I was skeptical of Amazon producing The Sandman as an audio book. Graphic novels are notoriously visual mediums if well written, and eliminating the visuals would be crippling, I thought. I expected a pale shadow of the original book, with much of the story abridged.
I was never so glad to be wrong. The soundscape presented is lush, and the story is completely unabridged, matching my memory of the graphic novels, and eliminating none of the kitschy DC Superhero references and cameos. The voice actors are great, and Gaiman himself serves as the narrator. The audio production was so good that I found myself saving episodes for the early hours of the morning so I could plug both earbuds in to get the full experience, rather than trying to listen to it in the car. Given that I treat most audio productions as multi-tasking fodder, this is high praise indeed.
The first act is a great deal, covering the first 20 issues of the graphic novels (the first 3 books as originally published as paperbacks). Gaiman wrote additional description of scenes that were provided as pure visuals. What's great is that unlike a comic book, where your eyes might slide over important details in the picture on first reading, Gaiman's additional descriptive narration ensures that you cannot miss details that he considered important.
I have friends who cannot read comics either because they're visually impaired, or because the skills required to read comic books is something you can't easily pick up as an adult for many. (It astonished me when people told me that they couldn't figure out which panel came next on a page) To those people, I can recommend The Sandman audible edition as an excellent production worthy of its runtime.
Highly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment