. The monk, in turn, sets out to save her. Along the way, various other Sandman characters appear in minor roles. Probing deeper after that unsatisfactory reply, and additional exchanges between Dream and his winged charge, the Raven asks, pointedly, “And you also learn a lesson?”