The High Cost of Bad Comics

In a nutshell, Death: The High Cost of Living is slightly better than the average "don’t kill yourself" didactic with bad art and truly awful coloring.

Now for the longer explanation.

High Cost of Living came out at the peak of the Sandman fervor. Everyone’s favorite character was Death and since Sandman was pretty much carrying DC Comics, Neil Gaiman was convinced to write a Death mini-series. Now, Neil is a monumentally slow writer. He’s very, very good given enough time, but he’s so slow. The fact that he managed to put out as much material as he did with Sandman is slightly stunning. I'm not saying that writing comics is a slow process. By far, no. Most comics writers can easily do 2 or 3 monthly books without sweating deadlines, if they can get the work. And at the time DC was paying their writers about $40 a page. Do the math for a 22-24 page book and you’ll find that in order to eat most writers needed to do 2 or 3 books a month.

So Gaiman is slow and in addition to the 24 page script he’s no doubt struggling to put out he’s asked to do a three issue mini-series. I believe that this is why the story doesn’t exactly sparkle.

The story is as follows. Mad Hettie is an incredibly crazy, incredibly old woman. She’s hidden her heart so she can’t die and she wants Death, aka Didi in this story, to find it. Sexton Furnival is 16 and plans on killing himself out of boredom. Then there’s this creepy guy who either has a screwed up face or a badly drawn face, you pick. He wants Death’s ankh because he believes it has power. And this is happening on the one day in 100 years that Death is human. Death picks up Sexton and, through her own enthusiasm for the experience of being alive, shows Sexton that life is really a good thing while finding Hettie’s heart and defeating the bad face guy.

The ‘don’t kill yourself’ thing is beneath Gaiman and so is the bad face guy subplot. The only story that really had any interest for me was the Mad Hettie subplot which never really resolved.

The art is gawdawful inside out, upside down and backward, as it is in most of the run of the series. The pencils look to have been sloppy and weedy and the inker seems to have been using a Sharpie to create those thick, clumsy lines. The colorist apparently over bought on black and needed to use it up. The lettering is ok. It’s not John Workman, but it’s ok.

There is also an introduction by Tori Amos that I have never read and a public service announcement in the back wherein Death teaches us about AIDS. It’s drawn by Dave McKean who can’t draw at all, ‘but he’s so cool!!!’ That, in case you weren’t paying attention, was sarcasm.

So I wouldn’t recommend this graphic novel to any but the most die hard Sandman fan, and then not without a whole string of caveats. Do not, under any circumstances, start reading Sandman here.


PS - My not recommended is relative to Sandman, not all comics (which are often badly written and the art ranges) or on books (which also range widely.) I would rather not have a potential Sandman fan turned off by this dreck.