The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake is the final installment of the truly awesome Sandman series. It was a fitting ending, a wake and funeral for Morpheus, attended by his siblings and the many whose lives have been touched by him. Unfortunately, the gap between my reading of this chapter and the previous ones is far too wide and I couldn’t remember a lot of the mortals, so their anecdotes were a little lost on me. The Wake is a trio of stories but the only one I enjoyed reading was the first one, the wake and funeral of Morpheus, a fitting send-off to this glorious character. The other stories though  were ultimately forgettable.

Next I read The Books of Magic, a quartet of graphic novels featuring young Tim Hunter and an intriguing quartet of men, John Constantine, the Phantom Stranger, Dr Occult and Mister E. who are to guide him through the magical realms as he decides whether magic is to be his ultimate path. As I’m quite unfamiliar with the comics universe, the significance of these four men was quite lost on me. Apparently they are pretty well known characters! Ah well… now I know.

Perhaps my favorite of this Gaiman selection of mine was Violent Cases. I picked it up because of the Gaiman name, not knowing anything else about the storyline or the illustrator, and in the end, it was the illustrations that absolutely blew me away, although the cover illustration doesn’t really do justice to what’s inside. The storyline was a recollection of the narrator’s meeting Al Capone’s osteopath when he dislocates his shoulder as a young boy. Relatively interesting but the illustrations… they were just absolutely brilliant, exciting, and they really put the ‘graphic’ back in graphic novel. This was artwork, mixed media at its best… Dave McKean is truly a genius. And Gaiman should also be credited for his allowing McKean to take over the story. Gorgeous, just gorgeous.