Picture Death. What do you see? If it’s a pale, thin girl with big hair, dark clothing, and a silver ankh, Neil Gaiman’s to blame. In a moment of inspiration that will long outlive him, he chose to make his personification of death not terrifying or beautiful but cute. Over the course of Absolute Death (which collects two miniseries, three one-off stories, and various ephemera), she quotes Mary Poppins, jokes about pigeons, and ushers the newly dead into the afterlife. Her first appearance was in “The Sound of Her Wings,” an early issue of Sandman. In it, she’s presented as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before […]