[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.
Good Omens was and is great fun…but I give much of the credit to Terry Pratchett.
American Gods, on the other hand, was horribly ponderous, pretentious, and difficult to actually slog through…
I still like Violent Cases and Mr. Punch though…and I've been toying with purchasing Signal to Noise to complete the trilogy (never read it). I think Gaiman's comics are better than his prose…but his recent comics (Eternals, Whatever Happened, Metamorpho) aren't much better than most comics…which isn't exactly praise.
I thought American Gods was fun but a bit long. Didn't see the pretentious side of it.
Coraline left me cold, but other Gaiman readers tell me that his post-Sandman work they like best.
As for Good Omens, the Joe Queenan review makes it hard to believe the book could be any good, and that's because of the review's long quote from the book itself.
People seem to love the book, judging by the interest during Q&A sessions w/ Gaiman at the Montreal sf con.
I think Gaiman's "Whatever Happened…" is even worse than Miller's All Star Batman and Robin. And Miller's book probably suffers most because of Jim Lee's inept artwork.
Ha! Somebody else who doesn't like Jim Lee. That does my heart good.
Good Omens has some really funny bits, if I remember aright. I thought that review you linked to was amusing but maybe a little off base, Tom [the guy seemed offended that the book presented Queen as being still relevant for example…but, in fact, Queen is still both beloved and influential.)
I thought Lee was the best of the Image guys and appreciated his work on Uncanny X-Men (his first big title; he virtually revived it single-handedly) but he never improved. In fact, he got worse. His work on the Miller Batman comic is gross – zero sense of irony.
"the guy seemed offended that the book presented Queen as being still relevant for example…but, in fact, Queen is still both beloved and influential."
yeah, good point. In fact the review came out just a year or so before Wayne's World made a fuss over Queen and drove up its record sales
but … the killer in that review is the long quote from the book itself.
I agree with just about all of this, but what really rings strongest to me is how the book holds up only in accordance with those aspects you remember most fondly. I never really thought the characters were the series' strong point, and sure enough, none of the main characters register as more than coatracks for Gaiman's ideas. (To his credit Gaiman admits as much in the series itself, even going so far as to posit that as a primary motivation behind Morpheus' suicide.) The only characters who get to shine are incidental characters, probably because their peripheral nature places them at a slight remove from the overwhelming mechanisms of plot and allusion. I remember getting far more attached to the talking dog and the raven than I ever was to any of the Endless. (Incidentally, was it ever confirmed by Gaiman that the raven was supposed to be Matthew Cable from Moore's Swamp Thing? I seem to recall hearing that somewhere.)
For my money the first half of the serious is infinitely better than the second, although there are good moments scattered throughout. I still think the Doll's House is a very effective horror comic – people always talk about the 24 hour diner book, which never struck me as that great (sort of watered-down Clive Barker), but the Serial Convention sequence still sends a shiver down my spine twenty years after the fact. I also like Season of Mists, but that's probably the series' high point in terms of hitting the sweet spot between high fantasy and horror. Those stories are still pretty good – the less said about crap like A Game of You or Brief Lives (anything but!) the better.
I have to say, Tim, I found your morbid moniker more disturbing by far than anything in Sandman. But I guess mileage varies on that sort of thing.
Matthew is definitely Matthew Cable. I think it's fairly explicitly stated in the comic itself, though I can't remember where exactly. Eric, do you remember?
"I think Gaiman's "Whatever Happened…" is even worse than Miller's All Star Batman and Robin. And Miller's book probably suffers most because of Jim Lee's inept artwork."
I felt it was pretty bad too.
It was like someone asked Gaiman to write Batman, he agreed, but realized he had absolutely no idea how to write a Batman comic, so he just reused one of his 3 or so main ideas, and had the characters standing around in a dream and telling stories in stories and, oh, the power of myth!
Yes, Matt Cable is Matthew the Raven…Gaiman has said as much (definitely out-of-series… but I think in series as well). He definitely had more personality than most of the characters…but it was from someone else's book.
I liked Game Of You…but not Brief Lives (that one really was a clunker).
and Whatever Happened is definitely a retread of World's End (or was it The Wake?) (Batman dies, people gather to tell stories). The first issue was actually not bad…telling some "clever twist" Batman stories…but the second part–ugh…That was awful. Rewriting "Goodnight Moon" as a Batman comic…what could possibly have told him that was a good idea? (and I like Goodnight Moon!)
“A Dream of a Thousand Cats” from The Sandman # 18 now appears much more simplistic and derivative.
Derivative of what?
Also, there's a small irony in your citation of Wolfe's (brilliant) Book of the New Sun here, given that Wolfe wrote an enthusiastic introduction to Fables and Reflections, one of the Sandman volumes. Obviously it's perfectly valid to like what Wolfe does but not what Wolfe likes, but it seems worth noting.
It's all part of my long-running sense that Sandman is more appreciated among lovers of prose fantasy/sf than among comics lovers per se. I'm not sure why this is — perhaps because the writing is better than the art? Perhaps because fans of serious comics have an anti-fantasy bias that comes from the amount of drecky fantasy in comics? Or those who aren't comics lovers have lower standards for comics? I'm not sure; probably lots of factors. But it's noteworthy that so many of the best sf writers — Ellison, Delany, Wolfe — wrote introductions for the tpbs. And that the prominent SF editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's current Sandman re-read is so much more enthusiastic than this one. And so forth. Myself, I'm with the prose writers & readers on this, although I do love comics. But I mostly find the split interesting.
I don't know…the art is really, really spotty, so I'm sure that's a factor. But I've read a ton of fantasy in my time. Still love Ursula K. Le Guin. Still love C.S. Lewis. Still love John Christopher. Sandman's…well, there are problems.
Obviously people who don't like Sandman can love other fantasy (e.g. Gene Wolfe as mentioned above), and those who love prose fantasy can dislike Sandman (while loving other comics). And this is the sort of thing that can't be proven (any more than disproven) by a few anecdotal examples, so I might simply be wrong. But I still think there is an empirical phenomenon — the different reactions (overall, with lots of exceptions, but as a trend) between two communities towards one body of work. I'm curious about its origins (unless, again, I'm simply seeing things that aren't there, in which case I'd like to be convinced of that).
It's probably demographic. Fantasy is tilted much more towards female readers; (western) comics towards guys. Sandman always tilted female as well.
I'm curious what, if anything, manga readers think about Sandman though. Kinukitty and Vom Marlowe both come at things from a manga-community perspective to some degree; they're posting later in the week, so we'll see what they have to say, at least.
Stephen: Hmm, maybe the word "derivative" was a bit too strong. I was thinking of stories where the protagonist dreams to change the world like Ursula K. Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven and the blurring of dreams and reality as with Zhuangzi. Gaiman has a nice twist on the whole idea. By the way, I'm not saying that I don't like "A Dream of a Thousand Cats". Just that it doesn't seem as "shiny" as it once did when the idea seemed more novel to me.
Also, I'm quite aware that Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman admire each other's work. Afterall, they even wrote "A Walking Tour of the Shambles" together. I didn't read that Wolfe intro though. I think you may be right when you suggest that readers of art comics have an anti-fantasy bias. But I have no such bias myself. I think there are certain works of SF/Fantasy which can be counted among the best literature (in general) produced in the last few decades (The Book of the New Sun being the example here). There's also little doubt in my mind that people who don't usually read comics have much lower standards when it comes to assessing them. Stephen King comes to mind but he's not exactly a great writer. Many would overlook the art (an absolutely essential aspect of comics) and even more overlook the writer's grasp of the formal qualities of comics. But the comics agnostic may have an intuitive grasp of these aspects since they appear to gravitate towards those issues which represent Gaiman's finest collaborations with his artists (the Vess and Craig Russell stories for example).
I don't think you're seeing things but I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon either. I think prose writers focus almost exclusively on the writerly aspects of The Sandman which naturally makes them more enthusiastic. As for Noah's theory about The Sandman "tilting female", I think that has something to do with the fact that ladies tend to make better (and more avid) readers than men – and The Sandman is primarily about the writing.
I don't think it's about writing vs. art; it's simple genre conventions. Goth is for girls, just like super-heroes are for boys — not exclusively, but that's the way it works generally.
I'll be talking about Brief Lives, which everyone here seems to hate, and how much I like the art. Heh.
Oh sure. Just be contrary.
I don't think fantasy tips towards women at all, Noah. Lord of the Rings and Conan and Elric…swords and sorcery…these are all for men…or more properly for boys of a certain age. Some fantasy tips to girls, perhaps, but it depends upon the kind of fantasy doesn't it? Girls like LotR of course…but I still think it's main appeal is to boys.
Superheroes tip to boys, but I'm not sure "comics" do, except by the accident of history that made the two equivalent for awhile.
Of the "great" mainstream comics writers of the past couple decades, Gaiman definitely appeals to women/girls more than anyone else. I see Alan Moore as a very "male-oriented" writer despite his friendliness towards women and women's issues. Halo Jones may be the only substantial exception. Grant Morrison is way over to the male side…and Frank Miller even further. Are there other "great" or even good mainstream American comics writers, post 1986 to pick a not completely arbitrary date? Garth Ennis? I don't count him.
"Rewriting "Goodnight Moon" as a Batman comic…what could possibly have told him that was a good idea?"
I got to read this thing.
NST: Thanks for thoughtful reply. It's a puzzling question, I think — but maybe the focus on art vs. words is central, I dunno.
I do think the gender issue is a red herring.
It's a red herring to suggest that goth comics appeal to girls? And that there's a larger group of women reading fantasy than reading super-hero comics?
Those two things seem indisputable to me….
Tom…"Whatever Happened" is worth a read as a kind of train wreck…little entertainment value though–it's the kind of hagiography of the superhero that replaces an actual story these days.
couldn't resist and i had to answer some of the thoughts here and from Noah's original post. Of course it was too long so i endedup putting it on my blog:
http://inkdestroyedmybrush.blogspot.com/2009/09/sandman-appreciation-roundtable.html
intersting thoughts from you guys as always!
Suat, thanks for linking to my short piece, and Noah, thanks for starting this discussion!
It's been ages since I read Sandman and like many of you, I feel some apprehension at doing so today, but I hope I'll get the time to do so soon anyway.
I don't have much to add at the moment; just one loose thought re: the portrayal of Nuala's love for Dream. I don't remember being troubled by the apparent lack of rationale for it, seeing that Dream was generally described as a pretty attractive character that one might fall in love with.
I know several female readers who had crushes on him way back when and found this a logical extension of how he was portrayed. It may not be the most profound representation fo love in a comic — it's more like an idealised goth romance — but it still takes some chops to write a character like that.
Goodnight Moon is pretty damn great as a song.
Vom, I'm m looking forward to your piece on Brief Lives.
Sandman was a gateway comic for me. I had long since given up reading American comics. I'd collected them as a kid, all of them, every title I could get my hands on, and then I stopped – as you do.
I'd collect comic strips and Cartoonist Profiles mags and old copies of Heavy Metal and Near Myths, but I just wasn't interested in comic books, they had no appeal whatsoever.
One day, however, in the 1980s, heading home, I stopped off at the bus station in Edinburgh's East End and leafed through the comic books at the newspaper kiosk and the cover of The Sandman instantly caught my eye, and so did the cover of Hell Blazer. They somehow seemed like a matching pair. I bought them, and then started picking those titles up regularly, and then because of The Swampthing link with Constantine, I picked up that title, and for a period I started collecting again.
My interest petered-out again during Seasons of Mist, but the comic had a lasting impact on me and on what I believed a comic book could be. The Dolls House remains the only story arc I have paid well over cover price to complete.
To this day I haven't read the later issues and I've avoided the collections; so I'm following your discussion with a great deal of interest.
Hey Matthias. Nice to talk to you again!
I don't think the Nuala romance, or most of the other romances really, are unrealistic in the sense that they're implausible or even unlikely. You could easily imagine a story in which Nuala falls in love with dream and it makes sense. It's just that Gaiman never does the work to get there; the nuts and bolts of the romance are elided, both here and everywhere else in the series.
Not that this is the worst sin an author can perpetrate, or that it's terribly done; as I said, I liked Nuala. It just makes it hard for me to be as enthusiastic about it as I once was…as opposed to, for example, the Laurie/Dan romance in Watchmen, which I actually appreciate more now than I did when I first read the book.
All I can say is, that if you were a kid in the late 90s and felt you had graduated from (or were so goddamn frustrated by) serial superhero comics, there were only two or three available options: Gaiman and Moore, maybe Frank Miller. And Sandman trades, like Watchmen and DKR, were always in stock. Love and Rockets came later, depending on how good your comics shop actually was.
Part of the reason people feel so strongly about these books is that they kept people reading comics when everything else surrounding the comics world seemed to be imploding more than a little bit.
Also, Gene Wolfe is greater than Gaiman, Delany's "Dhalgren" has shaped my life more than any Sandman comics, but I would not have read it if he didn't write a Sandman intro (I read it when I was like 13; alternative sexuality, yay!). The late issues of Gaiman's series turned to much strager art styles; I remember Hempel's work on "Kindly Ones" very fondly, and wonderwhat you all will think about it.
A red herring in the sense that I don't think it's explanatory for the divide I'm talking about; I've seen people of both genders on both sides. (For example, the three prose writers I mentioned were all male.) I suspect that a larger proportion of fantasy's readership is female than for superhero comics (although I don't know for sure, and I have no idea about goth), but I don't think that's what's at the root of the divided reaction to Sandman.
Fantasy readership is exponentially more female than superhero readership is. Really. Trust me on this.
Goth is a primarily female genre. Twilight, Anne Rice, etc. etc. Goth comics are basically the only American comics genre that women have shown more interest in than men, as far as I can tell.
NRH, I was pleasantly surprised by the art in the Kindly Ones. I thought he did a lovely job.
Are you guys looking at those new Absolute Versions? I heard some of the coloring and inking had been 'fixed', though modern fixing of those arts usually feels like defacement to these eyes.
Frank Santoro on Comics Comics talked awhile ago about "The bridge" that existed between underground/indie/alt comix and the maintstream, mostly through Los Bros Hernandez and Steve Rude and Matt Wagner and Chaykin; I think the way Gaiman used Allred and Hempel, and the whole tenor of the series, can't be underestimated in that context (not to mention Dave McKean, whose "Cages" was actually something you could buy for a few years). Not that I have a lot of perspective beyond my (pre-internet) experience of the time, but I know others had similar experience.
Not me; we have the old collections, mostly….
nrh – I have the Absolute Sandman collections but haven't done a close comparison – reading those pamphlets is a pain. All I can say is that the reproduction on Sandman #50 ("Ramadan") is poor. I commented about this on Domingos Isabelinho's blog a while back (he was talking about the new edition of Prince Valiant and how good it was in comparison to older versions). The lines in the Absolute edition of Sandman #50 are approx. 50% thicker than Russell's actual lines on his original art. They probably used old photocopies and blew them up for the new editions. I was really disappointed when I saw this. I can assure you that it makes a huge difference to the feel/delicacy of the art.
I've seen the Absolute and my only response is "eh…" So, it's bigger…I never get why this matters…My eyes adjust when I'm reading to the size of pictures and words. Having something be bigger seems like a ploy to get more money out of me. Obviously, if it's miniature and I can't make it out, that's a different story…but to me, the floppies, the collections, the Absolutes…they basically all look the same. It's just a big pain in the ass to dig floppies out of longboxes (which is why I sold most of my Sandman floppies years ago in an effort to be less impoverished–it didn't work). I do hate the effort to "glossy up" the colors–I prefer a "flatter" color palette I guess.
Little Nemo is the exception, since it's kind of hard to actually read the words unless the pages are at original size. Of course, after reading them you sometimes wish you hadn't. Better to just look at the art, usually.
I've seen the Absolute and my only response is "eh…" So, it's bigger…I never get why this matters…
If you've seen the Sandman ones specifically, then you need to look more closely. The first volume in particular was recolored significantly — it looks very different. (Side by side comparison can be seen here.) I think it's pretty clearly better. (NST may be right about #50; I haven't compared that one. But the art in vol. 1 is a real improvement.) Other volumes have lesser changes, but some are still significant, e.g. Colleen Doran re-inked her issue of the GAME OF YOU storyline.
You may still not like the art, but the changes go far beyond the size of the volume.
Ok…obviously the colors are different, to which I say phooey! If I'm going to read the thing again, I want to read it again, not the same book but "colorized." It's like frickin' Ted Turner. I prefer the original…the limited color palette is a better rendition of hell. I've been there–Wilkes Barre, PA–and it looks more like the original version. The new colorized version looks more like Sesame Place (slightly further south)
Just to clarify – I'm not comparing the old Sandman #50 with the new Sandman #50. I'm comparing the new Sandman #50 with P. Craig Russell's original art. If a reader is paying a premium for a new edition, I expect the reproductions to be top notch.
Oh come on, Eric. Wilkes Barre isn't hell. Purgatory at worst.
Saying that fantasy "tilts female" is kind of like saying that acoustic guitars "tilt female" because Joni Mitchell and Sharon Isbin play them.
Fantasy is just a genre, you know? Some stuff appeals mostly to guys. Some stuff appeals mostly to women. Some stuff is universally loved by everybody.
There are boys' adventure stories, murder mysteries, suspense stories, romance novels featuring wizards and vampires, updates of old myths, historical romances jazzed up with some magic, whatever you want to call Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast… Fantasy is broad enough for everybody to find something they like regardless of things such as gender, race, creed or level of familiarity with Bottomless Belly Button.
As a straight guy who has been reading fantasy since the Seventies, I feel vaguely offended by the idea that the whole genre is "girl stuff."
A guy who writes so much about Wonder Woman should know better.
Genres are very much about gender. It's not an accident that they have the same root.
Why are you offended that fantasy in general tilts towards women in terms of who reads it and who writes it? Just because that's generally true doesn't mean that it's not as good, or that guys can't enjoy it, or that even various sub-genres aren't more tilted towards guys.
Pointing out that fantasy is more girl-friendly than super-heroes is just descriptive. It's not proscriptive. I quite enjoyed the Twilight books, but it would be kind of ridiculous to say, "Well, I liked them, I'm a man, therefore it's offensive to describe the Twilight books as being aimed mostly at women." I like shojo, but it would be ridiculous to say that, therefore, shojo is not mainly for girls.
Just because something is intended for women or girls doesn't mean it's bad. Just because you read something girls like doesn't mean you should be embarrassed. Marston would certainly agree with me about that.
I still don't think "fantasy in general" tilts toward either gender.
What are you basing your assumption off of? The relatively recent success of the Twilight series? Laurell K. Hamilton, maybe? If so… that's kind of ignorant.
What about Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague De Camp, Gene Wolfe or Lord Dunsany?
There have always been fantasy stories that were written by manly men for other manly men who like to read about clever heroes (and occasional heroines) who kill people with their cool swords.
And going back at least to L. Frank Baum, there were always fantasy books written for both boys and girls.
Just because some female authors like Tanya Huff or Robin McKinley have spent the last ten years or so aiming their stuff more at their female readers, that doesn't mean every fantasy book ever published is really women's literature.
You're making a bad generalization about a genre that was around for at least two hundred years before the first Twilight book.
Were Nathaniel Hawthorne and H.P. Lovecraft writing stories specifically for women? What about E.R. Eddison? Or Jonathan Swift?
If I was going to oversimplify fantasy, even though I know better, I would probably cite examples like Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy or Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber–really violent, exciting stuff that would appeal to anybody who ever had a good time playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Fantasy isn't a women's thing or a boy's adventure thing. It's for anybody who likes magic and monsters and feats of derring do.
Noah changes the terms of the argument a couple of times.
To say that fantasy tilts more towards girls than superhero comics IS obvious. With very few exceptions these are written for and by guys.
To say that fantasy in general tilts toward girls is less true…and I would say (as I did earlier in the thread), actually false.
Even if fantasy were 50/50 for boys and girls though, it would obviously be a way higher percentage of female readers and writers than superhero comics.
Not that this was what Noah said–In fact, he's kind of gone back and forth between the two claims.
Citing Hawthorne is off topic, it seems to me, just as citing Borges would be. Fantasy as a contemporary genre means stuff that's shelved with fantasy books. That's not Hawthorne, no matter how much folks eager to establish fantasy's bona fides would like it to be.
Eric's right; I've kind of gone back and forth somewhat. For the terms of the argument (which was originally about why Sandman has more appeal to fantasy readers), the fact that fantasy (and especially goth) has more of a female audience than super-hero comics do really is the point.
I would be that overall fantasy at the moment has more of a female audience than a male one as well, though obviously the imbalance isn't nearly the same as it is for romance novels (which I'm sure have some male audience as well.)
"Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, L. Sprague De Camp, Gene Wolfe or Lord Dunsany?"
I've read work by all those people. I think the fact that most of them are pretty old is fairly telling. Fantasy now tilts more female than it did 30 or 40 years ago, I think — though, again, that doesn't mean that there aren't authors who write more for men. For instance, there are whole very popular sub-genres (goth, urban fantasy) which are aimed primarily at women. (And I don't think that means that the main genre itself is intended for men.)
I did some brief googling, and found little that talked about fantasy audience demographics either way. This writer seems to think that fantasy tilts male, but I'm not sure how convincing a case she makes.
There's an interesting conversation about it here where they seem to feel it's split down the middle…though I notice that many of their male examples are older, with female ones being overall more recent.
Anecdotally…I worked at a mall bookstore for two years, and there were virtually no men who bought romance novels (can't recall any)–On the other hand, there were many fantasy buyers who were…maybe more than women. Robert Jordan was probably the most popular fantasy guy besides Rowling then and his readers tended to be more male. This was something like 15 years ago though…before Twilight, and only a couple Harry Potters were out (or maybe none–I can't remember).
noah,
what about thief lord, eragon… i'm sure there are other current ones, i would guess following on the success of harry potter? that athiest fantasy series that got turned into a movie last year, whose title escapes me? leminy snickett?
i haven't read any of those, my younger brothers are/were into them at a certain age, and my sister and brothers were all into harry potter, which based on the movies i would say splits down the middle, gut feeling not really being in touch with how kids think or buy in terms of gender.
just wanted to give some examples of current fantasy, which seems to be thriving across gender lines.
david alex
Hey David. Harry Potter definitely appeals to boys and girls I think. The atheist guy is Philip Pullman; I have trouble understanding why he appeals to anyone, but I think his audience is probably male and female as well. Eragon too, I'd assume. Lemony Snicket isn't exactly fantasy, I don't think — though perhaps it's shelved there, I don't know for sure.
I kind of am surprised that I couldn't find demographic information more or less instantly with google…oh, wait, here's an article. Haven't read the whole thing, but it argues that there's been a massive influx of female readers into the fantasy genre in the last few years. The article argues that this has caused a drop in artistic quality, which seems like a stretch to me, but anyway, here it is,
And here's another article arguing, with what looks like more actual knowledge, that SF/F books are becoming more oriented towards women.
Women buy and read more than men in general. Comics is a huge exception.
RWA used to have good info on this, but I don't have time to Google.
Fantasy, ah fantasy. Usually considered more girl friendly than SF, in the industry, but still not very friendly, which is kind of why so many fantasy novels are now marketed as YA or romance.
Harry Potter (and Eragon) appealed to boys and thus created great excitement, because it's very hard to get boys to buy books (as opposed to girls).
Lets get back to the art for a little bit here. I have the first three Absolutes, and while i appreciate the larger size, what i don't like, and have blogged about, is that the artwork is generally not reproduced from original source when available. thats a real problem when you're actually bringing the artwork back up to close to original size.
I really disliked the original coloring on the Sandman series, and i'm extremely happy that they took the time to recolor. (see the bleeding american flag during the serial killer convention versus the original version ) It does, however, point out the limitations of the saved black scans that they have. For those of us who have the fortune to have some of the original art, its depressing to pay $100 and know just HOW bad the original scans are.Why don't these companies put the word out to the collectors so that we can give them better scans?
Very often the original colors were big slabs of navy or purple covering all the work that dringenberg and jones were doing, as well as messing up the depth of field and panel composition. The Doll's House stories are clearly better in the recoloring.
I always enjoyed the variety fo artists that were chosen even if i didn't always like them. sometimes you have to take chances and soemtimes it will pay off.sometimes it won't. Jill Thompson's work wasn't always perfect, but it was very effective on those stories and an integral part of the storyline.
I agree that the effort to claim that fantasy books (like Twilight) aren't really fantasy, but YA or Romance, indicates a (still) male bias to "fantasy" as such. Those Eragon books were marketed first as YA, likewise with Twilight…NOT as "fantasy" per se. This tells us something about the perception, anyway of "fantasy" as for boys. This may be changing as Noah points out, but it is a salient fact.
My daughter loves Eragon–read all three innumerable times now, loves Harry Potter, read all 7, 3 or 4 times now—is enjoying The Golden Compass (that's Pullman) and loved the Hobbit and is in the middle of consuming Lord of the Rings avidly.
I kind of get the sense that the gender divisions of reading in general are somewhat less than when we were kids…but of course my child may just be very atypical. No one seems to think she's an "odd girl" for being into dragons, swords, and suchlike. Or maybe you need to be older for this kind of peer pressure/stereotyping to set in? She's 8.