UPDATE: I changed the post’s heading in honor of Anonymous, who I believe may be the ghost of Lionel Trilling.
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A while back in Comments I said this about Neil Gaiman:
IMO he’s done a couple of good female characters (Element Girl, for example), and a couple more with decent schtick (Death, Thessaly), but his female leads tend to be hard to tell apart, at least in the Sandman series. For instance, what’s her name, Rose Hunter, or that other one, Barbie. They struck me as placeholders for the imagined Vertigo reader.
But his men aren’t all that great either, except when it comes to schtick.
Judging from some of the other Comments, there are people who can tell Barbie apart from Rose Walker and Rose Walker apart from Lyta Hall. I can’t, beyond such obvious markers as age, height and maternity status. Lyta had her kid taken away and is mad as hell, but I guess Rose would be too. Barbie is adrift and mopes around; then again Lyta doesn’t have much to say for herself until her kid gets yanked, and then she’s mainly just gritting her teeth. Barbie paints her face; Rose writes in her journal. I can’t remember anything any of them said. In The Kindly Ones, Rose writes in her journal that she’s a cold sort of bitch. Well, all right, but she didn’t seem that way in The Doll’s House or even Kindly Ones. She didn’t seem much of anything except a skinny kid with decent bone structure.
Above I refer to the girls as “placeholders for the imagined Vertigo reader” or, more properly, the imagined Vertigo reader’s imagined ideal self. That’s tough to prove, except for the moping, the face painting and journal writing, the low body fat and pleasing cheekbones, and the flattering sense of being important for reasons that are rationally undefinable (I’m a dream vortex!). So I’ll let it lie.
I think Delirium’s crazy younger sister thing is pretty interesting. I don’t know that her or death’s thing is any more a “schtick” than with most male comic characters in the series.
Dream, destiny, and destruction all have their schitcks.
Beat you to it, Pallas. From my post: “But his men aren’t all that great either, except when it comes to schtick.”
Man, I fucking hated Delirium. Same thing with Lisa in Hate. Charming to their creators, tedious to me.
Pinkhamster, you seem like you got your head screwed on right.
Since the post is about “Gaiman’s Women”, could you sight something outside his work on Sandman?
It is a bit damning and almost smacks of fanboy entitlement to reference one popular work in one medium you have a bias towards, but Neil is a short story writer and novelist too. It would be nice to see how you stack up his women in prose or even other comics next to this….
Or are you one of those people who thinks comics can be literate, but that doesn’t mean you have to read real book?
Ah, I see…if you don’t read Neil Gaiman’s books, you must not read any prose at all? That’s an…interesting conclusion.
Calling others fanboys, are we?
Or are you one of those people who thinks comics can be literate, but that doesn’t mean you have to read real book?
I don’t know, am I?
By the way, in this context it’s “cite” and not “sight.” Good luck when you are reading “real book.”