Death is a hot Goth chick. Or that's how she's pictured in Neil Gaiman's underground DC Comics' masterpiece, "The Sandman," illustrated by Mike Dringenberg and others. The only visual that cues death (besides the girl's black duds) is her tapered, skeletally thin fingers, clasped chest-high beneath a heavy ankh pendant.

"You get what anybody gets — you get a lifetime," Death promises through lipstick-laden lips. One gets the feeling that even her voice is steamy.

That's a long way — 500 years, to be exact — from German printmaker Albrecht Durer's spectral depiction of Death as an apocalyptic horseman in his visionary print cycle inspired by the biblical Book of Revelation. The Northern Renaissance master's haggard Death rides an equally cadaverous horse, ushering in not a hot voice, but hot winds in the wake of four equestrians who trample the known world.

TRANSCENDING CENTURIES

Yet it's not as far as it seems. The two personifications of Death, centuries apart, share an exquisite sense of visual storytelling — a somewhat lapsed virtue in contemporary art. Witness their strong characters, moral imperatives, tragic hungers and denouements.

That's why entering the Honolulu Academy of Arts to view Durer's prints, on loan from Germany's Konrad Liebmann Foundation, is most like opening a book. It's a private experience; it takes time and attention (and, for the better-with-age set, reading glasses). But if you get past the first chapter, it'll suck you in.

So don't be dissuaded by the generation gap; Durer's prints have transcended their time and place for centuries. He was an innovator recognized during his lifetime, a northerner admired deeply in the more aesthetically fertile south. His prints altered graphic history for generations to come; this show is the finest assembly of them that you may ever see, anywhere.

Within the 70-plus works on view are several entire woodcut suites, including the "Apocalypse" and "Life of the Virgin Mary" series, and significant intaglio masterpieces such as "Adam and Eve."

But enough about the canon. This is tumultuous human stuff. ABC's television drama "Lost" has nothing on Durer's "Apocalypse" series, with its savage annihilation tableaus and elaborate beasts: seven-headed dragons and devils, and Death himself. And there's little in the pulpy "Da Vinci Code" fiction that can compete with the subtle sorrow of Durer's Mary Magdalene, who cocks her exaggerated head awkwardly in his "Large Passion" series' lamentation scene.

FINE LINES

Drama is achieved technically through versatile, pioneering line: cuts whose widths vary along their lengths, or bold curvilinear organic lines that oppose heavily stippled, cross-hatched passages.

Durer's woodcut designs, likely carved by another craftsman, extracted more intense detail from the crude block than those of any artist before him and few after — a stunning achievement, since woodcut lines represent raised areas that remain after carving (versus intaglio lines, directly formed by the artist's incisions on a metal plate). Durer's fine woodcuts, such as "The Birth of the Virgin," are remarkably as detailed and modeled as intaglios; and his metal engravings, such as "Knight, Death and the Devil," boast the rich textural and graphic appeal of relief prints.

From domestic genre scenes, to pastoral landscapes that recess into fortified medieval hill towns, Durer composes vividly. His so-called "master engravings," including "Melencolia I," treat classical content classically, with placid results. Their precision and ideal proportions suit their subject matter (virtues, God's harmonious effect); more compelling is Durer at his most tensile, as in "The Four Horsemen," whose compositional elements are swept from competing diagonal axes into a kinetic vortex that binds them — but barely.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

There's something very modern about Durer's figures who pluckily engage the viewer's gaze, and his treatment of unresolved human psychology: subjective disappointments, judgments, sorrows and jealousies that play, for example, across the finely wrought faces of those gathered at the synagogue where the Virgin Mary's future parents are rejected for being unfashionably old and still childless. Few artists of Durer's — or any — time display such skill in grasping, and rendering, intangibles.

It's worth disregarding the annoying but preservationally necessary gallery light dimmers, and the also annoying, perhaps less necessary, salon-stacked walls that promote neck strain.

Sure, you could buy the show's catalog instead, but you'd miss out; even the best printing (and this catalog, affordable but printed largely on cheap stock, doesn't qualify) couldn't capture Durer's extraordinary details and draftsmanship.

The man is legendary for good reason: Gallery visitors were overheard gushing unabashedly about a printed Durer woman's meaty, smokin' thighs; something, maybe, to give that Goth chick a run for her money.