GAF #16: Desire
April 25th, 2008 by Lee
In the immortal words of Debbie Harry:
Once I had a love, and it was a gas
Soon turned out - had a heart of glass
The beautiful Desire, whose sigil is, in fact, a heart of cut glass, is the only truly cruel sibling of the Endless. You’d probably be cruel too if you were the personification of all things before fulfillment of desire, but not fulfillment itself.
Desire’s gender is mutable, being male, female, neither or both as necessary. We’re not sure where exactly such a unique character fits into the Gallery of Gay Action Figures, but we’re sure Desire qualifies in several different categories.
Bonus musical trivia: Desire’s appearance is roughly based on Annie Lennox. Neat.
Related stuff
Posted in Action Figures
April 25th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Did you guys read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman all the way to the end? I really liked the series as a whole. However, I felt the ending was very weak. “The Kindly Ones” is the worst story of the series. First of all, it was a massive mistake to have chosen “Mark Hempel” for the art. I think its probably the worst I’ve ever seen. Second, the Furies seemed so completely 1-Dimensional for the main “villain” of the Series. Yes, they appeared at the very beginning of the series and you have to take those appearances into account. Nevertheless, they were paper thin and ultimately irrelevant (The deaths of “Fiddler’s Green”, and that Guardian Gryphon of the Dreaming seemed to fast and irrelevant). So, I’d like to hear you guy’s thoughts.
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:45 am
Hey Cory, sorry for the delayed response on this one.
I’ve read the whole series through several times, it’s actually my favorite comic and possibly literature of all time.
I like the Kindly Ones story a lot but I agree with you that the art is not my favorite either. I actually find that style of art pretty distracting from a story I otherwise love.
What’s great about The Kindly Ones is watching Gaiman pull together all the threads (no pun intended) of storyline that date back through all the earlier stories, taking us to this inevitable face-off with the consequences of Dream’s actions and character.
The intros to the books contain a lot of amazing insight to the stories, but my favorite line was Gaiman’s response to someone’s request that he explain The Sandman in 25 words or less: “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.”
I don’t see the furies as the “villain” really because the cool thing about the Sandman series is that it puts concepts like good and evil into larger context. I see the Furies, like many of the other characters in the series, as a force of nature. They react to events within the constraint of a set of rules. And like the other anthropomorphisized forces of nature in the series, what defines them is the degree to which they enjoy their “job” and the zeal they employ towards finishing it.
Even Lyta Hall, whose fault of this is, isn’t actually evil from her point of view. That’s one of the things I love about the series is that it tosses aside the traditional canard that evil characters have evil intentions.