InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "FANGS UP"

espanolbot (espanolbot) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-07-17 22:48:00

Entry tags:

char: death of the endless, title: ambush bug, title: lucifer, title: madame xanadu

As Blackest Night starts week I thought I'd post these cameos of everyone's favourite Goth
Possibly NSFW due to Ken Dollish nudity.

Firstly, from Lucifer, where Death comes to observe after he is sent as close to dying he can by a magical tarot pack called Basanos,

Later,

He is then brought back to life by the timely intervention of his niece, Elaine, who is the daughter of his brother the archangel Michael.

Note the comparision here to how she was with Lucifer,

I have Death's appearence in Lobo around somewhere, but until I, or someone else, posts it, here's her cameo in Ambush Bug, which sadly seems to have even more resonance now then back in 1992 or when it was published,

And here is her most recent appearence (I think) in the current Madame Xanadu series.

Madame X is in prison, and her immortality running out, she is rapidly aging to death.

Out of desperation, she performs what seems to be the same ritual they tried at the beginning of the Sandman series,

Xanadu askes that she be allowed to perform Death's card reading in exchange for not dying, and out of amusement Death agrees,

And here's the artwork from the above Lucifer issue, 'cause it's pretty,

Will possibly post her appearence in Books of Magic at some point in the future, depending on whether my photobucket bandwidth doesn't decide to go tits up.

Anyway, here's the thing.

Although I know that the current (kind of stupid) mandate between Vertigo and DC is that characters can't cross over anymore, I'd... Like it so that when characters like the Dibnys die, they have this particular anthropomorphic personification there waiting for them.

Not the Black Racer. Not Black Flash. Not Nekron. Just... Death.

Personally, I think that life in the DCU must be scary enough with the possiblity of that lot coming after you.

Anyway, here's to Death of the Endless, the joint first nicest personification of death after this guy,

From the Soul Music cartoon from the early 90s,

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	bruinsfan 2009-07-19 04:06 am UTC (link)
	There was a Captain Atom issue in the 80s in which Gaiman's Death explained that Nekron was death personified as a cosmic enemy, while the Black Racer was death as inevitability and she herself was death as a merciful release. All sort of different facets of the same thing. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-07-19 06:50 am UTC (link)

Hurrm. Well, that smacks of revisionism to me, since 'Sandman' says more-or-less outright, if I recall, that while people saw Dream and his brethren (among which is Death) in all sorts of different ways (J'onn, for example, sees Dream as a legendary Martian god of nightmares), they were all just the same set of entities seen in different ways. Separate versions of Death would seem to contradict that - besides, I would think that the personification of Death would count as a cosmic being in any case.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

espanolbot
2009-07-19 12:10 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, Gaiman apparently got annoyed that they had contradicted the Sandman series as he was still writing it at the time, and Death's speech in the Element Girl story was meant to clarify it.

The one where she said that she represented the death of everything from bacteria to crystalline beings on a planet orbiting a dead star, for example.

Though some people still seem to claim that this was him throwing a hissy fit, but really how can you write an ongoing series while someone else is making up their own stuff about your characters in another book without telling you first.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	psychop_rex 2009-07-19 08:26 pm UTC (link)
	Right. I say, ignore revisionism except when it actually clarifies; this obfuscates instead. Stick to what the original writer said, unless he's an idiot which Neil is not. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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