Sandman comic panels

I recently read The Sandman Papers, most of which were interesting though some were "oookay, academics can be weird." Then last night I re-read Preludes and Nocturnes... and then, inspired by one of the papers (on The Tempest) and Scott McCloud, I went back and looked at the paneling. What's square, what's not, what's borderless? First I was looking at "The Sound of Her Wings", where we meet Death, and... well, I noticed a lot of variation, but not a lot of pattern. Tended to the rectangular, but borders were often simply missing, or present only as part of the park bench. One page the background color was pink, except for one panel where it was blue.

I also found myself wondering if the final page, where Dream scatters his bread and joyfully hears the sound of (pigeon) wings, is actually a hint of his decision to commit suicide. Most of the comic is about what Death does, after all, and there's that poem about welcoming death. Then "She has responsibilities. I have responsibilities", which sounds like he's finding comfort in getting back to work again, but then... the wings, as if the pigeons are a foretaste of the sound of *her* wings at the end of it all.

Anyway. After that I went looking at the chapters in general, and I think I saw more of a pattern. The first issue is pretty whacked out, panel-wise, including lots of circular panels, usually as facial closeups, especially if seen through an eyepiece, the glass cage, or a scrying ball. There's lots of "panels on top of backgrounds", and curvy panels, and diagonal borders. Of course, the whole issue is largely "magical".

Then the next issue, Dream in the Dreaming with Cain and Abel, hardly has a rectangle anywhere, it's all curvy borders. Most of Constantine's issue is standard rectangular panels, diagonalizing or warping a bit when the dreams get heavy. That seems to be the basic pattern: everyday stuff uses traditional panels, dreaming stuff uses curves, some stuff in the middle uses diagonals.

I also saw one part where a unified scene was nonetheless broken up by diagonal gutters, for not obvious reason. (Unlike Spike: Shadow Puppets, where an otherwise unified 'picture' of a diner is broken by a gutter in the middle, and on the left Spike is coming out of the doorway of the diner and in the right he's moved across the street, so there's a temporal function.)

Sidenote: I was long impressed by how long and dense the first issue feels, and wondered if it was from the sheer fast pace of changes, like the ending of the third arc in Twelve Kingdoms, which feels (pleasantly) like it's a lot longer than 22 minutes or whatever. At some point I discovered it actually has more pages than a standard issue.

In which I discover how little I've been missing

Warning: this post may not be all that interesting.

Side note: Oiling my bike baskets worked almost too well. Now the basket I keep open while riding (I put my lock in it, don't have a bracket) tends to have the bottom jiggle up and catch on a higher rung. At least the other one doesn't spontaneously open. And all I did was dab canola oil around all the hinges with my fingers.

***

After getting my final Hep B shot yesterday, I decided to bike out to Belmont. The immediate challenge is that the bike path to Belmont has been closed for the past two years and is still closed -- apparently not because the area is too corrupt to renovate a bike lane but because it's an adjunct to an intense wetlands project next to it. But there's a detour marked on CambridgePark Drive. That's not too bad -- low traffic, though dusty due to yet more construction. Then I mis-read a sign and headed to the end of a parking lot (getting worryingly sprayed with something en route); heading back and seeing a runner emerge showed me where the actual entrance was, to a decent paved path paralleling the work. No shade, no traffic, sound of bullfrogs.

It ends at a random spot in Belmont, though. Another runner I asked said I had my choice of how to get run over, but the southern path wasn't too bad. The "bike lane" apparently indicated is possibly narrower than my bike and I stayed on the sidewalk, but it soon connects to a road between a lake and high school, nice enough. Then to Concord, with a real bike lane, in the door zone, and I thought of thoughtless teenagers opening doors to boot, but I wasn't going that fast.

Belmont Center looked to be a couple of blocks long. I stopped in a Bruegger's and was given free bagels, bought some milk, and observed signs of free-range parenting in the form of a couple of 7-10 year old girls on their own, who left on their own too. A pair of high school girls provided some entertainment when I overheard "They mostly speak French in Africa... there are places in Canada that only speak French."

But really, I ran out of center damn fast. Someone I know who lived there confirmed it's not very exciting; Belmont's for good schools and family-friendliness and being on the end of bus lines or in biking range of Harvard. Thus the title of the post; it's closer than Watertown or Waltham but has rather less of interest.

Except! When I moved on and tried the northern route back to the bike path, I found myself on wide flat roads with hardly any traffic. So a decent place to just cruise around on bike. I wondered if people go there to learn how to handle a car, the way I was taken to Daly City from San Francisco.

I really need a more comfortable seat or something.