Death: The Deluxe Edition
by Neil Gaiman and too many artists to name
2012, Vertigo/DC Comics

The things I said about the character Death in my review of Death: The Time of Your Life apply here as well, and that graphic novel is also contained within this one. This is a good-sized hardcover graphic novel containing some, possibly most, of the comic book and graphic novel appearances of Gaiman's character "Death."

I don't have much to add to the previous review, except perhaps to add that Foxglove's run-in with death ("The Time of Your Life") grew on me considerably on second reading. Gaiman's writing tends to have a lot of depth and a lot of thought behind it, and you'll get more out of it if you read it again.

In Death: The High Cost of Living, a weird dude called "The Eremite" goes to a great deal of trouble to steal Death's ankh on the one day in one hundred years that she spends as a human being. I remembered this sequence from reading it 30 years ago. The Eremite has high hopes for the ankh he's stolen, and the young man with Death says "He thinks that thing of yours has power." She replies: "He's right, of course. It's a symbol of life; and symbols have power." She continues: "Maybe not in the way he thinks, though." After which she buys another ankh for $10 at a street jewelry stand, saying that "It's the most important thing in the whole universe." This short sequence caused me to think very long and hard about how a symbol without context has no power at all, and that in context ... entire nations go to war for them.