The tenth and final collection of the original Neil Gaiman Sandman run, entitled The Wake, collects the four-part title story arc plus two other epilogues, respectively called “Exiles” and “The Tempest.” So it’s an epilogue and then another epilogue and a final epilogue. (If we leave out the follow-up stories by Gaiman written elsewhere.)

That’s a Peter Jackson Lord of the Ringsy kind of way to wrap it up, isn’t it?

But if you’ve sat through the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, you know that the endings upon endings feel properly paced and well-deserved. The same is true for Neil Gaiman and Sandman. Though it sometimes feels as if the entire second half of the series is about saying goodbye, “The Wake” and the two single-issue stories that follow are earned and resonant. And while they may not be strictly necessary—I think you could end your reading of Sandman with The Kindly Ones, drop the book, and strut away like a champ, though that would be weird and unnecessary unless your name is “Neil” and “Gaiman”—the stories collected in The Wake provide closure to the larger story and additional flavor to the Sandman mythology.

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On Thursday, Bleeding Cool reported on the latest DC Comics defection of writer Joshua Hale Fialkov leaving two Green Lantern books before he started due to a surprise editorial plan to kill off John Stewart, one of the medium’s most definitive black characters.

Thanks to the immediate online reaction to the news, Bleeding Cool is now reporting that this plan has been scuttled. But why was it brought up in the first place?

[Cross the line]

Marvel Comics has just revealed that the current comics crossover series The Age of Ultron, about a maniacal robot built by an Avenger  and bent on taking over the world, will feature an epilogue written by Brian Michael Bendis that brings a character Neil Gaiman co-created into the Marvel Universe.

That character? Not Morpheus. Not Shadow. Not Crowley or Aziraphale. But Angela from the Image Comics title Spawn.

Wait, what?

[And then it gets weirder.]

The collected edition of The Kindly Ones begins with a short story written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Kevin Nowlan, and I think that’s a mistake. The story was originally published in Vertigo Jam #1, and I’m sure the story fits between World’s End and The Kindly Ones, and was published around that time, and all of that is just fine, but it’s not the best way to start reading “The Kindly Ones” as a story arc.

Gaiman and Nowlan are great, sure, and it’s a nice little story about a dreamer.

But as a massive thirteen-part opus, “The Kindly Ones” deserves, in a collection with its name in the title, to get the spotlight from the first page.

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To be a fan is to place oneself apart—or perhaps to be apart is to find a community of what enthuses you while the mainstream passes by. This is a model that forms a natural affinity between the outlying culture of comics and the outcast social status of queer identity. As both of those communities assume a central place in society while they retain their fringe perspective, it’s worth examining the unnoticed path they took and the widened futures it points to.

[It’s contemplatin’ time]

There’s a scene in Sandman #56, the last of the six issues collected in the World’s End trade paperback, that provides a grim context for the Chaucerian tales presented within the book. We see—through the eyes of the characters looking out at the night sky from the tavern at the end of the world—a spectral funeral march, with Desire and Death of the Endless sorrowfully trailing behind.

The rest of the story arc is divorced from the ongoing saga of Dream and his impending doom. But with a title like “World’s End,” even the single issue short stories bode something far different than they did in previous anthology-style arcs. Titles like “Dream Country” or the collection called Fables and Reflections implied a kind of somnabulistic reverie, even if some of the stories were tinged with melancholy. “Worlds End,” though? That’s not a hopeful pairing of syllables.

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You think I’m not aware that I’m the voyeur god of this story? Standing outside the gutters and frames of the comic book panels, sure, that is where the gods and demons, the archons and aliens lurk. In the post-modern, fourth-wall-breaking context. The reader though, the reader is outside the entire framework. What does Morrison call it, in the end? The supercontext. But just how outside of it are you? Grant Morrison is outside of the comic, but he (with his artistic collaborators) created it and delivered it to you, like an infection, or a vaccine. Heck, it is even outside of time; Grant Morrison writes the message over a period of years, from 1994 to 2000, and I start reading it right at the tail end of 2012. Right at the end of the world. Ragged Robin is 33 years old in 2012, and so am I, at the end of the world, and I’m right in the middle of the supercontext.

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Outside of the Sandman series proper, as the dark but sophisticated corner of Karen Berger’s DC Editorial offices became Vertigo Comics, a troop of writers continued the tales of some of the less prominent members of the Neil Gaiman comics, with titles like The Dreaming and Lucifer and Merv Pumpkinhead, Agent of D.R.E.A.M. (Yes, that last one is a real comic, and it was written by Fables scribe Bill Willingham.) But that would all happen after Sandman ended, as a way to sustain the franchise while Neil Gaiman moved on to become a fancy-pants novelist and screenwriter. Gaiman produced a few Sandman-related books in the years after the series concluded, and, of course, he’s slated for a return engagement with the character in the fall of 2013, but, in total, more issues of Sandman spin off comics were written by people named neither Neil nor Gaiman than were produced in the entirety of the initial run of the series.

However, and this is a big however, DC and Vertigo kept their hands off the Endless. That was reportedly part of Gaiman’s deal with DC, perhaps to the extent that he co-owns those characters and no one else can do anything with them without his permission, or maybe just as a way to keep Gaiman happy in the hopes that he would one day return to write the characters and bring a gigantic fanbase along with him. (Which, as it seems, has worked out according to plan, if the online gushing about new Gaiman Sandman issues next year was any indication of the fanbase’s gigantism.)

So Dream, Destiny, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Death…well, maybe not Destiny as he’d been around awhile already, but the others…they are Gaiman’s alone to write, except when he loans them out to others to play with, like he presumably did for Jill Thompson’s Little Endless books or that time Paul Cornell had Lex Luthor face down Death in Action Comics a couple of years back. So the first guy to get a crack at a solo Death story was, of course, Gaiman himself, who wrote the three-issues of Death: The High Cost of Living just in time for it to become the first original series ever released under the Vertigo banner.

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Like Superman and other original comic book superheroes, Wonder Woman’s introduction in the 1940s cast her as a female champion who could bring the smackdown on Nazi Germany. It makes sense, then, that this new fan trailer for a Wonder Woman movie has Diana squaring off against the Third Reich.

But what makes this concept trailer especially impressive is that it’s directed by stuntman Jesse V. Johnson and stars Nina Bergman as perhaps the most convincing Diana we’ve seen on-screen since Lynda Carter.

[Hit the jump for the trailer]

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken so long, but by the time I reread the seventh Sandman collected edition, Brief Lives, I realized that the first four years of the series, at least in their trade paperback incarnations, follow a three-fold cycle. It goes like this: quest, aid, and potpourri. Then repeat. Those probably aren’t the super-official terms, and Neil Gaiman may have his own morphological constructions in mind, but the pattern remains true nonetheless.

The first story arc was Dream’s quest to retrieve his implements of power, the second was largely Rose Walker’s story with Morpheus in a pivotal supporting role, while the third was a collection of single-issue stories outlining different corners of the Sandman universe. The cycle repeats with the next three story arcs, as Season of Mists sends Dream on a quest to rescue Nada from Hell, while the follow-up primarily focused on Barbie’s fantasy world, and the Fables and Reflections once again gives a variety of short tales which involve the world Gaiman has created.

Quest. Aid. Potpourri.

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With this year’s Oscars out of the way, Hollywood is back in the swing of moviemaking! Best Actress winner Jennifer Lawrence dyed her hair brown to do some Catching Fire reshoots, while newly redheaded Shailene Woodley joined the cast of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 shooting on the mean streets of New York City.

Some fans bristle at set photos because they fear they give too much away, but rest assured that these shots don’t spoil anything. Instead, you get your first look at Mary Jane Watson! Not to mention Andrew Garfield in Spidey’s improved suit.

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On Wednesday of this week, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror Films announced their nominees for the 39th annual Saturn Awards. Established in 1972, the awards honor the ways in which genre filmmaking (and TV) have expanded beyond their origins in niche entertainment. It’s no surprise that the list of nominees comes out just days before the Oscars, and though both awards shows share a few contenders, the Saturn Awards highlight those genre films that, though mainstream, still couldn’t nab Oscar attention.

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Like the Dream Country collection, the sixth volume of Sandman trade paperbacks, titled Fables and Reflections, is an anthology of single-issue stories written by Neil Gaiman, set in the realms of Morpheus.

Fables and Reflections is a wider-ranging collection than Dream Country, compiling stories a bit out of sequence from their original release order. We get, for example, some stories in this volume originally released before A Game of You, some immediately after, and then others, like “Ramadan” from Sandman #50, that came out a year after the others. That makes it a more eclectic batch than we saw in Dream Country, and, I would argue, a less successful grouping. Some of the stories in this volume are very good, while I found others difficult to read through this time. Not all of them have aged well, and while Gaiman was surely fond of exploring different facets of his dream-time mythology, and pulling from histories and other books and stories to do so, he’s not great at making it all equally compelling. Such is the nature of anthology-style collections, even ones with a single author.

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Last December, we reported that author John Scalzi was working with Industrial Toys on a first-person space shooter game called Morning Star, an original game designed to be playable on multiple mobile platforms. As Scalzi pointed out, “It’s not a port from another video game medium, in other words: It’s at home in mobile.” Now news has come from Scalzi of Morning Star Alpha, a tie-in graphic novel set in the same universe, written by the author and illustrated by Mike Choi.

Check out how the two projects will interact and what sort of vibe influenced the world of Morning Star.

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I haven’t done an exhaustive analysis of the topic, or seen anything substantial written about it, but more than a few astute readers of early-to-mid 1980s fantasy fiction and American comic books have likely connected Michael Ende’s The NeverEnding Story to the end of the Bronze Age of superhero comics and the transition to the Modern Age. The simple version goes like this: Ende’s novel, about a fantasy land being destroyed by the encroaching “Nothing,” must surely have inspired Marv Wolfman’s conception of Crisis on Infinite Earths, in which a wave of Anti-Matter threatened to destroy the fantastical DC multiverse and all of its inhabitants.

The parallels may merely be a coincidence, but the stories are parallel nonetheless. And both The NeverEnding Story and Crisis on Infinite Earths tell of the impending death of a universe populated by expansive imaginations.

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The future of X-Men is in its women, ladies and gentlemen—and the future is now. In a surprising move, Marvel Comics announced recently that they will relaunch X-Men as a comic title headlined by all X-Women! This new book starting in April will be headlined by Brian Wood (writer of comics like DMZ, Mara, and The Massive) with art by Olivier Coipel (Thor) and will focus on such long-time favorite characters as Storm, Rogue, Shadowcat, Psylocke, Rachel Grey and Jubilee.

Why is this so exciting?

At a time when so many are standing up to speak about a lack of well-developed female lead characters in various geekdoms, Marvel has been actively addressing that absence with some amazing titles. Let’s take a look at what we can expect from the upcoming X-Men book and some of the other great books featuring Marvel’s mightiest women.

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Back in 1965, Marvel Comics decided to capitalize on the popularity of spy stories such as Danger Man, Man From U.N.C.L.E., and James Bond, and turned their grizzled WWII foot soldier Nick Fury into a one-eyed badass super spy and situated him as the new head of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which then stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division but has since come to stand for any other number of things, depending on the medium). Now as much as I would love to write a million words gushing over the trippy ’60s brilliance of Jim Steranko’s run on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., we’re here to talk about much more important things: crazy spy gadgets.

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