Death: At Death's Door is an interesting project for several reasons, not least of which is the format.

It's an original Sandman spin-off produced directly in the manga digest format.  For those of you who steer clear of the bookstores, that's a fiddly way of saying it's a normally sized paperback book.  By way of comparison, $9.95 would get you around four-and-a-half issues of Wolverine.  Clocking in at 192 story pages (plus some editorial material and sketchbooks), this format has to rate as a clear win when it comes to value for money.

Generally speaking, the approach of major American publishers has been to produce comics in the normal serial format and then collect them in trade paperbacks in the hope of getting into the bookstore market; original graphic novels still have a tendency to be presented as prestige projects.  Death, appearing in digest form straight off the bat, makes a break from that.  And it's a better way of doing things.  Part of the point of manga is that the format allows for a more relaxed pace.  When you try to mimic that in a monthly serial, the result is generally torpor.  The opening scene here, for example, lasts for 21 pages on its own.  And in this format, that works just fine.

As a format experiment, it certainly deserves to succeed.  But what about the actual content?

It's a manga-style story by Jill Thompson which basically revisits the Sandman storyline "Season of Mists" from Death's point of view.  That storyline involved the temporary closure of Hell and the return of the banished dead to Earth, which obviously caused a few difficulties for Death.  So Thompson has Death, Despair and Delirium attempting to deal with the mess.  Interestingly, Despair gets a much more sympathetic and likeable presentation here than she tended to in Sandman itself; she comes across more as a source of comfort for the depressed rather than as the embodiment of their depression.  And there's a cute comedy subplot with Edgar Allan Poe.  Delirium and Death are much more clearly and recognisably in character, although marks have to be deducted for a painful spot of soapboxing where Death starts blathering about how they prove that girls can be anything they want to be.

Plotwise, Thompson faces the difficulty that from Death's point of view, the events of Season of Mists effectively resolved themselves - or at least, she didn't play any direct part in resolving them.  As the story seems consciously aimed at readers entirely new to the Sandman mythos, Thompson finds herself having to incorporate large chunks of "Season of Mists" wholesale in order to provide an overreaching structure to the plot; but that doesn't quite get round the problem that Death is shoved off to the side of the key events.  It's an entertaining story for all that, and a pleasant reminder of Season of Mists from a different stylistic perspective, but it does work more as an enjoyable series of skits rather than an overall story.

The manga style does suit Thompson, though.  And it's a good match for the characters of Death, Despair and Delirium, all of whom benefit from being a little removed from reality.  There's a risk when trying something so explicitly manga that it comes across as artificial; especially here, when it isn't really Thompson's normal style, and it isn't the style associated with the characters.  Fortunately, the story doesn't try to make a big show of style; it's just there to be read.

Highly enjoyable even if a little inconsequential, and definitely a format that DC ought to do more with.

Rating: A-

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