Author Archives: Ng Suat Tong

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.

Reviewing the Reviews: Bottomless Belly Button

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While corresponding with a prominent comics blogger recently, our discussion drifted towards the imminent release of The Best American Comics Criticism of the 21st Century. He made the suggestion that it might become “a yearly thing, in the style of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American series, tracking the 21st century as it moves forward”. Now I don’t think this rumor is accurate in any way (not least because there are no other sources backing this claim up) but I was incredulous for an entirely different reason. Quite simply, there simply isn’t enough good comics criticism to fill a book on an annual basis. You might be able to fill a book once every 5-10 years but certainly not more often than that.


Now I’ve been know to write some reviews in my lifetime so I’m essentially lumping myself in that pool of mediocrity called “comics criticism”. I’m approaching this, however, from the perspective of a person who is a reader first and foremost – a reader who is just about lazy enough to want to rely on the hard work and intelligence of others for a deeper understanding of comics.


In this spirit, I decided to make a short analysis of the reviews available for one of the “big” books from 2008 – Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button (BBB). There’s nothing remotely scientific about the following survey. I’m merely trying to reproduce the experience of a reader trying to find out more about a comic after having read it. From the perspective of an occasional comics reviewer, such an exercise is not without its benefits as the articles I’ve encountered mirror the deficiencies in my own writing.


I’ve chosen BBB quite deliberately. As one of the “biggest” and most talked about books of 2008, one would expect a reasonable amount of quality reviews around which to crystallize readers’ thoughts. I hardly expect a critic to devote acres of space to ascertain the merits of an insignificant work but this label simply doesn’t apply to BBB.


It has to be said that most comic reviews and articles aren’t written with needs such as my own in mind. Rather, they’re aimed at readers in search of much more basic guidance: to read or not to read; to buy or not to buy.


Most readers aren’t interested in the inner mechanics of comics or the layers upon layers of meaning an artist imbues his work with. In other words, the very things a good cartoonist wrestles with on a daily basis. Most aren’t even interested in well argued, detailed essays debating the merits of a work. To most readers, comics are momentary diversions hardly deserving of this the kind of attention. Another group of readers find reviews entirely useless, preferring to rely on their own brilliance to pierce any semblance of a veil. Needless to say, this blog entry is not meant for persons such as these.


The web is perceived (not entirely without reason) as the province of ephemera directed at short attention spans. That the vast majority of reviews of BBB amount to little more than a short description and recommendation should come as no surprise. I count among these the reviews at Boing Boing, Comic Book Galaxy, Comic Mix, Entertainment Weekly, Fiction Writers Review, The Guardian, the Hip Librarians Book Blog, infibeam and The Stranger. There are a series of blurbs at the Fantagraphics website as well as at Publishers Weekly. The review at Comic Book Bin goes into more detail but is once again mainly descriptive with the faint whiff of opinion thrown in for good measure. In short, the web is replete with choices in this category. I’ve merely chosen a small representative sample from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps this reflects, in part, the lack of money attached to this activity - this lack of money discouraging the use of more resources in terms of time and effort.


The well known New York Magazine article on Dash Shaw is little more than a puff piece containing some background information on the author. The extent of its adulation is easily captured in the following quote:


“Yet that disparity between the roughness of the art and the maturity of the story—not for children! the book’s spine reads, alongside Shaw-penned faces of crying tots—lends Shaw’s work an emotional jolt that’s sometimes absent from the work of other graphic novelists, even those as acclaimed as Ware and Clowes.”


On second thoughts, perhaps it’s not so much adulation as clutching at straws.


Well argued negativity is also in very short supply. An article at the Inkwell bookstore has some embryonic antagonism in relation to BBB but does so in passing while reviewing Ariel Schrag’s Likwise. The writer at Fiction Circus uses his review of BBB to launch into a tirade against simplicity and “humble line art” among alternative cartoonists. Seth, Alison Bechdel and “maybe everyone at Topshelf” are brought up in defense of his case. He writes:


“My problem is with how the boring “cartooning” style is privileged as artistic and honest in comics, the same way Hemingway’s writing style used to be in literature. The same way, arguably, that literature now privileges boring “realistic” subject matter. Unfortunately, in Bottomless Bellybutton, Mr. Shaw is guilty of drawing in a boring style…”


And later:


“It is a credit to the modest, weirdly involving art and writing in Bottomless Bellybutton that, despite all these problems, I didn’t realize it wasn’t very good until I was about halfway through.”


The entire experience is not unlike wandering through the arguments of a petulant child.


The New York Times is not much better. Here’s exhibit A:

”Though there’s plenty to enjoy in “Bottomless Belly Button” – realistic dialogue, an emotional connection to the characters, some wonderful flourishes in the layout – it seems wrong to delve too far into those elements before pointing out another major ingredient: nudity. The book’s spine has a “not for children” label and a drawing of six young faces overlaid with X’s – quite appropriate, because some of the interior illustrations merit a triple-X rating. The images run from the mundane to the racy to the positively, well, graphic. Perhaps the use of nudity is a budding trend in graphic novels.”

I understand the limitations imposed by writing about comics for a mainstream publication – the need for evangelical zeal and a sensitivity for reader’s of a more puritanical nature – but this reads too much like a blast from the “Comic aren’t for kids anymore!” past. I imagined a nun at the keyboard before the writer started proclaiming a fondness for the decompression used by Brian Michael Bendis in Ultimate Spider-Man. I can’t imagine a nun liking Ultimate Spider-Man. I certainly can’t conceive of any nun labeling Y: The Last Man “exquisite” as the NYT writer does. Nuns have better taste than that. The less said of this travesty of a review the better.

Derik Badman who makes a valiant effort at analyzing some of Shaw’s techniques but gets bogged down in the somewhat repetitive mechanics of the book. Badman’s entry reads like a series of notes prepared for a more comprehensive article and it really never pretends to be much more than this. I suspect that a longer and more thorough piece might have emerged in a more encouraging critical environment.

The single best article on BBB available on-line is in all likelihood one of the least read – Charles Hatfield’s article at Thought Balloonists. This isn’t even Hatfield at the top of his game – it’s merely a long entry for his blog, written with some degree of thought and planning of course but not with the rigor of one of his academic articles or published reviews. It’s a clear, methodical discussion of the themes, mechanics and deficiencies of BBB. Hatfield has been doing this for years and it shows even in the most casual of his writings.

One good review of BBB out of dozens – a sad testament to the state of comics criticism by any measure. For the sake of comparison, I urge you to do the most basic search for reviews of any prominent work of literary fiction – a recent one if need be if only to give a small edge to comics-related reviews (Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Inherent Vice. Even in a critical scene notorious for incestuous relationships and glad-handing the difference in quality is sobering. Comics criticism has a long, long way to go – certainly before it satisfies my most basic needs as a reader.