Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The discussion of Stardust drew seven participants. Stardust is a fairy tale about a young man who sets on a quest in an attempt to impress a beautiful young woman and win her affections. Along the way he has adventures involving tricky witches, evil noblemen, gypsies, and fallen stars. Unusually, the book is available in two forms: a heavily illustrated version with paintings by Charles Vess, and a plain text version. All of us at the meeting had read the illustrated version, which offered all the words plus some gorgeous art for less cost than the plain text hardback.
We started off with a brief discussion of a comics convention in Austin the prior weekend. Several of us had met Charles Vess at the convention. He had brought many of the original paintings from Stardust with him to the convention, and we