Sandman The Dream Hunters SC

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Cunning Like a Fox: The kitsune is confident she can catch a baku to save her love, because foxes are crafty creatures. Interspecies Romance: The kitsune heroine falls in love with a human man. Fox Morpheus cautions her that these things don't end well. This is an illustrated novella, written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Yoshitaka Amano. It takes place in the universe of The Sandman series, but I think that it can be very easily read from someone who has no idea about the series. Sandman: Cazadores de sueños es mi segunda incursión en el universo Sandman y, aun sin conocer la historia principal de los cómics, ésta ha sido una historia que me ha atrapado desde el inicio, en gran parte gracias al maravilloso trabajo de ilustración de Yoshitaka Amano, y que me ha gustado mucho.

This TPB is the original prose novella written by Neil Gaiman with illustrations of Yoshitaka Amano. Don’t get it confused with the comic book format version featuring artwork of P. Craig Russell.Inspired by Japanese folklore he had discovered while working on the Studio Ghibli Mononoke adaptation, he decided to recast an ancient fairy tale from our world and place it in the realm of Sandman. He wanted to retell the story “in his own way,” according to the afterword printed in Sandman: The Dream Hunters. The artwork is fantastic and perfectly fits the story. It’s very reminiscent of old Japanese woodcut artwork.

Just be careful about trusting that Gaiman guy. He’s a writer—an author, and if you study the origin of the latter word, you’ll know that it comes from the Latin auctorem, which translates as “magnificent liar.” Dopo averli letti entrambi uno dopo l'altro devo dire però che messo a fianco dell'opera del decennale, questa impallidisce abbastanza. Edit: dopo avere letto il fumetto che adatta la storia in prosa, si scopre che Gaiman si era totalmente inventato la genesi di questo racconto, dovendo riempire diverse pagine di postfazione poi diventato un trafiletto scritto piccolo piccolo per via della mole di illustrazioni. Apparently Russell himself believed Dream Hunters wasn't an original story but rather a Sandman re-writing of a classic Japanese parable. But, in reality this story was created purely from Gaiman's imagination. I feel like there is a strong connection to Aesop's parables and even Jim Henson's The Storyteller (but don't quote me on that one). In The Dream Hunters, the lead characters are a young monk and a wily fox. First, the fox challenges a badger to a contest in which they will drive the young monk from the neighborhood. But the fox falls in love with the intelligent and discerning young monk. “And that,” writes Neil Gaiman, at the end of the first chapter, “was to be the cause of much misery in the time to come. Much misery, and heartbreak, and of a strange journey.”So he took versions of the old Japanese story from the likes of Reverend B. W. Ashton and Y. T. Ozaki and pulled in some of the familiar Sandman components like Dream’s raven and a brief cameo from a pair of famous Biblical brothers. Sandman: The Dream Hunters ended up as a prose story retelling of that foreign tale, with the great artist Yoshitaka Amano (who you may know from such character designs as Gatchaman anime and the Final Fantasy video game series) providing sumptuously painted illustrations. Come si apprende nella postfazione, Gaiman si era documentato sulla mitologia giapponese mentre si occupava dei dialoghi della versione inglese della Principessa Mononoke. E durante questa fase di documentazione si era imbattuto nella storia "La volpe, il monaco e il mikado dei sogni di tutta la notte", rimanendo colpito dalle similitudini con la storia che aveva scritto in precedenza, Sandman. Yet by the time of The Sandman: Endless Nights—an anthology project completed as the original series neared its fifteenth anniversary, and one that I’ll dig into next time—Gaiman had already flat-out said that The Dream Hunters was “a retelling of an old Japanese folktale [he] completely made up.” I must have read those words in 1993 or 1994, whenever I first sat down to read that anthology. But I ignored them, clearly, because until now I have always thought of The Dream Hunters as not-real-Gaiman- Sandman. Like most fables, the story begins with a wager between two jealous animals, a fox and a badger: which of them can drive a young monk from his solitary temple? The winner will make the temple into a new fox or badger home. But as the fox adopts the form of a woman to woo the monk from his hermitage, she falls in love with him. Meanwhile, in far away Kyoto, the wealthy Master of Yin-Yang, the onmyoji, is plagued by his fears and seeks tranquility in his command of sorcery. He learns of the monk and his inner peace; he dispatches demons to plague the monk in his dreams and eventually kill him to bring his peace to the onmyoji. The fox overhears the demons on their way to the monk and begins her struggle to save the man whom at first she so envied. Asian Fox Spirit: The protagonist is a shapeshifting kitsune. She spends most of her time in fox form but occasionally takes the form of a beautiful woman.

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters is a standalone story in the universe of The Sandman (1989), written by the comic's author Neil Gaiman. It was originally published as a novella in 1999, featuring painted illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano. In 2008 a four-issue comic book version with art by P. Craig Russell was released.

Tropes:

A fox spirit and a badger (which might refer to the more folkloric tanuki) make a bet that whichever of them drives a Buddhist monk from his temple can claim it as their own. Both of them fail, and the badger flees in disgrace. The fox, however, has fallen in love with the monk. She apologizes to him in the form of a beautiful woman, and he allows her to stay in the temple provided she does not cause him any more trouble.