Tag Archives: Neil Gaiman

I Just Live Here

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This first appeared in March, 2011 on Splice Today.
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Neil Gaiman’s 1996 novel Neverwhere has been chosen as the novel everyone in Chicago is supposed to read for the One Book, One Chicago program. So what the hell; I’m in Chicago. I did my civic duty and read it. And having finished it, I was left with a question. Why?

I’m sure Gaiman’s novel made sense back when it was released. It was a novelization of a Gaiman-penned BBC series, first of all, and novelizations make sense, if by “sense” you mean “dollars and”. And besides, it’s always the right time to release standard-issue genre product. Richard Mayhew is a rumpled but/and appealing Londoner with a mundane job and an overbearing fiancé. Then he is pulled into the mystical magical world of London Below, therein encountering an attractive damsel in distress and quests and beasts and, well, you know the drill. Richard goes down into the down below and discovers within himself Hidden Depths. As a reward, he gets everything he ever wanted in his mundane existence—promotions, perfect wife, etc. But he turns it all down to go back to the magic world because he is no longer the mundane yob he once was but a big fat hero. Yay!

So as I said, at the time it made sense. People read narratives like this at a brisk pace; the supply must be replenished. Gaiman churned one out, it was consumed and everyone was happy. Fair enough.

But there are a lot of books in the world, and even presuming that One Book, One Chicago has to pick a couple of them a year, so perhaps they’re running out—it’s still hard for me to figure out what made Neverwhere stand out. Even though my local Borders just went belly up, I bet I could still sneak in by a back door and find, amidst the scattered boxes and debris of the inglorious retreat, at least a dozen volumes scattered about forlornly in the urban fantasy section that are indistinguishable from Neverwhere.

I guess there are various possibilities. Maybe somebody on the selection committee is just a huge Gaiman fan. Maybe it’s linked to the stage play of Neverwhere, which is supposed to be opening in Chicago—synchronicity and all that.

Or maybe (and this is my favorite theory) the appeal is the book’s bizarre lack of sex.

Urban fantasy is a fairly eroticized genre: at this date, post-Twilight, it’s a hybrid of fantasy/horror and romance; all heaving angst and tortured bosoms with time out for fairies. Gaiman’s book is considerably more chaste while still being basically obsessed with throwing shapely lasses our hero’s way. It’s got the tantalizing tingle of lust without ever admitting its baser instincts (which might raise unfortunate questions in the minds of the censorious.)

Whether or not this played into the selection, there’s no doubt that, as far as love and women go, this book is a marvel of bad faith male fantasy. Almost the first thing we learn about Richard Mayhew is that he “had a rumpled, just-woken-up look to him, which made him more attractive to the opposite sex than he would ever understand or believe.”

Richard is rumpled, attractive, and humble. On the strength of those qualities, and those basically alone, we are to love him, especially if “we” are women. The narrative proceeds to throw at him girl after girl: Door, the pursued heroine; Hunter, the sexy lesbian leather-encased bodyguard who takes a pronounced liking to him; Lamia, a goth hottie, and Anaesthasia, a young girl who guides him about for a few pages.

Richard never gets anywhere near consummation with most of these women; his clueless continence is why they all look upon him with such proprietary longing. The exceptions are instructive though. He sits on a bench with Anastasia beside a hot-and-heavy couple who (magic!) can’t see them. Shortly thereafter, Anastasia gets killed, allowing Richard the opportunity to soulfully mourn her and erase that pesky hint of uncomfortable eroticism. In another incident, the goth hottie Lamia actually kisses him—and she then turns out to be a vampire, suckling the life out of him like an evil inverse mommy. Sex is death! (Though maybe not an entirely bad death; there are a couple moments in the book where Richard seems a little nostalgic for the vampire and what she was offering.)

The one woman Richard actually does sleep with (always off-camera and in memory, but still) is his bitchy, high-powered girlfriend Jessica. Jessica has numerous sins. She drags Richard to art galleries and drags him shopping and wants to make something of him. We are supposed to despise her for this, though, really, it’s hard to see how one could not want to make something of Richard. For he is, in all his attractive, slumpy glory, about as boring a character as I have ever encountered in literature. If he has ever had a single real interest or thought or passion, Gaiman does not allow said interest, thought, or passion to disturb the still perfection of Richard’s rumpled vacuity. Richard does collect little troll dolls, it’s true—but Gaiman takes pains to inform us that this is largely accidental, and has nothing to do with a real interest in troll dolls. Richard’s only actual attribute appears to be a kind heart. In the absence of any personality, though, it’s hard not to see this as tacked on.

Anyway. The point is, Jessica wants to change him, and that is wrong, wrong, wrong. And so we have Neverwhere, the entire purpose of which is to pry Richard from those predatory, improving arms; to make Jessica break her engagement with him so he can leave Mommy and grow up…or never grow up, as the case may be. And so London Below opens up and takes Richard in, offering him a teasing erotic smorgasbord and the adrenalin high of conflict. And when he returns, Jessica comes crawling back, begging him to be her fiancée again, so he can dump her. With sadness, of course, and delicious superior regret. Paid her back, the bitch—and he was even sorry about it!

At this point, you’d think Richard would celebrate maturity by going out and screwing someone. Someone is offered (she’s from Computer Services)—but no. Not that life for our boy. Instead it’s back to London Below, where, presumably, more exciting adventures and more chaste eroticism await. Richard’s a rumpled, drab Peter Pan; Neverwhere is Never-Never Land with the spark of imagination swapped for very slightly more sex. It’s a poor trade, but maybe it’s what Chicago is clamoring for. How should I know? I just live here.
 

Just a Thing In Our Dream

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Earlier this week, Nadim Damluji wrote a post discussing the painful Orientalism of Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Nadim sums up his argument as follows:

Wanatolia represents the poignant identity crisis at the heart of Habibi: it wants to be a fairytale and commentary on capitalism at the same time. The problem is that in sampling both genres so fluidly, Thompson breaks down the boundaries that keep the Oriental elements in the realm of make-believe. In other words, the way in which Wanatolia is portrayed as simultaneously savage and “modern” reinforces how readers conceive of the whole of the Middle East. Although Thompson is coming from a very different place, he is presenting the same logic here that stifles discourse in the United States on issues like the right to Palestinian statehood. If we are able to understand Arabs in a perpetual version of Arabian Nights, then we are able to deny them a seat at the table of “civilized discourse.”

Thompson self-consciously presents his Orientalism as a fairy-tale. Yet the fairy tale is so riveting, and his interest in the reality of the Middle East so tenuous, that he ends up perpetuating and validating the tropes he claims not to endorse. Here, as so often, what you say effectively determines what you believe rather than the other way around.

Thinking about this, I was reminded of one of Neil Gaiman’s most admired Sandman stories — Ramadan, written in the early 1990s and drawn by the great P. Craig Russell.


The beautiful opening page of Gaiman/Russell’s “Ramadan”.

I haven’t read Thompson’s Habibi, but from Nadim’s description, it seems that Gaiman and Russell are even more explicit in treating Orientalism as a trope or fantasy. The protagonist of “Ramadan” is Haroun al Raschid, the king of Baghdad, the most marvelous city in the world. Baghdad is, in fact, the mystical distillation of all the magical stories of the mysterious East. Gaiman’s prose evokes, with varying success the exotic/poetic flourishes of Western Oriental fantasy. At his best, he captures the opulent wonder of a well-told fairy-tale:

And there was also in that room the other egg of the phoenix. (For the phoenix when its time comes to die lays two eggs, one black, one white.
From the white egg hatches the phoenix-bird itself, when its time comes.
But what hatches from the black egg no one knows.)

At his worst, he sounds like a sweatily clueless slam poet: there’s just no excuse for dialogue like “I can smooth away the darkness in your soul between my thighs”.

But if Gaiman’s hold on his material wavers at times, Russell makes up for any lapses. Beneath his able pen, the Arabian Nights is transformed into sweeping art nouveauish landscapes, a ravishingly familiar foreign decadence.

As I said, this is all clearly marked as fantasy — both because there are flying carpets and Phoenixes and magical globes filled with demons, and because the whole point of the narrative is that it’s a story. As the story opens, Haroun al Raschid is dissatisfied with his city, because, despite all its marvels, it will not last forever. So he makes a bargain; he will sell Baghdad to Dream, and in return Dream agrees to preserve the city forever. The bargain made, the city vanishes into dream and story. And not just the Phoenix and the magic carpet disappear, but all the marvelous wealth and luxury and wisdom of the east, from the luxurious harems to the fantastic quests. Orientalism, as it is for Craig Thompson, becomes just a story which never was.

Gaiman and Russell, then, avoid Thompson’s error; they do not conflate reality and fantasy. Fantasy is in a bottle in the dream king’s realm, forever accessible, but never actual. The real Middle East, on the other hand, must deal with a grimmer truth; the last pages of the story show Iraq as it was in the early 90s — ravaged by sanctions, brutally impoverished, and generally a gigantic mess by any objective standards (though not, of course, by the standards of the Iraq of a decade later.) In this real Iraq of starvation and misery, the other Iraq is only a dream. As Gaiman says, speaking of an Iraqi child picking his way through the ruins, “he prays…prays to Allah (who made all things) that somewhere in the darkness of dreams, abides the other Baghdad (that can never die), and the other egg of the Phoenix.”

So that’s all good then. Except…whose is this dream of Orientalism, exactly? Well, it’s the Iraqi boys, as I said, and before his, it was Haroun al Raschid’s. But really, of course, it isn’t theirs at all. It’s Gaiman and Russell’s.

Orientalism does have some roots in Arabic stories; I’m not denying that. But this particular conception of the folklore of Arabia as a single, marvelous whole, containing all that is wonderful in the East, in contrast to a sordid, depressing reality — I don’t believe Gaiman and Russell when they say that that’s a thing in the mind of Iraqis. Habin al Raschid giving up his dream is a dream itself, and the dreamer doesn’t live anywhere near Baghdad.

“Ramadan,” then, is a tale about losing a fantastic land to fantasy — but it isn’t Habin al Raschid who loses it. Rather, it’s Gaiman and Russell and you and me, (presuming you and me are Western readers.) Gaiman and Russell are, like Thompson, nostalgic for Orientalism — they know it’s a dream, a vision in a bottle, but they just can’t bear to put the bottle down. Our fantasy Middle East is so much more glamorous than the real Middle East, even the people who live there must despair that our tropes are not their reality. Surely they want to be what we want them to be, democrats or kings, sensuous harem maidens or strong independent women. Thus the magical Arabia and the sordid, debased (but potentially modern!) Arabia live on together in the world of story, comforting Western tellers with the eternal beauty of loss. Our Orient is gone. Long live our Orient.
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Nadim’s thoughts have inspired an impromptu roundtable on Orientalism. which can be read here as it develops.

Best American Kvetching 2010

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The Best American Comics 2010 edited by Neil Gaiman just came out a week or so ago. Here’s the table of contents:

My review of the book is here but I wondered…what do people think should have been included that wasn’t? And (since this blog abjures excessive positivity as bad for the soul) what do people think shouldn’t have been included that was? (Remember despite the title releases should actually be from 2009.)

I’ll kick it off — I think the worst piece in the book is probably Peter Kuper’s insipid anti-Bush boilerplate, “Ceci N’est Pas Une Comic. After that…um…Dave Lapp’s Flytrap with its mix of oleaginous condescension and crappy art is really bad…and the maudlin it-must-be-profound-because-it’s-about-9/11 excerpt from Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel’s The Alcoholic.

As for what I’d include: I definitely would have put in an excerpt from Johnny Ryan’s first issue of Prison Pit (which I reviewed here. ) I’d also have included an excerpt from one of Mo Willems children’s books, which are some of the most skillful comics around in whatever format (probably I’d have chosen something from the great Elephants Can’t Dance.) I’d definitely have chosen something from Kate Beaton too…and quite possibly from Garfield Minus Garfield.

The one piece in the book I agreed with down to my socks was the inclusion of an excerpt from Lilli Carre’s Lagoon, easily one of my favorite comics from last year. (I reviewed it here.)

So..use the comments to have at it. Feel free to include links to reviews of your own, too, if you’d like.

Morpheus Strip: Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream)

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This is the last in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. There’s lots of good stuff in the previous posts (too much good stuff, perhaps, but such is the danger of going last). If you haven’t already, take a look at:
Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and Vom Marlowe’s “Revisiting Old Lives.”

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Like everyone else in the world, I loved Sandman when it first came out. I have all the collected volumes but one (more on that later), and while I haven’t reread any of them, I do still think of some of the stories and characters sometimes. (Which would especially impress you if you had any idea of the mental chaos I fight daily just to remember to, say, eat lunch – although if you’ve followed Gluey Tart at all, you no doubt do have some idea.) So, I remember the whole thing fondly but was a bit worried that stirring it up again would just make everyone unhappy, like visiting my home town or listening to ‘80s Aerosmith (and ‘90s or, quelle horreur, ‘00s Aerosmith is obviously not even on the table).

Mostly, though, I was just excited about figuring out where the hell that enormous stack of Sandman books was and digging in. On top of a bookcase, it turned out, and not under a huge, dusty, towering stack of God knows what, like almost everything else I look for. And I realize that there are books on top of these stacks, and everything can’t always actually be on the bottom, but sometimes I wonder if they don’t migrate there on their own, trying to hide from me – something that could easily happen in Sandman, now that I think about it. I decided to look at the two Orpheus stories because I particularly liked those. (They’re in Fables and Reflections and Brief Lives, if you’d like to read them yourself.) Or maybe I’d pick something else – I didn’t know. (I often don’t; I prefer to think of it as being flexible.) But I flipped through the books in order and, good lord, that is some lousy-ass art. I mean, a jittery, shifting every few pages, unnervingly bad collection of art. A Game of You is the worst – that one doesn’t just make me just cringe but also makes me fucking angry about its really excessive badness. I kept thinking no, this is really so bad I can’t quite bring myself to spend quality time with it.

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I remember having problems with a lot of the art in Sandman the first time around – the overall quality (by which I mean the lack thereof), but also the startling shifts in style and character design in mid-arc. Like these three consecutive pages:

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No, of course it isn’t all horrible. (I like two of the those last three pages, and don’t mind the other.) But a lot of it is. And if it bothered me then, it freaks me the hell out now, having since discovered manga and becoming accustomed to the joys of consistency and artistic whatsit. So I riffled through every volume until I found one that I liked the look of pretty consistently.

Unfortunately, that volume was the second to the last, The Kindly Ones. This is unfortunate in several respects:

1) It is an endgame sort of volume that heavily references and wraps up a number of previous storylines, few of which I remembered as well as I needed to.
2) Morpheus fucking dies. I hate that.
3) See point 1. This collection isn’t boring, but it does feel like more of a settling of accounts than an exciting bit of fantasy, and you kind of have to read the whole thing – there isn’t a shorter piece that holds up on its own in this volume.
4) Morpheus dies. Did I mention that already? I loved Morpheus, in all his enigmatic, usually barely there but always wonderfully Goth manifestations. Morpheus dying is counter to my personal agenda.

Let us tackle these points in order, you and I.

1) Reading Sandman always reminded me of reading Ezra Pound, except that I like Neil Gaiman, while I always sort of wanted to kick Ezra Pound’s ass. What I mean is that Gaiman throws in all these allusions to various mythological and historical high points, and you won’t really understand what’s going on if you don’t get those connections – much like Pound, of course, but ramped down a couple hundred decibels. Gaiman doesn’t reference anything really obscure, and, you know, nothing’s actually written in Greek. So that puts it in a whole other and hugely more acceptable level of pretentiousness right there. Also, Gaiman has so much fun with it, you wind up having fun with it, too. It isn’t “See ye these literary allusions and weep in terror at my big old brain.” It’s more like, “Oh, my God, and then the ravens, the ravens are so cool, and wait, wait, Loki! See what I did there! Oh that’s so cool! And that could tie in with…”

2) I was, and remain, in love with Morpheus. He was written beautifully, if not always drawn beautifully. He is ambiguous – his relationships with the other characters aren’t often clear, or his motivations, or his intent. I often want to scream at writers to please shut up – stop telling me about the damned character. I don’t need to know everything. I want there to be some mystery in our relationship, just like in real life. It’s hard to retain the ambiguity and keep hold of the character, I know – too much information and you feel like a six-year-old has been tugging at your arm and filling you in on all the complexities of the Transformers for several hours; too little information and you don’t care because you never connected with the character in the first place. More people should try, though. Reading Sandman might help.

Morpheus talks a lot about the rules, and the following thereof, and the doing of what must be done. A beautiful example of this is the action that drives the last nail in his coffin. He gives Nuala a pendant when she leaves the Dreaming, telling her he’ll come if she calls him. To grant a boon of some sort. This is one of the many complicated plot points that lead directly to Morpheus’ death. I’m not saying much about any of them because who has the time? This one, though, might bear some explication. Nuala, a fairie who’d been given to Dream in an earlier story, loves Morpheus and mopes around a lot, pining for him. When her brother shows up unexpectedly to take her back to Fairie, she lets Morpheus decide if she stays or goes. He cuts her loose. As a result, later, when Nuala learns Morpheus is in trouble, she summons him – at the worst possible time – hoping to save him by getting him to stay with her. By asking him to love her. Well, who hasn’t had the impulse? It never works for any of us, and Nuala is no exception. This is all very poignant, etc. etc. What I love about it is that Morpheus comes when she calls him. The Dreaming is being pulled down around his ears, but he’d be safe if he stayed put. He tells her the timing sucks, but when she insists, he goes, knowing the furies will take the Dreaming in his absence. I don’t love this because, oh, it’s so romantic (wibble wibble). I mean, it’s hard not to be annoyed with both of them, on that level. I love it because I believe Morpheus when he gives his reason for doing it – there are rules, and they must be followed. Some might say, well, perhaps an exception might be made in this case. I see the logic, but I’m utterly charmed by Morpheus’ failure to compromise. I have a great deal of sympathy for that position. Of course, he sort of does become someone else in the end, anyway. But it’s all, you know. Ambiguous.

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3) The Kindly Ones isn’t the most exciting Sandman collection, but it is still fantastic fantasy. It’s the kind of thing you read on the train for fifteen minutes, and then you get off the train downtown and walk onto the dimly lit platform and start looking around for Norse gods or sentient crows or faeries or something.

4) Morpheus’ death comes as no surprise. There’s a lot of foreshadowing in all shades from really obscure to ham-fisted like an ultra-conservative Republican state representative, but it’s still a shock when it happens. I like the way it’s portrayed, too. A light flashes, and goes out. And Dream the Endless is gone. And everything else goes on. Which is just exactly how death works.

Whenever Death (the character) tells someone they got what everybody gets – a lifetime – I think of the Stephen Crane story, “The Open Boat.” The theme of that story being, basically, “it is what it is.” The tie-in is obvious: nature doesn’t care, and death does her job, because that’s what she is. In The Kindly Ones, Morpheus talked a lot about fulfilling his responsibilities, and many characters questioned his motives. Did you do this on purpose? Do you want to die? One of the many bits of foreshadowing comes via Loki, a divine trickster, but not in a fun, gentle, let’s exploit Native American legends and wear dream-catcher earrings sort of way. Morpheus is the reason Loki is out in the world and wreaking havoc (on Morpheus, as it turns out) instead of being tied by his son’s entrails under the earth with snake venom dripping down on him for eternity, where he belongs. The Corinthian (sort of the ultimate walking nightmare, which Morpheus recreates toward the beginning of this collection) steals Loki’s eyes and breaks his neck, and Odin and Thor take Loki back to the underworld to tie him back down. Loki tries to get the dim-witted Thor to kill him, but Odin intervenes, and Loki isn’t able to escape his fate worse than death. Because Loki is a god, and that’s what’s proper. Morpheus (who is not a god, but the distinction is – well, indistinct) is able to escape, though. What does that mean? I don’t know. That’s how death works, too.

I refused to read the last Sandman collection, The Wake, when it came out. At the end of The Kindly Ones, another character takes over the dreaming (Daniel, who’s never done anything to me, but I hate him anyway – see points 2 and 4 – even though he becomes basically a new version of Morpheus – but it’s sort of like reincarnation in Buddhism, where the flame goes out, and the flame is reignited, but it’s not really the same flame). Sandman was about Morpheus for me, and when Morpheus died, I didn’t want anything else to do with it. Which was really quite emo of me. But it’s also a testament to what Neil Gaiman did with this series, even saddled with a collection of crappy art he had to drag around behind him like the rotting carcass of a castrated ox (or some other foul, unwieldy dead ungulate of your choice). I hesitate to use the “t” word, but in Sandman, Neil Gaiman created something transcendent, in its way. Not “I’m going hire a lawyer to help me set up a religion” transcendent, but something that somewhat extends the limits of ordinary experience.

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Morpheus Strip: Revisiting Old Lives

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It’s ten years ago, and I’m thousands of miles from home, living in a teeny room with a bed that’s been lopped short to fit and a slanting roof, like some medieval scholar monk. I don’t know anyone and I’m spending my days, and my nights, reading cramped texts in Greek and Latin; so much so that my grasp of English is getting stilted and my voice cracks from lack of speaking. I can’t seem to read for pleasure anymore, the words zip past on the page, too fast to catch.

But I stumble into a comic shop, for reasons I no longer remember, and I buy Sandman, and I take it home. I curl up on my too short bed, where my feet stick off if I stretch out, and I read about Andros climbing up the hill. Aner, I think, genitive, Of Man, and keep reading. The beautifully drawn art slows me down and the stories feel familiar, rich and strange and interwoven with layers of meaning and metaphor, like a country garden’s roses gone wild.

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Looking back, I’m sure I didn’t read Brief Lives first, despite this picturesque memory. If I rattle my brain, I can remember reading Preludes and Nocturnes, at my small and cramped desk, and being delighted and appalled and pleased, especially by Death. I read all the notes, too, and I’ve always wondered who Cinnamon was.

But let’s return to this me, this depressed and lonely grad student, steeped deep in Greek stories of destruction and desire told in lush rhythm with beats that seem inevitable and Latin tales of debauchery and conquest told in spare and elegant prose. I sat there and read through the book, a chapter a day, reading slowly and carefully, slowed down by the beautiful art and puzzling over each word.

Did you know that the Greeks had a word for ritualistically ripping people apart, limb from limb, and eating them while alive? (sparagmos)

They did. And you know what? It showed up in the Sandman. The Bacchae there were the Bacchae of my beloved Euripides, at least a little. A force of nature that is both benevolent and strange, cruel and violent, and at times nurturing.

Each week, usually on Sundays, I would walk to the comic store, down a long and forested road full of blind curves and no sidewalks but cut granite curbs. It almost always rained, since Pennsylvania rains a good deal, and eventually it snowed. I walked it anyway, buying, slowly and carefully, each volume.

Except that I didn’t buy them all. A friend told me that Dream dies in the Kindly Ones (and I certainly was wary, with a title like that) but this is not how the story ends. I know this in my heart. The story does not end with Dream killing himself. That never happens. And thus I never bought that volume and I haven’t read it and I won’t, because that plotline does not occur. I’m difficult, and stubborn, as, er, some of the readers of this blog have no doubt guessed, and I sometimes make a decision about how a story as itself should go. And that is the story that lives in my head. Thus it was with Sandman. Sometimes authors are wrong about how the story goes and it is better to live with the story’s own ending.

But what, you may ask (quite reasonably), is the point of a long tale about the sad girl who read Sandman except for skipping the end? How is this useful criticism? What the hell?

And so I will tell you.

Well, so you know that Sandman was a good friend to me, back when I needed one. A beautiful and difficult tale that I savored and cherished. And this week, I was, like many of you, afraid to reread this story lest it look dusty and crumpled and turn out to have atrocious art that could only appeal to the few, the proud, the naive.

But no! Due to a flood, I lost my personal library (about thirty boxes worth) and all my Sandman, so I wasn’t able to reread the whole opus. But I picked up a copy of my favoritest favorite of them all, Brief Lives, and I was pleased and cheered to discover that it was just as good, if not better, than I remembered.

Let’s start with the art, because I love art and I read comics for art, more than for words. This volume has Jill Thompson’s pencils and inks by Vince Locke and Dick Giordano, with color by Danny Vozzo.

Check out this page:

I love this. It’s so unabashedly emo Goth. The dark colors! The fuzzy black hair! The despair! It’s touching, but it’s also kind of funny, because who among us hasn’t had a love affair that felt like this?

After this, of course Morpheus stands outside in the rain. Of course he does! I hear a lot of people (here and elsewhere) complain about the art, and it’s true that there’s better art and worse art, but look at this and tell me that it doesn’t make you laugh:

The art is evocative, and speaks more than the words do alone, which is exactly its job. It conveys a feeling that you can’t get with words alone.

I’d like to turn now to a bit of plot. Delirium, one of the Endless and Morpheus’s sister, misses her brother, Destruction. She’s trying to find him, and she’s asking her siblings for help. She asks Desire first. Desire, ahhhh Gaiman’s Desire. What a tricksy character zie is. In this first piece, Desire is portrayed as petty and cruel, sending an adoring fan to a dire fate for no apparent reason and then behaving unpleasantly, if not deliberately maliciously, to hir sister. Desire decorates with a vivisected man grinning in ecstasy, sleeps on a squishy pink heart muscle, and floats in an eyeball. Ew. Desire, of all the Endless, is shown as the most scheming.

In some ways, this always bothered me, because the point of love is to be good and kind, but at the same time, that’s not really what Gaiman is about. This isn’t love, it’s Desire. Shown most explicitly as sexual Desire.

Now, Brief Lives is bracketed by the Greek temple and Orpheus. The Endless echo Greek deities, and those beings are expressly cruel and capricious in their behavior towards mortals. Aphrodite and Artemis, for instance, destroy lives left and right in the Hippolytus for no other reason than a sisterly grudge.

Gaiman’s Desire would have felt right at home.

So Desire behaves much as a Greek deity would do, and Delirium moves on to ask Despair, who is portrayed in beautiful accents and with truly horrific touches, as gray. (I’m not as OK with her being fat, though, because I am very tired of fat being shorthand for sad or evil.) Despair refuses to act, perhaps because she is afraid of Desire. And then Delirium goes to ask Dream, and we come to one of my favoritest pages in the entirety of the Sandman. Look at this art:

This is the shit. The body language is spot on. That’s a girl trying very very hard to be polite and adult, when upset and worried, and then perking up when the waiter asks her a question. By the end she’s getting confused and impatient, throwing her limbs around in wriggling social discomfort, The brother is absolutely rigid and offended, pretending to be polite while being very cold and insulting. The body language when he orders his meal is so pretentious—and insulting. Sibling slapfight. And the colors! Look at those colors. They’re so clean and reveal so much.

And because everything else is bog standard normal, the waiter is hilarious.

How is this not an awesome visual display of two different and competing siblings? When Morpheus’s body language changes (on the next page), and softens, all the previous panels’ repetition gives that change a huge amount of force.

And his small willingness to change, while he is clearly still despairing over his own heartache and while he is equally still completely embarrassed by his LOUD SHINY COLORFUL WHACKO sister, is endearing. If he thought, as Destruction thinks, that Delirium is fun or comfortable, his actions wouldn’t be nearly as sweet. No, it’s the fact that this trip is going to ruin his already bad day that the character Morpheus is humanized and thus lovable.

There are other fine pieces of art in this volume. The crazy sequences with Delirium turning colors, her jacket turned white, the frowning secretaries who look absolutely like secretaries everywhere, the fluffy and scruffy dog Barnabus, the strange sequence in the nudie bar, there’s a lot to like about this art.

And a beautifully crafted page that is striking with white and blue and a smear of blood blood red.

The pages between Morpheus’s granting of Orpheus’s wish and the page above are always hard to read. Morpheus hides his hands, and his pain, as he apologizes to the small fairy and is polite to his doorkeepers. He’s keeping the horror from others, as best he can.

The impact of killing his son is here in this page, where Morpheus’s despair and exhaustion are real and revealed with no words, just art. I think it’s beautiful and it always stops me in my tracks.

But in any case. I could talk a bit about the coloring (wonderful) or the inking (mediocre) but why? The art does many things well. It’s a whole. And this is a story I am glad to return to. I don’t regret my revisit of this tale. I hope those who haven’t been there in a while can return, too.

Is Morpheus a cypher? Yes and no. His family is rather difficult, let’s admit. Most of them are comfortable with who they are. Death is all-knowing and wise, but that is…not someone I’m going to be. I’m not all knowing and wise, but flawed and emo. Like Morpheus.

Morpheus is interesting because he’s deeply flawed. He’s got all this power and yet he just got dumped. There’s an annoying and embarrassing sister, who bugs him.

Unlike Desire, who is all powerful and using it the way a Greek god would, or Death who uses her power as we’d like the Greek gods to, or Destruction, who decided to leave the game, or Despair, who just isn’t around much, or Delirium, who’s lost it (literally), Morpheus has his powers and still can’t really cope. He does his best, though, and his muddling around is endearing to see and worth reading about. I like him. And he doesn’t die in the end.

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Edited to add: Since there’s a discussion going on in some of the other comments sections about the art, I thought I should note that I read the most recent printing of the regular trade paperback (ISBN 13: 978-1563891380) available here. That’s where the scans come from as well.
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Update by Noah: Other posts in the roundtable: Noah’s “Dream Lovers,” Suat’s “Impressions of Sandman,” Tom’s “Post-modern Something,” and, Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream).

Morpheus Strip: Post-modern something

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It looks like most of what I have to say will be in the Comments threads to Noah’s post, so go here if you’re curious. More important you’ll find Noah’s thoughts on Sandman, and over here is an illuminating discussion by the distinguished Ng Suat Tong.
In this post I’ll add a paragraph from an article about Gaiman that I did for TCJ (namely “My Gaiman Decade,” issue 273, January 2006). And I will add a one-liner that I took out for some reason. It goes like this: Gaiman is so temperamentally averse to big systems of thought that his idea of a cosmology is alliteration (Dream, Destruction, Death. etc.).

The TCJ article was about why I liked Sandman so much and why I felt let down by the series. A lot of me, me, me, which I think was an honest way to approach the subject. For a little while the series had somehow got into the center of my life, and I wanted to figure out why. But I put some ideas in there too, and the paragraph below has a couple.
For instance, wish fulfillment. Here are two secret little payoffs that I got from the series, and I suspect they’re hooks for other people too:

Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes, like folds in a paper fan, and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will. That’s very comfortable; it suits me down to the ground. The characters can go anywhere, travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers; so am I. Go deeper and there’s a more embarrassing source of attraction. The Endless’s fundamental power is that they matter. Wherever they go, they count, and most often anybody else in the same panel counts for less. (The Endless are aware of this, as shown by Dream’s easy way with a high horse and Death’s ambling among the confused.) Superheroes beat each other up; Gaiman’s superbeings see who can matter the hardest. At their crudest, these contests are expressed through staredowns and well-seasoned rebukes. But what underlies the encounters is mana; to use Gaiman language, what underlies them is the fundamental stuff of mattering. [We have no idea what this stuff is, neither in the series or in real life.] Why some people have more self-possession than others is hard to pin down; so is why the universe cares so much about the Endless. After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests in outfacing each other, in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.

I stuck in the bracketed sentence, the one about “We have no idea what this stuff is,” because I still wonder if that section of the extract really makes its point. Ah well.
I’m going to break down the paragraph and expand on individual points.
1)  “Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes … and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will … travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers …”
Kind of meta, I guess. These days most of us spend most of our lives being media consumers. Sandman is the only property I can think of whose characters act out a deluxe, all-power-is-in-your-hands version of same. Wotta hook!
A related point. As I read it, around about the early ’70s genre entertainment fans realized they could just pile all their favorite genres into any single work. Underlying the innovation was the idea that a story didn’t really have to take place anywhere, not even Middle Earth. The idea of a solid world was gone; instead there were just entertainment tropes, with nothing needed to house them but the ready-to-hand sf concept of billowing and necessarily undefined dimensions rolling one into the other.  The Man-Thing story that introduced Howard the Duck is the first example I can think of. The two issues had everything: pirates, space men, dragons, funny animals. If I recall right, Gerber shanghaied the idea of the multiverse, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, and refitted it from an assortment of sword-and-sorcery worlds into the broader sort of assemblage I have in mind.
It was part of Gerber’s sad life progress that, having wandered onto this rich territory, he then wandered off it again. Dave Sim took up the idea in the late 1970s, and he didn’t even need dimensions: pretty soon he was having superheroes pop up in Conan-land with no explanation, and eventually Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway too. Terry Pratchett joined in during the ’80s with Discworld, again shoving disparate genre tropes into a place that didn’t really have to be any place. In the late ’80s Sandman came along and Gaiman hauled dimensions back into play as an explanation. To tie in with the paragraph just above: though all these works have settings that are less places than entertainment-trope warehouses, only Sandman simulates the all-powerful-media-consumer experience because the Endless get to flicker in and out pretty much anywhere they want to go. The people in the other series generally have to walk.
2)   “After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests … in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.”
I guess this in line with David Riesman and inner directed/outer directed. I say “guess” because I’ve never read Riesman, he admitted casually. But a muscles superhero gets his way thru straightforward physical instrumentality: he hits something and then it is no longer standing up, it’s lying down. The Endless, on the other hand, have a lot of big moments that rely just on how one person reacts to another, and these exchanges tend to be a matter of who can out-crust the other. It’s a bit like CSI, if you’ve seen that. Every damn episode has a moment where some poor guy has to swallow his gum and shift his gaze, look down and away in shame as a detective stares at him, and often enough these guys aren’t that important to the story. The episodes still make time for them because those moments are money shots. The audience loves the sight of a poor sap wilting in front of another because those are the moments people chase in their daily lives at the office. 
Put the two ideas together and you get, I don’t know, post-modern something. Physical reality downplayed, agreed-upon social realities played up. But to tell the truth, I’ve been up a long time and now I’m going to bed. 

Morpheus Strip: Impressions of Sandman #1-20

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[Being a cursory reexamination of The Sandman #1-20 by a non-devotee]

The last time I read the first few issues of The Sandman was sometime in the late 80s as the individual issues were being serialized. I suppose it must say something about my appreciation for the comic that it was one of the few mainstream continuing series which I collected from beginning to end. While my interest in the series waxed and waned even as I was collecting the issues, it was these initial episodes which have stuck with me most over time. My general lack of interest in The Sandman is probably best demonstrated by the fact that I had completely forgotten that Morpheus had died towards the close of Gaiman’s tale until Noah brought it up in his roundtable entry. So little did this series mean to me at that point in time (I say this only in retrospect).

When Noah suggested this roundtable discussion last week, I decided to follow his lead and simply reread some issues of The Sandman to reassess my feelings towards the book. The consistent refrain in recent years is that The Sandman as a whole doesn’t hold up. This would suggest that The Sandman represented some high watermark at the time among the comics “cognoscenti” but I don’t remember it ever actually achieving such adulation among readers with a restricted diet of men in tights. I could be mistaken of course. Its reputation among the comics agnostic was and is immense, a fact which was perpetually enshrined by Gaiman’s honoring with the World Fantasy Award in 1991 for his tale with Charles Vess in The Sandman #19 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”)

The most surprising thing about my current reappraisal of The Sandman is how little my impression of these initials issues has changed. I’ve been impressed by the extensive planning involved from the very first issues, now confirmed by a review of Gaiman’s initial Sandman proposal at the back of The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1. He has a good feel for the material and has the right ear for the kind of dialogue required by his characters. These comics are clearly the receptacle into which Gaiman poured a multitude of his ideas. His script for the aforementioned Shakespearean story is precise and well planned, meeting its equal in his collaborator, Charles Vess. We see in these early issues the foundations for the various complexities among The Endless later in the series. The bricks from which Gaiman’s constructs The Sandman fall into place methodically and with great facility throughout these 20 issues. On the other hand, these perceived “virtues” would appear to be among Noah’s chief irritants with regards the series.

Of course, with the passage of time and some personal growth and development in taste, certain ideas have begun to appear more musty. Dr. Destiny’s path of violence and humiliation through The Sandman # 6 (“24 Hours”) no longer seems as viciously violent as it once seemed. “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” from The Sandman # 18 now appears much more simplistic and derivative. The damage frequently wrought to Gaiman’s ideas by Mike Dringenberg, Sam Keith and Colleen Doran is even more evident to my eyes than it was before.

Is Gaiman’s depiction of love as leaden and functional as Noah suggests? It’s entirely possible. Yet it must be said that it has never occurred to me to ask for anything more from Gaiman’s series if only because the comic never seemed to be more than a simple yet appealing entertainment. Perhaps this explains why the seemingly inexplicable nature of Nuala’s love for Morpheus and the reasons Noah posits for this seem more than sufficient in my eyes; these seemingly simplistic justifications being the very fabric of fairy tales and myths. Gaiman gifts are for plot and narrative (enlivened by a thorough immersion in his subject matter). Whenever he strays into the realm of heartfelt emotion, he almost always falls flat on his face. The Sandman has never moved me in the way it appears to have moved much of its audience.

Noah’s passion for The Sandman comes through in his piece. He wants more from it even when there is only so much to squeeze from this fruit. Even when he seems to be criticizing Gaiman’s pretentious depictions of repression, what comes through seems more like bitter disappointment with a beauteous love now tarnished. Yet even these grievances seem well worth exploring and reading if only because of the passion I detect beneath them. Similarly, Tom Crippen’s Sandman retrospective (“My Gaiman Decade”) in The Comics Journal #273 is worth reading precisely because he feels so deeply for the work. It reads like a love letter (tinged with regrets) to a high school sweetheart 10 years on.

For me, Morpheus and his sister, Death, have always remained cyphers and plot devices meant to push forward the narrative and communicate simple homilies – characters for which I have never felt any real warmth or affection. What I see in The Sandman is an intricate fireside story informed by fantasies both old and new. There are modern trappings scattered around the series but the overwhelming feeling is that of myth making and all the richness and sparseness this entails. In much the same vein, I remember the Death mini-series more for Chris Bachalo’s depictions of Death than any semblance of characterization. My memory of it after all these years is that it was rather poor reading. It’s a different matter when it comes to Jaime Hernandez’s depiction of Maggie and Hopey in his most recent comics. Maggie’s crushing depression and sense of loss is palpable when she revisits her old haunts in Ghost of Hoppers. Jaime’s chosen path seems almost like an oppressive hand on his characters lives. The situations in Jaime’s stories are meant to advance his characters while the reverse, more often than not, appears to be the case in Gaiman’s comic.

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These were never books of immense complexity but simply reasonably well told and plotted comics (two elements in short supply in mainstream comics both then and now) served fitfully and to varying effect by a few of the most respected artists in the field (McKean, Vess, Talbot, Craig Russell and Zulli). It’s still a good deal better than 90% of what you get on primetime television. And that’s the key to its success – accessibility mixed with a not insubstantial helping of intelligence and imagination to tickle the nerves of an audience used to much blander food. The richness in its textural references seem mostly skin deep (at least in these early issues). These reference are rarely integral to a clear understanding of the plot nor are they particularly useful as passageways to even greater insights. Evidently, Gaiman understood his audience well.

When I reread Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun every 5-10 years or so, I still find new things to marvel at and more mysteries to uncover. The series remains a continued source of pleasure for me whenever I find the time to revisit it. With The Sandman, I see an old friend who hasn’t changed much since I last met him over a decade ago – still amusing and entertaining in parts but a little shelf worn (though not drastically so). I remember much about him and of his personality even though he’s faded a bit with time. To spend a few hours in his company isn’t particularly painful.

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Notes:

(1) I recently had the chance to read an article by Matthias Wivel at The Metabunker about Gaiman’s work across all mediums with particular reference to Coraline. Wivel appears to have read most of Gaiman’s works including most if not all of his novels. He is of the opinion that the comics represent Gaiman at the height of his artistry. This would include parts of The Sandman I imagine but also his other works such as Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise and Violent Cases. I wonder if he’s right.

(2) Perhaps it would be of some interest to collectors and admirers of original art that some of the most famous pages and covers from the series can be found on Comics Art Fans (CAF). The cover to The Sandman #1 recently surfaced on CAF and is owned by a prominent art dealer who is also an avid collector.

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Update by Noah: As fascist blog overlord promoting gratuitous synergy, I feel it incumbent to add that my initial post in this roundtable on Sandman is here.