Death as personified in flesh is one of the most interesting characters to come out of The Sandman series, as she’s not designed by Neil Gaiman, who wrote the series and designed almost all of the other characters as we see them in his series. Rather, he says, ‘the initial visual design of Death was based on a friend of [artist Chris] Dringenberg’s named Cinamon Hadley’. He later ran into a waitress dressed all in black as Dringenberg has shown her and decided that was indeed how Death should look.
This is the larger statue (not the mini), designed by Randy Bowen, and is number 3192 out of the 6000 that were produced. It stands about five inches tall. Originally it went for around a hundred dollars but is now well over five hundred dollars if you can find one. I found this via a friend at a local comics shop in those golden days before the Pandemic when one could actually go into local shops.
She’s an innocent looking creature but she is of course anything but that. Here she sits on a section of wooden flooring. She’s a very well crafted piece of ceramic, with both the figure itself and the painting details being awesome. Death has white skin, which is hard to get right, but they did that here; it contrasts perfectly with black clothing and well-done hair. There’s also silver paint on her boots, belt, wrist wrap and the anhk. Yes Death’s wearing an ankh. Oh, and she’s got exactly applied red lipstick which contrasts nicely against the ankh tattoo on her eye.
No idea why she’s sitting on a section of flooring and it’s been decades since I read all of Sandman, so I can’t recall a scene where she’d be doing that. It’s an appropriately casual pose given her personality. I’d certainly recommend getting her if you’re really, really into Sandman, as given her price, you will need to be. I on the other hand picked her up for a very reasonable price.
(DC Collectibles, 1997)
