Anyone else pickup the Season 8 "Tales of the Vampires" issue? I didn't care for it.

Yeah, it wasn't that great.

I finally own all the Powers trades, so I'm re-reading and catching up. I forgot how funny this book is.

I JUST got into Fables, holy crap how awesome is that. I'm at the 7th TPB arabian nights (and days) and I'm hooked. I feel like a junky looking for another hit.

Heh. Yeah, it's a pretty good series. Although I've recently considered giving it up, I don't know. I'm not sure how long Willingham really wants to keep it up. I am curious about how The Great Fables Crossover is going to end, though. Maybe that will give some indication of whether he has a long-term plan past the point where he could/should have effectively ended the series.

Not quite there yet. I like crossovers in general though so I'm looking forward to getting there though. Have to admit though I'm more into the snow/bigby storyline than anything else and have felt a bit deprived at this point.

Yay! My love for Fables was unalloyed up to the point where they decided "Project: Israel" was a suitable name for their cunning plan. Which - wow, way to punch me out of the narrative. Since then I've been a bit more iffy about the books, but there's still a lot to love.

China Mieville, on the Guardian book blog:

In the Sandman story 'Calliope', collected in Volume 3 of the collected decalogy, Dream Country, Neil Gaiman gets disquietingly under the skin of a writer, and presents a dreamlike but perfectly savage investigation of storytelling. Richard Madoc, in his verve to become a 'great writer', imprisons and rapes a muse. His ongoing creativity is predicated on tawdry and brutal violence, in the kind of literalised metaphor that the fantastic is uniquely suited to providing. When Morpheus, Dream, confronts him in disgust, and Madoc repulsively insists that his actions were necessary so he could keep having ideas, Morpheus sentences him to 'ideas in abundance'. Which Madoc then begins to feverishly expound, as he breaks down.

'A city in which the streets are paved with time', he says. 'Head made of light...A were-goldfish...'. And on and on. It ranges from the para-insightful--'Gryphons shouldn't marry'--to the numinous--'An old man...who owned the universe'--via the humourous--'Two old women taking a weasel on holiday'--to the (seemingly) banal--'A small piece of blue cardboard'. It's a bravura sequence. It is terrifying and, in some bleak way, in the slopping speed with which these ideas vomit forth, a baleful antimatter version of 'reassuring' to the would-be writer: see how quickly hooks can be generated? But at what cost, by what violence?

A sideways homage to Gaiman and to his incomparable Sandman, rather than stories set in the comic's universe, would be a collection of all these tales listed but not (yet) written, generated by Madoc's punishment. Each thrown-out line could be turned, by some suitable writer, into a story. It would be loving, respectful, hopefully intriguing and, if done right, not a little unsettling, given the grotesque nature of the crime that spawned these punitive inspirations.

This I'd love to see happen. But I'm no editor. INTG.

I think you should make it happen anyway. I'd contribute.

I remember suggesting that as a fic prompt once, but I vaguely remember being told that it had already been done somewhere? But if not, then, yes, I agree - it's a wonderfully evocative set of hooks.

Neil's response is here: [link]

I don't think I could officially authorise such an anthology (given that the Sandman is owned by DC Comics.) If someone did it, however, on the web or on paper, I would be delighted.

I would contribute. I love the idea.