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.
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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