Death Gallery Highlights

Here are some highlights from 1993's Death Gallery

The issue's cover

by Geoff Darrow

by Arthur Adams

by Jill Karla Schwarz

And here's Gaiman's intro to the gallery:

She arrived in my head, about a week after her brother.

He had arrived brooding, quiet, pale, and gaunt: and while there was indeed a definite family resemblance, she was in many ways his opposite: sensible, delightful, nice.

Mike Dringenberg was at that time the inker of SANDMAN (Sam Kieth was pencilling). He read my description of Death in the original Sandman outline and decided that she should look less like a young Nico or Louise Brooks (as I’d suggested) and more like his friend Cinnamon. Mike did a drawing of her—the same drawing that appeared as a pinup in SANDMAN, and later as a T-shirt and a watch face.

The day the drawing arrived in England, I had met Dave McKean at a London pancake house: he was to show me transparencies of the first few SANDMAN covers. Our waitress was Death: skinny and pale and elfin and sweet, with long dark hair and black clothes and a silver ankh. I nearly showed her Mike’s drawing, but then decided not to.

There’s a tale in the Caballa that suggests that the Angel of Death is so beautiful that on finally seeing it (or him, or her) you fall in love so hard, so fast that your soul is pulled out through your eyes.

I like that story.

There’s an Islamic story that declares that the Angel of Death has huge wings covered in eyes and that as each mortal dies one of its eyes closes, just for a moment.

I like that story too and take pleasure in imagining huge wings, and a ripple of ever opening ever closing beautiful eyes.

And there’s a touch of wish fulfillment in there too. I didn’t want a Death who agonized over her role, or who took a grim delight in her job, or who didn’t care. I wanted a Death that I’d like to meet, in the end. Someone who would care.

Like her.

-NG

The first drawing of Death that Gaiman was referring to