I picked up Mike Carey’s The Sandman Presents: The Furies not out of any strong desire to find out what happened to Lyta Hall after Sandman, but because I like to encourage our library system to get graphic novels and various people think highly of Carey’s other Sandman spinoff, Lucifer. (I read the first volume, liked it, and decided to wait on the rest until the trade paperbacks were all out. They are now, but I just haven’t got around to it.)
This is a very peculiar story. Lyta Hall, who went batshit crazy during Sandman, is still far from well. More Greek mythology is about to complicate her life in the form of Cronus, youngest of the Titans. And there aren’t any page numbers in the volume and I’m not about to count them, but it’s all wrapped up in a fairly slim volume.
As that might suggest, the story’s climax didn’t resonate with me emotionally. I felt Lyta’s emotional journey was given short shrift, which was compounded by my lack of interest in Cronus and, accordingly, the external plot. At any rate, a harmless enough volume, but nothing to seek out unless you’re a completist.
The art, by John Bolton, is in a style that the cover copy calls “groundbreaking” and “painterly”; to me it looks like photographs have been heavily airbrushed. I actually find it more distracting, in its not-quite realism, than more stylized work. But then, I’m apparently one of the few people on the planet who liked Marc Hempel’s art in The Kindly Ones, so take that for what it’s worth.
I raced through the Lucifer series when I discovered them earlier this year, and I was rapt to find this book, but I couldn’t even finish it – and as you point out, it ain’t huge. The artwork bothered me immensely, it rendered everything so static looking I felt – there was no suggestion of movement, which in a graphic novel format is pretty tricky to do.
Margo: that’s a good point about the static nature of the art. On reflection, I agree; it just wasn’t very _interesting_.