Made a little run of these prints for FREE THE BOOKS: A Print Exhibition. It runs through the month of March at the Evanston Public Library in Illinois.
One of these prints did not come out super great (lots of extraneous markings). I have five on this thin paper and a couple more on thicker paper, before I changed papers and brayers (and before they extended the deadline, so I had more time to make a nice one to send in.) I'm going to try to get the shop part of the site set up by March, but if you want to buy one of these guys they're $15. Shoot me a lil ole email at royalmontgomery [at] gmail [dot] com and I can let you know what everything else in the run looks like.
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I re-read a lot of The Sandman last week or so. I skipped a couple parts ('Brief Lives', 'Fables and Nocturnes'), but my favorites are 'The Kindly Ones' and 'The Wake', anyway, so it was fine. I really like how interwoven the characters are - Barbie from 'The Doll's House' reappearing in 'A Game of You', Ken from 'The Doll's House' now in Sandman: Nightmare Country.
I found Sandman: Nightmare Country because I found Sandman Special: Thessaly and needed to know what happened. The ways that DC have tried to lead the reader through these books is very poor. They sent me from Thessaly to Nightmare Country #4 to Dead Boy Detectives, and that is not the reading order at all. The reading order is Nightmare Country, Thessaly, Nightmare Country: The Glass House. Whatever is happening in Dead Boy Detectives I don't know and I don't really want to find out because 1) it's super boring 2) the continuity does not make sense based on the events of the books that actually are telling the story I want to read. One of the things that is terrific about The Sandman is that the writing is great. The story is not always satisfying. It does not always come to an end that is just and wrapped up in a bow and everyone is living happily ever after, but Neil Gaiman tells it in such a way that it doesn't matter. There are a lot of messy stories with messy people, gods, and every kind of being in between, and it's just told so well that it's very real. When I saw that James Tynion IV had written the Thessaly one-shot, I was super excited. I've been reading a lot of his other work and so I knew I was walking into something good. Unfortunately, the art in the Thessaly one-shot is poorly done - the same artist did Nightmare Country #6 and the already sloppy work is even worse in that issue. (Tynion IV also wrote the two Nightmare Country mini-series.) The art for the rest of the two mini-series is mostly well-done, and the cover art is lovely, as seen above. I think it would be difficult for a new reader to fully grasp the storylines in these books, because they're very heavily steeped in the Sandman lore. But for people who know the characters and their origins, it's a terrific tale that is still unfolding - the next installment is coming out in April of 2024. I definitely have a new appreciation for Morpheus' re-made nightmare, Corinthian, and I'm happy to see more of Thessaly and the new incarnation of Dream. I went back and read The Sandman Presents: The Thessaliad as well. I love reading about this clever, calculating witch and how she moves through the world. The thing about bad art is it motivates me to get some work done. So I have been plugging away in the studio, much to the dismay of my sleep schedule. Not sure when I will get the time for the non-Murder of Crows comics I've been thumbnailing in my sketchbook, but we'll get there. Another year, another chance. In my review of last year, I found that things had gone...pretty well, actually. There were some bad things, but there were a lot of good things. The good things edged out the bad things for the first time in a long time. For that, I'm very grateful.
I have a hard time focusing on a whole year's worth of resolutions and so I have been doing these monthly challenges. The sketchbook challenge was okay. I think it was good. The drawings themselves are not good, but having myself do this whether I wanted to or not was a good exercise. I even felt weird on the first day of February when I realized I didn't have to fill a sketchbook page on that day. My goal for February is to buckle down and finish the first issue of Murder of Crows. Click on the "Read More" button if you want to see the sketchbook pages from January. |
AuthorArtist, essayist, divinity school dropout. Here for a good time, not for a long time. Archives
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