Stardust gets new edition

Wed, Aug 30, 2006

Books, Film, TV and radio

With work on the film adaptation of Stardust (starring Michelle Pfieffer and Robert De Niro among others) now having moved on to post-production and the film hopefully slated for release next year DC has announced a very tasty looking over-sized hardback edition of the Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess book for January. Rather than a graphic novel per se, Stardust (which was also released as a straight prose novel) is designed like a fairy tale book, with pages of prose illuminated by full page illustrations. Anyone who has come across the art of Charles Vess in the Sandman and elsewhere will realise what a gorgeous combination it makes with Neil’s prose; you really can lose yourself in both the words and the delicate, painted artwork. It is a similar format to the one used to such great effect later on by Neil and Yoshitaka Amano for Sandman: the Dream Hunters.

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The tale is a relatively simple one of a young country boy drawn into a quest to find a fallen shooting star for the woman he loves and unusually for Neil’s work is not as layered as many of his other tales. I remember a signing session for Stardust in the 90s and one fan actually asked Neil about this. His answer was that his usual layering didn’t suit this tale so well; he wanted to read something with the simple elegance of a fairy tale but one which adults could enjoy. Since no-one was writing one he could read he decided to do it himself – luckily for us! As a prose novel it is a lovely, enchanting tale, but in conjunction with Charles’ luscious artwork it becomes a real work of beauty; I think this hardback edition is going to make a lot of readers happy.

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