- Highlight
- #1
So, about a week ago Audible released their first part in a series of adapting The Sandman comic book series into an audio drama. Despite being excessively pessimistic about any live action adaptation(fingers crossed Netflix's dies like all the rest), I had two free credits and a need for stuff to listen to at work.
It's alright.
It's a very straight adaptation. The couple of sections I checked with the comic, all the dialogue was exactly the same. There wasn't any major plot point I noticed changed in any way (it's been a fair number if years since I last read it). Neil Gaiman narrates well to fill in what is lost from the visuals. Had I been a lot more familiar with the comic, or had I recently read it, I may have been bored. However as a way to revisit the story after quite a while, I was mostly pleased.
The only real problem is the voice acting. I posted the cast list as to give context for why it's disappointing. I don't think there was a bad performance, it's just nothing stood out as particularly good, other than Gaiman himself. James McAvoy is a mediocre pick for Morpheus, but with Alan Rickman dead I don't think there could be a great choice. Kat Dennings actually probably does I think the best job with Death. The voice threw me off at first, but she is my favorite character from the series, and Dennings' performance won me over. The rest of the cast has several names I recognize from other audiobooks, and I think there in lies the problem. Audiobook narrators aren't voice actors. They're good at distinguishing voices, so you know who is talking, but rarely put all that much inflection into those voices.
Overall, I enjoyed it, and I'll be listening to the rest (it was about 1/3 of the comic), but I'll probably be picking them up on the open seas.
