Of Swords and Parasols

15 Sword Stained With Royal Blood/Bi Xue Jian
29 Charles Vess (inc some Stardust)
21 Stardust movie

Teasers:

   

dangermousie's post on Stardust has reminded me that I never did the Charles Vess picspam I intended to do a while back, so here it is.

Stardust is a ballad about the realm of Faerie, in prose and illustrated form.  In it, a young man named Tristan Thorn swears to bring a fallen star to the girl he loves.  Tristan lives in the town of Wall, which exists on the border between Faerie and our world, and the people of Wall guard the hole in the wall that can be used to cross between the two worlds. 

Once every nine years, there is a market day where the people of Faerie sell their wares to the people of our world, but if you aren't careful, you can fall under their spell.  Eighteen years ago(though closer to seventeen and a half at the start of the tale) Tristan's father, Dunstan, fell under the spell of a faerie market girl and nine months later, after Dunstan had wed his sweetheart, Tristan was left at his door.  Tristan grows up to love a beautiful local girl named Victoria.  On a night when a star falls from the sky, Tristan asks her to marry him and Victoria tells him that she'll grant him any desire he wishes if he'll bring the star to her.

So Tristan passes through the hole in the wall and into his mother's realm to search for the star, and after a short series of adventures, he finds the star in the form of an unhappy young woman, who was knocked from the sky by an amulet thrown by the Lord of Stormhold and broke her leg when she landed.  Tristan is not the only one looking for the star.  There's also a trio of witches as old as time who eat the hearts of stars to regain their youth, and the youngest of the three sets out to acquire their new source of youth, and then there's the sons of the Lord of Stormhold.  At Stormhold, fratricide, not order of birth, determines the heir, but the throne cannot be claimed until the amulet is regained.

The novelization of Stardust was actually the first thing of Gaiman's that I read, and while I liked it a lot, something about it felt "off," which made sense when I learned that it was adapted from a graphic novel a few years later.  Gaiman is at his best when writing stories about stories, or stories that border on that and follow tradirional paths, and this is the perfect example of that.  The art is by Charles Vess and thus gorgeous, though not necessarily conventionally so.  BTW,

 

Now to find out soon how badly the movie can mess it up, as they seem to be approaching it from a "fractured fairy tale" standpoint, which is very far from what it is.

alexandral, Vess is one of the two artists the artist you posted the picspam of recently reminds me of.

You know, it occurs to me that, someday soon, I really should read my Stardust trade instead of just pulling it out and looking at the pretty pictures all the time...

(of course, I've read the novel version...my first exposure to Gaiman, actually, but I love Charles Vess's work-he really needs to do a second Book of Ballads series, or just GN would work, too-and I should read it as it was originally intended to be read, certainly before the movie comes out.)