Adnan, great news...here is that review:
Death the high cost of living:
I dyed my hair and she visited me and I started to accept the mess I'm in. I know that mess spelled backwards is 'ssem' & I felt much better armed with that information.
Those are lines written by Tori (Cornflake Girl) Amos' in the opening foreword to
Death: The high Cost of living, a zany, irreverent yet darkly profound morality tale written about Death, the sister of Dream (the Sandman). In a unique story that features no real superheroes, no villians whatsoever and some of the most amusingly clevel comic dialogue I have ever read, 'The high cost of living' is a book to be cherished. In it, Death, who goes by the spunky steet name of Didi visits Earth once in a century or so. While she isn't performing her morbid duty of being the grim reaper, she is given the opportunity to cherish life with mortals for a day. That day spans 3 issues of the comicbook and features a young boy named Sexton (excuse the name) who has given up on his life and his pointless existence with his single parent mother and is seriously contemplating suicide when he bumps into Didi. She offers him, ironically, his first taste of what life really can offer and why we sometimes have to come close to losing what we have to really cherish its worth.
While all of it sounds rather heavy for a book such as this, the tone of the comic is whimsically supernatural, like
Ghost world crossed with
Catcher in the rye with bits of
Constantine thrown in for good measure.
Here is a sample of some of the things that Sexton randomly thinks to himself:
When you're on your knees, you're closer to the ground. Things seem nearer somehow
or the classy response when conversing with someone in a bar about falling in love,
To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don't think anyone ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny; horny and scared. So when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and they call it love.
.
As a writer, Gaimen really outdoes himself with this one. The plot follows nothing close to convention - there are strange characters who psychobabble, brushes with the occult yet a neat and tidy (perhaps too tidy some might say) conclusion, but what he creates here is his most accessible work, not to mention one that is entirely self contained. Working without his usual collaborator Dave Mckean, the services of penciller Chris Bachalo are used to the books advantage. Bachalo, who later found success and fame with his work on Marvels X-books, hits all the right notes with his shadings and the superb coloring work and this is undeniably his finest hour. The fact that book is a decade old and was released at the height of the MTV domination (Didi dresses more like a rock chick than an undertaker) made me think perhaps it might not age too well, but having read this again nearly 8 years after I first picked it up only proves to me that this is a timeless classic.
Rating: 5/5
