Creatures of the Night
The brevity and recycled nature of current fantasy supernova Gaiman's new book at first suggests he's milking the old cow pretty hard. Its two stories are adaptations of prose-only versions inSmoke and Mirrors(1998), in which they weren't the most memorable entries. And only 48 pages? Fortunately, the artwork quashes all kvetching. Zulli mixes the precision of pen-and-ink and the lushness of full-spectrum watercolor to produce one glowingly lovely panel after another. The full- and two-page single images are big beauties suitable, as they say, for framing. Note, in particular, the two-page transition between the prologue (an interior scene) to the narrative proper (an exterior) in "The Daughter of Owls." It's ravishing, though not as intensely colored as many other panels, especially in "The Price," which gives the lie to those who sneer at the idea of a guard cat. Oh, there is one odd scene in "Daughter" in which the story vaults alarmingly from seventeenth-century England to . . . Solomonic Jerusalem, isn't it? Even that looks marvelous.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved