Mark Buckingham continues his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, adapting four of his prose stories into graphic format
Neil Gaiman’s work in the short story field is not well known to the public, perhaps because of his reputation as an almost full-blown artist whose work in the short story field has driven him to consume a variety of forms and genres for almost four decades; a literary genre that he passionately championed and returned to time and time again as a creative outlet. Gaiman sees short stories as a testing ground for formal and formal experimentation, where he reinvents and overturns tropes of science fiction, fairy tales, and horror. As mentioned in the introduction to Sensitive Material, one of his best-known anthologies, the Portchester-born artist regards these short stories as “one of the purest and most perfect compositions a human being can make.”
Given Gaiman’s fruitful relationship with television formats and projects over the years, it was not surprising that the author gave the green light to a television adaptation of four of his stories, which were released in miniseries format in 2016 under the general title Neil Gaiman’s Possible Stories. . Thanks to the well-received project, it was given a second life in the form of a graphic novel published by Dark Horse two years later, now reaching Spain under the umbrella of Planeta Cómic.
The graphic artist responsible for the graphic adaptation of these four short stories, which have appeared in anthologies such as Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Objects, is none other than Mark Buckingham, Gaiman’s usual suspect and living comic book historian for over three decades. It helps to explore and/or revisiting the dazzling graphic work at Fábulas for Vertigo Comics or the Marvel label. On this occasion, Buckingham chose to forego television adaptations of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard that focused on Gaiman’s original material, and does so by imitating the working style of the famous British filmmaker Amicus in the 1960s and 1970s. They are horror movies in episodic format. As with these productions, which are structured by a common connection that unites stories and relates characters, Buckingham shoots the mysterious Diogenes nightclub, which features the introduction and epilogue of this anthology and serves as the usual rendezvous of a number of extravagant characters. those who tell of their misfortune to a narrator who always appears off-screen, to increase the reader’s immersion in the narrative.
Gaiman and Buckingham tapped into the short story’s enormously expressive potential in The Miracle Man. Golden age, beautiful belt, where all kinds of stylistic whims are allowed. Perhaps this is why, in Possible Stories, it is surprisingly surprising that content comes before form, with an independent Buckingham committed to providing maximum fidelity to the story without giving himself too much artistic freedom. The various pages follow each other through the eighty pages of the short anthology, and together they form 16 vignettes divided into four by four; the talking heads here seem to struggle not to be buried among so many sandwiches with text, sometimes on blank backgrounds. . This detail, which at times threatens to clog stories, fortunately loosens up a bit in the second half of the anthology.
But this stylistic decision does not detract from the merits of possible stories, which are much better than their television counterparts. As in the productions of the aforementioned Amicus, the Gaiman-Buckingham tandem gracefully eschews the most obvious and epidermal aspect of the horror genre, opting instead for a kind of suggestive and nuanced horror that stems from some characters’ gruesome confessions consumed by their obsessions. , ghosts and delusions. For example, Stranger Pieces combines graphic images of venereal and mental illness to paint a resourceful and visionary metaphor about the fear of the other coming to disrupt order, the loss of control, and the phobia of physical and emotional attachments. . understood as a form of aggression. Perhaps the most canonical and also the most revealing of the bunch, Feeders and Fed is an unhealthy parable about cannibalism, vampirism, and power relations, as the Search for the Girl travels to dreamy realms in search of an undead and elusive beauty. men delirium since ancient times. The last of the stories, Closing Time, begins as a youth tale with a clear allusion to the doors of the past that slowly evolves into a suffocating fiction about ghosts and the weight of guilt. and it can never be reopened. As we are warned in the ingenious epilogue, rain and the first dawn will come to wash away the sins and confessions spilled in the Diogenes Club the day before, and it is better not to go into details, as the narrator zealously warns.
Buckingham manages to bring a single character to some fictions that seem disconnected from each other with the lines and color palette that change according to the vulgar or tragicomic impulses of the plot. He also manages to capture and distill, and sometimes amplify, the sick and mutated imagery of Gaiman, using compelling close-ups reminiscent of the disjointed traits of EC horror comics characters. Their determination makes creative experimentation appealing, but it doesn’t solve its core problem: We’ve seen authors shine so much in collaborative work that, by comparison, Possible Stories can disappoint the expectations of readers familiar with their work.
