by Eden
Capturing Tank Girl’s anarchic qualities on film was never going to be easy, and Tank Girl (1995, directed by Rachel Talalay) tries really hard. I still have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. I like it — I do own it, and I also own the soundtrack on vinyl (because of course I do) but I go back and forth about how much it actually works.
Mostly, though, I liked it mostly in the same way I always have. It’s a rich and messy comic with plenty of highs and lows. I think it’s a masterpiece when taken as a whole work, even if individual parts are failures.
The Wake doesn’t really need to do that much — it mostly feels and operates like an epilogue — but it provides Neil Gaiman with the opportunity he needed to close out the story of this incarnation of Dream and look to the next one.
The Kindly Ones is dense. It’s the longest volume of The Sandman, collecting 13 issues (plus one small story from Vertigo Jam). It’s confident, it’s powerful, and mostly, it’s just satisfying that all of this has been leading to this point.
Worlds’ End is the quiet before the storm. Or, well, in the context of the collection, it’s the quiet during the storm, since it’s about several travelers who are stuck in the titular inn telling each other stories while they wait out a “reality storm” (it’s The Sandman so just go with it).