I guess I need to stop by the comics shop on my way home too.

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I am beginning to see why you love Delirium. She's cracking me up.

She's at her most quotable in Brief Lives, too. I want to smush her and then run far far away before awful things start happening to my brain.

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So. IC #7. There were characters I didn't recognize -- who I haven't recognized throughout IC -- because I'm *not* a DC fangirl from back in the day. That said, I don't think my lack of knowledge hurt my enjoyment of it.

What I liked:

That perfect, heartbreaking moment of Tim seeing Kon all broken and bloody in the rubble of the tower. Poor Timmy is just a walking bag of pain.

The Superman double-teaming of Doomsday.

The Batfamily taking on Deathstroke. (Which would have been oh so much better had the Nightwing storyline played out the way that it was intended to, instead of being cut short and nonsensical.)

Bart Bart BART!!!! (Yes, Plei, I've come around to the Bart-love.) But I don't know how I feel about him being older. And -- not a speedster.

Nightwing OH NOES!!!! ...or maybe not.

The Joker. Dude. The Joker. Payback's a bitch.

I really didn't mind Batman with the gun, though I don't think the character really earned that moment, at that specific point. It still worked for me, because it took him all the way down, to the point of killing, and that establishes his need to "find himself," and his trip around the world with the birdboys.

What I don't understand is how Earth-1 Superman lost his powers. What exactly happened to make them go away?

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Steph, quick answer to your last question...

All the Supermen gain their powers from the light of a yellow sun. They can retain some ( I guess, like a battery) but eventually their powers wear off in the depths of space. A red sun does nothing for them, and may even sap them (I'm not up on current canon), but what the red sun did here was -

a) Destroy Superboy Prime's armor so that he didn't have a reserve of power.

b) Slowly push them all towards a more normal power level so that the two Supermen would have a better chance to deal with Superboy who is actually stronger than either of them (that's a long story). Presumably if they'd been on that planet for awhile they would have been a man in his prime, an older man and a boy, all normal strength for their age and size which would have hosed Superboy. Ultimately the plan, I think was to reduce Superboy's power enough that he could be captured.

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Okay, so, Brief Lives wins. Damn. That was good shit, from beginning to end.

It helped that there was a very strong narrative revolving around a clear, well-defined goal (I think this is a reason I preferred Doll's House to Season of Mists): find Destruction. What also helped is the team-up of Death and Delirium, who just happens to be fucking hilarious. Nearly everything she says in this book is totally awesome. I love that she speaks in funky colors. Her childlike mentality is even funnier in contrast to Dream's dour demeanor. And sometimes she's so adorable I want to smush her.

There's also a lot of great character stuff in here, as we get a real sense of the siblings' relationships with Destruction and what he meant to them. The Sandman, ultimately, is about family. And I think Gaiman nails the complex relationships that exist between siblings of different genders and ages.

As a sidenote, Gaiman fails at the complex relationships that exist between mortals in love. Nearly every dealing with romance comes off as very clichéd, and thankfully, there isn't a lot of it. He fares better with the immortals, though, and I love that the fact that Dream got dumped again serves as motivation for him to go on this journey with his sister, to distract him, to take his mind off her, whoever she was. That rings true.

I am a complete moron for not recognizing Destruction the first time we see him with Barnaby. His pages even end with a line about family, and what I didn't see at first was that the room with the pool had all the damn sigils. I was supposed to have figured it out then. Instead, I clued in on the family the second time he appeared, and I let out an audible "Oh my God." Because it was so fucking perfect that when Destruction quits, he embraces creation, in the form of art. Painting, poetry, cooking, etc. And I was glad that Gaiman never really spelled that out for us, which made me feel smart for picking up on it.

I wonder where the hell Barnabas the Talking Dog came from. He gets special lettering.

I love that Dream is so unwilling to recognize that he's changed. Even though it's clear by his actions that he has, he doesn't want to accept it.

It's interesting that Destruction left because of science. Because of the rise of the Age of Reason. It makes "Thermidor" more thematically relevant. I'm not particularly sure why that spurred him to leave, though Peter Straub, in his afterword, seems to interpret it as his being unwilling to participate in the sort of destruction that science would herald. I saw it more of a reaction to what he talks about at the end, the fact that the Endless are really just anthropomorphs cooked up by humanity, and a focus on reason threatens their relevance. It's as if he quit so that he wouldn't be fired.

Also, nice to see the Corinthian again.

Ever since I read Siddhartha, I've been fascinated with the concept of duality, so I of course loved the recurrence of that theme throughout the story.

I didn't expect Destruction to come back, really, and I wasn't sure what to expect from the penultimate issue, but I think it ended up working for me. What Dream and Delirium needed was closure. Dream, whether he'll admit or not, was there when Destruction was deciding to leave, and he probably blamed himself a little for not stopping him. Delirium needed to know he was okay. It was time for a check-in, after three hundred years.

Then Dream kills his son, not out of malice but out of love, a love he'd probably deny feeling. And I don't know Desire swore this oath that he'd shed family blood, but now he's done it, and she didn't even have to do anything.

Brief lives. A strange term to use around immortals, or even long-living mortals.

Random questions: what the hell is up with Dream's helm? Why does it look so weird? It makes him look like an alien. Why did Delight turn into Delirium? Why did Despair become Desire's twin? What Endless was destroyed? Who are Mary Canby and Chloe Russell?

Looks like the world ends in the next book. What fun.

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Damn, I actually broke the limit this time.

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Because it was so fucking perfect that when Destruction quits, he embraces creation, in the form of art. Painting, poetry, cooking, etc.

And through Barnabas, we know that he's not very good at it, which makes sense.

Random questions: what the hell is up with Dream's helm? Why does it look so weird? It makes him look like an alien. Why did Delight turn into Delirium? Why did Despair become Desire's twin? What Endless was destroyed? Who are Mary Canby and Chloe Russell?

As is said in the first book, his helm was forged from the bones of a dead god. Apparently this one had a funky shaped skull. Delight became Delirium because of some huge but unnamed change in the world, or in mortals at any rate (after all, they exist because of us). Despair just is Desire's twin. If you think about it, they each depend upon the another to some degree (the concepts as well as the persons). You find out which Endless was destroyed later, so I won't say. Far as I know, Canby and Russel are just people. Some of his characters are just that.

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This is a job for Super!Teppy!

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This is a job for Super!Teppy!

Bwahahahahahahaha!!!!

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The Sandman, ultimately, is about family.

Do you mean Brief Lives, or the entire series? Because it's a little bit dangerous to decide what it's all ultimately about when you've got a third of the series left.

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