My friend Matthew Surridge just interviewed Neil Gaiman! It was for an article Matthew’s doing about Anticipation, the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention. Gaiman’s going to be the guest of honor, and the convention’s right here in Montreal (Aug. 6 thru 10).
In my post about Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman yesterday, I realized I forgot to sneer adequately at one of the things that most annoyed me in his scripting for WW 196-200. Namely, the gods.
I don’t mind that Rucka turns all his gods into irritating American suburbanites and/or hipsters (Aphrodite as bored housewife; Cupid as stoned California drop-out, etc.) That’s fine; whatever. Some of the dialogue is kind of funny, I guess. I sort of laughed when Ares told Cupid to stop hitting on his great aunt and Cupid says “like that ever stopped anyone in this family from getting game.” I don’t know. I don’t expect a ton from Rucka at this point; I guess I appreciate any indication that he’s trying at all to entertain me rather than educate me or encourage me to fawn over his Amazon paragon.
So, right; updated gods — not especially clever, but par for the course. What really irritates me, though, is the theology. At one point, Ares explains at length to WW that he (Ares) is now more powerful than Zeus, because nobody is scared of the sky but everybody loves war. Putting aside the question of whether Zeus couldn’t somehow piggyback on climate change fears, I just want to say — I am so, so, so sick of the whole “it isn’t the worshippers who get power from the Gods — it’s the Gods who get power from their worshippers” wheeze. It was tired when George Perez dragged it out for his WW series, and after Neil Gaiman picked it up, dusted it off, and then (in his elegantly canny British way) jumped up and down on it for years…well, there wasn’t a whole lot left.
And yet, here’s Rucka, trundling along years later, spouting this crap like it’s actually insightful or meaningful or anything but the tedious ploy of a nonbeliever who wants to have a deity for verisimilitude while pissing on him (or her) too. The logic is patently ridiculous…and as a result it makes the Amazons look like idiots. If they know that their prayers and belief give the Gods power, then, you know, why not think about something else for a while? Why worship a figment of your imagination? Doing so isn’t profound, and it’s certainly not an alternative to man’s world, where everybody is always already worshipping their own immaculate feces. (And, yes, Alan Moore’s worship of his own imagination also irritates me, though at least, unlike Rucka, he actually does have an imagination.)
It seems to me like if you’re going to use gods in a super-hero comic, you can do one of two things. First, you can just treat them as super-heroes, which is more or less what Lee/Kirby did with Thor (at least in all the Thor I’ve read; maybe somewhere they try to build a theology/philosophy to explain the gods, but I mercifully missed that.) Nothing wrong with gods as superheroes; it’s entertaining and goofy and involves people hitting each other with unusual weapons andl/or force blasts, which is what comics are all about.
Or, second, you can actually, you know, have some kind of concept of transcendence and use the gods to explore that. That’s what Marston did in the first WW series. His Aphrodite and Ares are archetypes connected to his ideas about femininity and masculinity and love and war. Aphrodite especially is definitively transcendent; she’s wiser and more powerful than any other character. It makes sense that the Amazons worship her, because she actually seems to know things they don’t.
Of course, the things she “knows” about submission and love and gender roles are things you could disagree with — but Marston believes in them. What’s most irritating about the “gods are there because we believe in them” meme is that it true to some extent — but the truth is vitiated by putting it so clumsily. Yes, fictions do have power, and the power has something to do with belief. But that belief is at least in large part the artist’s belief in his or her own work, and it is created not just through saying, “hey, I believe in that,” but through genius and craftsmanship. Marston’s Aphrodite means something because Marston took the time to make her mean something; she’s transcendent because Marston thought there was transcendence, and thought about how to express that in his work. Rucka’s Ares, on the other hand, just says, “conflict is important,” as if anybody couldn’t have figured that out for themselves. And then he says he’s powerful because people think conflict is important. Just give it up, already. Don’t lecture me on the meaning of existence when you can’t even figure out how to tell a decent comic book story.
I gather it was some kind of music that people find drippy, and that by extension it’s been applied to sensitive young men. Is that the case? Apparently people consider the term a sure put-away insult. From a thread on Sandman at TCJ’s message board, JL Roberson calls Gaiman’s Sandman “Emorpheus” and adds, “sorry, but it’s true, and Dave Sim’s parody of him sums up all that you need to know about him.” As I recall, the Sim parody character was named Swoon and wouldn’t have been much good at football.
Who is she? There isn’t really a lot of information to be had, and apparently that’s how the Gaimans prefer it. Fair enough, and thanks to Mary Warner of the blog Woo Woo Teacup Journal for gathering what was out there. She posted her findings here, and basically they’re a series of links to various scant mentions of his wife by Mr. Gaiman. The first link is to an online journal entry in which Gaiman says this: “my wife is happier to be a shadowy and mysterious figure in the background, or something.”
For the record, Mrs. Gaiman’s name is Mary T. McGrath, she’s American, and the couple got married before Gaiman hit it big. They have a son and two daughters, with one of the daughters still pretty much a kid and the other children both grown up and pursuing careers (Google for the son, film production in Hollywood for the daughter).
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.
Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.