A Day in the Death...

I have an uncanny knack, or curse rather, for stumbling upon the best of something: the best of a genre, the best team, the best production, the best food. The first time I watched a ballet (live), I had tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet Company performing Swan Lake. After that, the Arkansas Ballet just didn’t do it for me.

I didn’t read comics as a child, and, as one would expect, I didn’t read comics as an adult—-until recently. My husband (an avid comic book collector) and a I were discussing books and themes he mentioned Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. He told me to go to a bookstore (or a comic book store—horrors! I wasn’t ready for that quite yet) and pick up a copy of one of The Sandman volumes. I plunked down $20 at the closest Book-A-Million and whipped through Fables and Reflections—I was hooked. A few days later I actually braved a comics store and acquired the rest of The Sandman collection—and blew two months’ worth of my book allowance.

The Sandman revolves around Dream of the Endless. The Endless are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Despair, Desire and Delirium, a family of godlings that personify human experiences. Unlike the Greek gods or other religious deities, the Endless do not need worshippers to exist, they exist as long as there is human experience.

Neil Gaiman introduces Death in “The Sound of Her Wings,” in Preludes and Nocturnes. Death isn’t the usual “Grim Reaper” type. She’s a hip chick, with Goth leanings, dressed in black jeans, a black tank top, and a leather-studded belt with teased black hair. She also wears an ankh charm around her neck—-the ancient Egyptian symbol of life (and more recently the symbol for woman, but life has more significance in this instance). During her appearances in The Sandman, Death eases the way for people out of the life they’ve known into death, and though she knows what their deaths will be like, neither the dying nor the reader has this insight.

Due to Death’s popularity in The Sandman, Gaiman gave her two collections of her own: Death: The High Cost of Living, and Death: The Time of Your Life.

In Death: The High Cost of Living, Death must spend one day a century as a mortal woman “better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality: and this is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after.” Oddly enough, Death doesn’t pay actual money for anything during this one day in the late 20th century, except $10 for a new ankh (“the most important thing in the whole universe”) after hers is stolen.

During this day of mortality, Death pals around with a suicidal teenager; is tasked with finding the heart of Mad Hettie, a 250-year-old London bag lady; gets herself kidnapped; goes to a nightclub; eats apples and hot dogs and bagels with lox; and dies falling into a fountain. She gets everything for free, from food to a taxi ride to club cover charge, because she smiles and says thank you a lot. But she also pays the price: she feels what it’s like to die and realizes that life has such value because “it always ends.”

Death, well, she’s pretty happy about being alive, and pretty happy when she’s something other than alive and “collecting the dead.” She teaches us how to live. Literally and figuratively, that’s her two cents worth.

So, my first foray into comics, I read the best. While Death: The High Cost of Living is not nearly Gaiman’s best work in The Sandman collection, it’s still a great story accompanied by fantastic artwork and Gaiman’s penchant for subplots and underlying themes. Read Death: The High Cost of Living for yourself; you might find a new outlook on death, and on life.