Tag Archives: Neil Gaiman

Je Suis Charleston

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Last week, halfway through a vacation where I spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying about being mauled by a shark, another white shooter opened fire some 200 miles down the coast. During the manhunt, I watched helicopters thunder up and down the shore searching, not for Dylann Roof, but for a threat so rare as to be almost illusory. In all this, I know, there is a parable for whiteness and its absurd preoccupations in the face of great privilege. Its self-obsessed imagination. My unearned oblivion.

Still, there are things that I know. Having spent the first 18 years of my life in the mountains of Tennessee, and another four in North Carolina, I felt sick, but not quite surprised, when I heard that a white supremacist with a goddamn bowl cut murdered nine African Americans at a historic church in Charleston. Right now the press is doing what it does, trying to play up this white terrorist’s personhood. (Did you know that his poor sister had to cancel her wedding?) The awful truth is that he is like us, just not in the sense such manipulations imply. For years, Roof has been spewing poisonous nightmare views that the people around him didn’t identify as extreme. And why would they?  Frankly I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between sizeable chunks of Roof’s manifesto and certain Facebook posts by my high school acquaintances. His thoughts on, say, George Zimmerman sound a lot like my uncle’s. The difference is that Roof’s rant has the gravitas we are forced to give someone who has murdered nine people. All too often we try to laugh off the words of regular old non-murderous racists, or just live with them, however uneasily.

Now that the Confederate flag has been denounced by the likes of Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Walmart, it seems that mainstream society finally recognizes this relic of our shameful past as racist imagery. I’m less sure that people understand that it is much more than just a symbol; it is also a threat. Though I spent more than half my life in the South, I find it difficult to articulate the ways in which its discourse is not just a code, but codes built upon codes, including syrupy insults and thinly veiled warnings. Depending on which side of the law you ascribe to, the Confederate flag carries the implication of violence or a promise to look the other way. Whether it’s draped in the back window of a pickup or waving over a courthouse, its message to black Americans is always the same: if I see you here, there will be trouble.

The rhetoric used by staunch defenders of the Confederate flag will sound familiar to anyone aware of the cultural conversation surrounding satire in comics. In both, you’ll see people rally behind racist imagery under the pretense of honoring history or supporting freedom of speech. Comics figureheads like Art Spiegelman who have no love for white supremacy per se have created and/or defended racist cartoons as though the integrity of art itself depends on it. Not realizing that literally no one self-identifies as racist, they imagine themselves to be that other R word: righteous. What would Dylann Roof make of “Notes from a First Amendment Fundamentalist,” I wonder? Compare Spiegelman’s condemnation of the “sanctimonious PC police” with the part of Roof’s manifesto that talks about how easily black people are offended. Yeah, I know there are differences. But tell me, what similarities do you see?

The Charlie Hebdo shooting was both an international headline and a story deeply felt on a personal level by many people in the comics community. What happened in Paris was a tragedy, and there’s no shame in being moved by a story that is especially relevant to your life. But those who said “Je Suis Charlie” (or, worse, “Cartoonists’ Lives Matter”) did not speak for Comics. They spoke for white people who understood the massacre to be of universal significance because the killers were militant Muslims and most of the slain were white. While this fits conveniently with our idea of Trouble in a post-September 11th world, the incident was, demographically speaking, a statistical anomaly. Very few victims of terrorists—including the state-sponsored ones that infiltrate U.S. police—are white. You know who is? Right-wing terrorists like Dylann Roof, who are twice as lethal as their Muslim counterparts in America.

Reader, I don’t wish to suggest that you don’t feel the appropriate degree of sadness or outrage or abject depression about what happened in Charleston. None of us has near enough feelings for the nine people who died there, much less the victims of other atrocities that happen around the world on a given day. But if you do not recognize the Charleston massacre as a story that pertains to Charlie Hebdo or to comics on multiple levels, you are egregiously mistaken.

As a white person, I’ll never fully understand, much less convey, what it feels like to casually encounter racist imagery like some of the more infamous Charlie Hebdo covers or the Confederate flag. I can only offer an imperfect analogy. Back in North Carolina, across the street from the house where I was staying, there was a bar with a BITCH PARKING sign out front. I wasn’t particularly alarmed or surprised upon encountering it. Had I not lived outside the South for so long, I doubt I would have even registered it as a thing. First and foremost I recognized it as a stupid joke (though of course a joke, like “celebrating heritage” or satire, offers a certain kind of cover or deniability). In its sheer ridiculousness, this joke made me laugh. On another level, I felt annoyed. On another level still I felt weary. And finally, churning beneath all of those things, I felt a sense of unease. To me BITCH PARKING communicated a warning so obvious it may as well have been in flashing lights: Go home, girl. There is nothing for you here.

It was lunchtime and we weren’t there to drink. We didn’t even sit down. My brother-in-law just wanted to buy an ironic t-shirt. Still, looking around that dark room with a handful of Bubbas and a specials list featuring something called the Wet Pussy, I understood that my instinct in the parking lot had been correct. As my brother-in-law cheerfully chose his shirt, I felt something that wasn’t fear or danger or even anxiety, but its nebulous possibility.

Art Spiegelman’s blown cover for the New Statesman reminds me a lot of BITCH PARKING. The comics clubhouse scene is no longer about who’s allowed in; it’s about who feels welcomed. It’s about subtle signs and signals such as who is being tortured in the posters you hang on the wall. The flag you choose to fly.

Often, I think about the bathos with which champion of free speech and New Statesman cover boy Neil Gaiman imagined his own death at the hands of Muslim terrorists when he attended a literary gala at the Museum of Natural History:

Hanging above us as we eat is a life-size fibreglass blue whale. If terrorist cells behaved like the ones in the movies, I think, they would already have packed the hollow inside of the blue whale with explosives, leading to an exciting third-act battle sequence on top of the blue whale between our hero and the people trying to set off the bomb. And if that whale explodes, I realise, even an oversized flak jacket worn over a dinner jacket could not protect me.

To fantasize about your own grandiose, unlikely death is a luxury of whiteness. Back on the coast of North Carolina, I bobbed along nervously in the Atlantic Ocean every day for a week without seeing a single shark. One thing I saw plenty was the Confederate flag, both on the news and waving proudly in front of the shop that sells $7 towels. In comics I routinely see people hold up similar racist images as unassailable paragons of free speech. The next time you’re tempted to mock and dismiss those who tell you they perceive that phenomenon as an act of hostility, know this: the so-called PC police can’t do violence to comics by simply voicing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. What sort of violence your gleeful disdain can do to them—the humans, not the comics—remains a live question. Whether or not you deign to examine it is, as ever, your choice.

__________
Follow Kim O’Connor on Twitter.

 

Off to Never-Never Land

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First time I lost a tooth, I ran to the top of the steps and yelled, “My tooth came out!” I couldn’t see my mother in our laundry room, but she performed a reasonably convincing shout of excitement, ending with: “Looks like someone’s getting a visit from the tooth fairy tonight!”

My five-year-old body went rigid. Blood drained from my face. Tooth fairy? Who the hell was the tooth fairy?

I must have a gothic disposition, because I assumed this creature would be coming for the rest of my still-attached teeth. One of Poe’s narrators does that, plucks out his beloved’s beautiful incisors and bicuspids with a pair of pliers. But Germany’s E. T. A. Hoffman is the better source for inverted fairies. A student in my English Capstone assigned the 1816 “Der Sandmann” to our class earlier this semester. Hoffman takes the harmless Sandman, bringer of sleep to dozy children, and twists him into “a wicked man” who “throws handfuls of sand into their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them into a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones.”

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That’s the guy Metallica is singing about. Although the Hans Anderson version isn’t all goodnight kisses either. Ole-Luk-Oie, the Dream-God, may be very “fond of children,” but if you’ve been naughty, he holds a black umbrella over you all night so come morning you’ve dreamt nothing at all. His sibling is named Ole-Luk-Oie too, except “he never visits anyone but once, and when he does come, he takes him away on his horse, and tells him stories as they ride along. He knows only two. One of these is so wonderfully beautiful, that no one in the world can imagine anything like it; but the other is just as ugly and frightful, so that it would be impossible to describe it.” The other Sandman isn’t a Dream-God. He’s Death.

I prefer Hoffman’s eye-plucking fairy. He reveals “the path of the wonderful and adventurous” as the child-narrator tries to unmask him. That’s right, “the terrible Sand-man” is a dual-identity supervillain. The kid recognizes his father’s business partner, a literally Satanic lawyer who practices alchemy by night. If the Faust allusions aren’t clear, then note his “sepulchral voice” and the laboratory explosion that kills the hapless dad. Hoffman even quotes Goethe after strumming the ubermench theme song: “Father treated him as if he were a being from a higher race.”

Enter Golden Age comic writer Gardner Fox. He must have spent a lot of time under Ole-Luk-Oie’s other umbrella, the one with the pictures twirling on the inside. He dreamt up the Flash, Hawkman, Dr. Fate and the Justice Society of America. Bill Finger usually gets credit as Batman’s original writer, but Fox wrote six of the first eight episodes, each almost twice as long as Finger’s introductory 6-pagers. Instead of apprehending jewel thieves and serial killers, Fox’s phantasmagoric Dark Knight faces down a werewolf-vampire and some guy who steals faces and puts them on talking flowers.

Sandman golden age

When Finger returned Batman to the grit of crime alley in 1940, Fox dreamt up the Sandman, your standard fedora-wearing Mystery Man, except in a World War I gas mask. He stole his knock-out pellets from Batman’s utility belt (a Fox invention), though they’d already been field-tested by Johnston McCulley’s Bat and WXYZ’s Green Hornet. When Jack Kirby and Joe Simon got tired of spinning Timely’s umbrella of characters, they traded in the Sandman’s business suit for a red and yellow leotard and a sidekick named Sandy. They kept the color scheme when they revised him again in 1974, this time as the Sandman of Hans Anderson lore, a protector of children’s dreams. That’s the dopey series Neil Gaiman reawakened in 1988.

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I was too busy mourning the collapse of Alan Moore’s short-lived Mad Love company to take adequate notice at the time. Gaiman stripped off the leotard, but I still considered his white-skinned Morpheus just another superhero reboot. I thought the future of comics was Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers and Dave McKean’s Cages. I was wrong. McKean’s publisher Tundra died almost as fast as Mad Love. I’m sure he made better money painting Sandman covers anyway.

Sandman is easily the best-selling and best-regarded comic of the 90s. When I attended a comics forum last month, it was the only work to receive its own three-scholar panel. Unfortunately the forum was in Michigan after a bout of “snow thunder” had reduced the state to a lake of frozen slush, and none of the three panelists showed up. Maybe the empty podium was their way of evoking a night spent under the Sandman’s black umbrella.

I prefer Gaiman’s non-graphic novels anyway. Stardust was one of the last books I read aloud to my kids, my wife regularly teaches American Gods, and Coraline once shattered an MFA-induced writing block of mine, not just its twirling dreamscape, but the deceptively Stein-esque simplicity of its sentences. This also lea\d to a parenting low point when my wife and I refused to leave a matinee of the film adaptation even though our son was trying to claw over the back of his seat to escape. And yet the emotional scars did not prevent him from later writing a book report on Neverwhere. He likes Good Omens too.

Like Hans Anderson, DC spun-off the Sandman’s sibling Death, but when Gaiman killed Sandman, his contract stipulated that it would stay dead. Because, as Ole-Luk-Oie warns his listeners, “You may have too much of a good thing.” I was paying enough attention to buy that 75th and final issue, a riff on Shakespeare’s Tempest. It turns out the bard is a bit of a Faust himself. The talentless hack accepts a contract as the Sandman’s front man, inundating the world with dream stuff for centuries to come. “There is nobody in the world,” wrote Hans, “who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely.”

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The Extended Laces; or Drusilla’s Fatal Brochure

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The Extended Laces
or, Drusilla’s Fatal Brochure
By Claudia Fonce Earbrass

Author of The Unsprung Trampoline, A Thousand Pins, Why?, The Applecramp Sextet, Did She Remember?, The Fantod Regrets, and A Scent of Cedared Fields

 

Hello to everyone at xL Design Studios. Neil here and very happy we have this chance to work together. So, the title page. Very much suggest central image plays on sneaker and laces, with the laces in advanced state of extension, just sprawling out there. That’s recto. Verso, we have the comic book, and that’s tattered and it looks like it’s been flung wherever it is—pages splayed, whatever. Placement of the title and byline and the “Author of” book titles: entirely up to you. Whatever works, and never mind about using all the book titles – we’re perfectly comfortable with their serving as design elements at your disposal. That being said, Scarlett said to tell you she likes The Applecramp Sextet.

 
Drusilla was left for the day in her family’s unexplored new home.

All right, first page. Think we discussed the kinetics, the set up for the flow we want from page to page. Kieran’s handling that, am I right? Hello, Kieran.

Drusilla, house, car. Car’s taking off, house looms, Drusilla looks at it, her back to the car. Car: mid-’70s vintage Volvo. House: not a teetering wreck, not necessarily a haunted house, but a big pile with many windows and ledges and little roofs, and so on. Drusilla’s look: as discussed. Skirt, sweatshirt, sneakers. Alinor, did you send the studio the character profiles? She says yes, so I expect you’ve got it. If not, text her, she’s on duty to look out for such things.

Just want to reiterate here that Drusilla’s sneakers and laces are in view from the outset and page by page. Always in view, laces always untied and getting longer.

 
Her parents absented themselves to join in a sordid debauch.

Tricky one. We want a very post-hippie, mid-70s feel: longish hair, wine glasses, joints,, jeans, tennis shorts. Perhaps a stereo with speakers out on the lawn, if feasible with regard to panel space. But here’s the balancing act I was talking about. As discussed, we want all that in the idiom of our source artist. At the very least, probably kohl darkening around the characters’ eyes. Anyway. When we see them, the participants are sprawled on the lawn in a sodden tangle. And there’s suggestiveness, what with shorts, blouses, etc., tugged awry.

 
Drusilla set herself to know her new surroundings.

Hi. Alinor here. Neil has to field a thing, so I’ll be passing on his notes and so on. All right. All … is this page 3? All right, his notes say: “inside house, big stairs leading up, dark, Drusilla at foot of stairs, one foot edged to ward them, expression dubious—posture like p. 1, Gilded Bat.” And he has “Period detail, if poss: ’70s again.”

 
There was a box under a bed she did not like to think about.

All right, that’s pretty clear. Bed, box under it. A cardboard box, quote, “as from a liquor store,” but Neil says no brand names, etc. Unmarked box. “Packed full a long time, strained at seams, flaps dented and wrinkled.”

Drusilla looking at box, Neil says: “expression similar to-—“ Oh, sorry, can’t make it out.

 
But its attraction proved too powerful.

Neil just texted to say Professor Bloom very much likes Scent Cedar Fields. I don’t know. I guess you know what that is.

Anyway, Drusilla pulling out the box.

 
The pamphlets she found baffled her understanding.

Now we have the comics, magazines, etc., that are in the box. Neil says, “Tricky, the balance again.” I guess you know what that is. Okay, quote, “suggest no pictures, titles on covers, except House Mystery, H. Secret, 1 of each.” And he says have the comics, quote, “really flung about, a couple small drifts of them.”

 
She read them with an undeniable fascination.

And this is like before, but now she’s on her stomach and reading one. And, because this is triple underlined, and behind her, in the doorway, the doorway’s left side, we see the last bit of a superhero ankle and heel, like, quote, “a superhero was just passing by and this is all we glimpsed.” Drusilla doesn’t see, and that’s underlined too: “Drusilla no idea.”

 
Her parents’ return startled her. Pushed by an instinct she could not name, she hid the booklet.

And now she’s moving about, getting the comics back in the box. Neil’s note says, quote, “Drus’s posture v.v. Gilded Bat. Visual humor from contrast of frenzied activity and elongated, immobile posture. Gilded Bat good reference.” So he wants you to look at Gilded Bat. And the “v.v.” means “very, very.”

 
Henceforth, she regarded the whole matter with misgiving.

Hallway, the doorway, Drusilla. I mean, Drusilla’s out in the hallway and looking through the doorway, and we can see a corner of the bed. Drusilla’s expression, the notes say, her expression is, quote, “the comic, blank foreboding found on G’s children, white faces, slit eyes, features minimal.” And then he has “Wugg-Ump.” I don’t know.

 
Years passed.

Note says “Drusilla. Same skirt, sweatshirt as before, but she’s teen. Dinner table, parents, rec parents from crowd on p 2, the sordid debauch. Refer character profiles.” Okay, and I sent you those, so we should be okay. He has “Kieran: D seated panel right, profile left.” So if there’s a Kieran, I hope you get that.

 
At college she made difficult friends.

Neil, quote: “Spooky, emptied-out coffee shop, student hangout but depopulated. Suggest great elongation, extension of decor—not just an unhealthy-looking rubber plant but one that twists its way higher up than it should and looks like it may collapse of its own sickness. And on like that. Standard items found in a college coffee shop, but seen a certain way.”

Okay, Drusilla and two friends at center but in the background … Oh, hi! Should I …

Hi, Neil, here. Yeah, okay, Ali, thanks for that. All right, page 11. They have the character profiles, right? Okay, two friends as described in the character profiles, use your design judgment as to where they’re placed in frame. But, and this is key, Drusilla’s laces are getting long now. We start to notice.

 
She searched for her creativity.

Drusilla at a performance art piece by students. I mean, she’s one of the students, taking part. Knock yourself out on this, re: costumes. Note: all girls more elongated and slinky than Drusilla, who looks a bit slumped around them. And there’s the laces. By this point, looking at them, one might wonder how she walks without tripping.

 
The childhood pamphlets sometimes returned to her mind, always at unexpected moments.

Right, same performance. Drusilla, foreground and to the right, eyes on one of the tall, elongated girl students striking a mock-Superman pose, a generic superhero sort of thing, with cape behind her, leg flung back, arm flung forward, all this suggesting flight. Nothing else to suggester superness, just the cape, which is blank, and the posture.
 
And there’s Drusilla looking. Laces in view.
 
In the background, as if peeping in from backstage behind the performance art show, there’s a superhero’s gloved hand and the edge of his caped-and-cowled shoulder and side of the head. Just enough so that a sharp-eyed reader can see.

 
Her parents remained irritating.

The dining room table, as in the “Years Passed” picture. Drusilla home from college. Parents older, squabbling, entirely caught up in each other. Maybe D has a Discman on and its playing. Laces longer; we can see one or both lying along the floor like a snake sunning itself.

 
In the city she found a career.

Drusillla, same posture, same place in panel as on page before. Now she’s at an office, computer screen in front of her. The monitor is one of those clunky jobs from the 1990s. Scarlett adds, quote, “Very then.”

 
And spent time alone.

Now in a movie theater. Same posture as last two pages, but now she’s angled toward the panel’s rear, toward an out-of-view movie screen. Empty seats on either side of her, other people spotted here and there in the hall—some couples, heads together. Suggest focus on the thin carpet peeling up at one corner, laying bare cement floor. Certain shabbiness so extreme it’s desolate—think that’s a G sort of thing to do, visually.

 
Her difficult friends became too difficult or too successful.

Drusilla at happening sort of downtown art party. She’s in foreground. One of her friends is there with her, sulking at her. The other is in the panel’s background, surrounded by a crowd of limp-looking hipster types, being lionized. Lot of room here to play with ’90s hipster accoutrements and decor in a G idiom. Want to stress elongation wherever possible, especially upward. A sort of pinched, unhealthy, looking-like-it’s-about-to-topple upward growth in all things, except Drusilla.

 
Parties confused her.

Okay, same party as before, different angle. The two friends still in view but off to the sides, one still being lionized, the other getting chatted up by a dubious type of some sex. Drusilla front and almost at center, looking toward us, face bleak. More with the ’90s hipster decor. Laces.

 
She became a waif.

Now Drusilla, still at the party, same place in frame, same clothes as ever—the sweatshirt, skirt and sneakers—but she’s sitting down with legs stretched in front of her. Still looking straight at us. Laces are distinctly longer than ever.

 
None of her poems were published.

Drusilla in her apartment, facing left—you have that, Kieran?—and an opened letter in her hand. It’s a rejection slip. Maybe a pile of them on kitchen table, but don’t overdo—sparseness important in all things with G. Apartment: sticks of furniture, little portable TV, Discman and scattered discs, scattered posters on wall for Lalique, Russian ballet, Nirvana.

 
She decided to work from home.

Drusilla trudging out of the office, with a box for her belongings in standard fashion. Box is almost empty, though. Coworkers look on grimly, supervisors frown, etc. Really she’s been fired, that’s the message.

 
She endured seeing her parents for the weekend.

The dinner table again, but with angle flipped—D now at panel left, the left end of the table, not the right. Parents older, quarreling harder than ever.

 
She found the thought of her journal burdensome.

Drusilla in her room at her parents’. Notebook and pen in foreground on table, Drusilla in background, to left, sitting by window. She’s trying to look out the window but can’t—her eyes are pulled unhappily toward the notebook.

 
Basic cable appalled her.

Downstairs in the dark, on a big couch. White glow from the screen. D on stomach, one leg folded so foot sticks up in air behind her; laces dangle a long way down. She has chin propped on hands and as she looks at the screen with a blankness that would appal one.

 
She found one of the pamphlets again.

Her room. She’s rooting about in a closet and finds a comic.

 
Without knowing why, she sat down to read.

Drusilla same position, same spot in panel as on page 8. On stomach, doorway behind her. Same clothes. But now she’s old and we see it: gray bits in hair, lines near mouth. One leg folded, foot up in the air behind her, and now the laces are spilling everywhere, a life of their own.

 

fin

And as before. Differences: her face isn’t propped up anymore, now it’s flat with the comic; shadows growing everywhere, especially among the folds and tangle of the laces; and in the background we have the fingers of a superhero gauntlet clutching the upper right side of the doorway, and the edge of a superhero cowl in view above the fingers, as if the creature were about to come and get her.

All right, that’s it. The professor just this instant texted to make sure we have all that about the superhero’s hand and cowl. “Job done, Hal, don’t worry :).” And Scarlett texted to say she likes, for the visuals, she likes a, quote, “Clean look, ex. Epileptic Bike, Rem Visit.” So there’s that.

Ali, you sent them the character profiles? All right, I’m off, thanks, looking forward to the magic I am sure you will—”

 
________
… collaborated with the actress and the professor to come up with an appropriately Gorey-like text. “The three of us developed a sort of electronic round robin,” Mr. Gaiman explained. “There was much buzzing of ideas back and forth via pocket devices.”

“The Extended Laces” recreates Mr. Gorey’s drawing style by means of digital techniques. Mr. Gaiman said, “They tell me we have some 15,000 signature lines and curves in the memory banks, and these are recombined.” He added, “It’s a painstaking process and, in the final analysis, really quite like an art.”

… early on the collaborators decided on updating the time setting, which for Gorey was typically Victorian or Edwardian. “Scarlett felt strongly that the 20th century was the new ‘creepy day of yore,’ to use her phrase,” Mr. Gaiman said. “Having spent so much of my life in that century, I could not say she was wrong.”

There is the possibility of a “syntha-Gorey” series, but no products are due to appear beyond “I am a Waif” t-shirts and sweatshirts. These feature the book’s heroine looking dejected and unsettling in the Gorey manner, and with overgrown sneaker laces. “We adamantly rejected the idea of marketing actual extended sneaker laces,” Mr. Gaiman laughed.

“There are these odd moments when one sees around corners,” Mr. Gaiman reflected when asked what attracted him to Mr. Gorey’s work. “I expect everyone has those. Mr. Gorey can in part be described as someone who was always seeing around corners, from one to the other, and who never learned how to stop.” He added, laughing, “If he wouldn’t find it presumptuous of me to say so.”
__________

Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

In Search of Bad Comics

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Whisper by Steven Grant and Rich Larsen

Far too long ago now, in the early ’90s when the comics business was fat & I worked on all sorts of books for all sorts of companies, I was a guest at a convention in Michigan. In a highly unorthodox move, the convention organized a “writing comics” panel & filled it with every comics writer in attendance, an approach that packed the stage with some 14 or 15 writers. The panel had no specific agenda, and when the introductions were over we threw it open to questions.

Inevitably, up piped someone – there’s always someone – who asked in a voice deeply embittered by the world’s failure to acknowledge his genius why, since so many comics are clearly crap, was he unable to get any editor anywhere interested in buying his stories instead of using the worthless shlubs they regularly used?

Obviously, none on the panel numbered among the tired, unimaginative, untalented hacks he was referring to. Obviously. (I should mention the non-exclusive emphasis of the panel, the show and his question was on work-for-hire superhero comics. Full disclosure and all that.) As it happened, we were running a system where the first person to answer one question became the last to answer the next. I’d answered first the previous question. With that many people on the panel, it was a long time coming back to me. I was a bit numb by the time it did.

My fellow panelists rambled through the standard answers. The “for public consumption” ones. Pleasant, inoffensive if occasionally stern platitudes with which everyone replies to questions like that, responses designed to gently shuffle the querant out the metaphoric door while maintaining the delusion of hope and allowing the respondents to feel as though they haven’t been total rat bastards. Above all, don’t offend the fans, since your livelihood depends on them. It’s not like the panelists were trying to con anyone, it’s just you stick around a business, any business, long enough, you pick up the pleasant lies they feed the customers and on some level it’s often easier to tap into those lies than to come up with something else. You believe them, at least for as long as you need to believe them. It’s a survival reflex.

All in all, I also prefer not to crap on other people’s dreams. But if a dream’s strong enough there’s no way to adequately crap on it. In college, I had a fiction writing course where we critiqued each other’s stories weekly, and the teacher repeatedly asked that we should be gentle and positive because the writer’s ego is a fragile thing and it would be terrible to drive someone away from writing with harsh criticism. I always thought that was a terribly wrong approach. Anyone who wants to write will do it regardless of what anyone else says. Sooner or later they may – may! – end up with something someone besides their mother or their best friend likes. (Bias puts blinders on us all.) Anyway, to get back to the panel, I’d just about gone comatose when whoever sat next to me said, “Steve probably has something to add” and shoved the mike in front of me.

I didn’t have anything to add.

Punisher by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck

Then, just like that, I did. I was bored, I was tired of hearing the same old crap, figured sooner or later someone ought to lay the facts out, and was acutely aware I was the end of that particular road. I took a deep breath, and launched into the following tirade:

Why won’t an editor consider your work instead of the crap he accepts?

1) Your work may not be as good as you think it is.

2) It’s not actually an editor’s job to find new talent. It’s the editor’s job to get his books out. While most editors do try to look for new talent, that’s something that gets relegated to after all the required work is done, and the required work is never done.

3) Because editors have to get their books out, they usually prefer to work with talent they know can get the job done, professionally and on time. Professionally doesn’t necessarily mean great. It means publishable. New talent always represents a risk.

4) Every editor has parameters for the material his office produces. You may not understand those parameters. Just because you want to do something doesn’t mean what you want to do fits editorial needs.

5) Everyone’s taste is different, and any editor may actually like the books he’s producing, and he may think they’re good comics. Even if you don’t. He may think the talent producing them is top notch talent. Even if you don’t.

Finally:

6) Even bad work is harder than it looks.

Let me repeat that now: even bad work is harder than it looks.

I know. I’ve produced a lot of bad work. I hope I’ve produced some good work, I produced projects I think are good work, but – and far too many people in comics can’t get this simple concept through their heads – I’m not the one who gets to decide these things. Unfortunately, I also can’t afford to pay attention to anyone else’s assessment. There are projects I’ve written that I thought – in some cases, still think – were very, very good that were almost universally vilified, when anyone bothered to pay attention to them at all. I’ve done projects that got raves that I thought, still think, were just utter crap. Then again, I knew what I intended, and, generally, how short I fell. Readers/critics knew what they wanted. The problem is the two sets of criteria don’t necessarily, maybe even rarely, match up.

The fact is that what I consider the bad work was never easier than the good. In my experience, good work takes much less effort to produce than bad. It requires less forced focus, usually builds more organically. But that’s deceptive. If you go by those criteria, you can easily trick yourself into believing that effortless work is good work and that’s nothing like a universal principle either. From a creative standpoint, any rigid criterion for distinguishing good or bad is both handicap and crutch. Creating comics is less a question of good and bad than a question of success and failure. Failing to produce good work isn’t hackwork. Hedging your bets is. Counterproductively, hedged bets are frequently what readers and critics respond best to.

Distinguishing good comics from bad is something of a fool’s errand, partly because they remain mostly a commercial enterprise (it’s around this point in these discussions that art/alt comics fans write me off as “a superhero guy” and that’s supposed to invalidate my arguments, but, trust me, I’ve been around this insanity we call comics enough to know that a) if you ain’t self-publishing, you ain’t the person who ultimately decides whether your work is publishable, and whatever market your publisher is targeting is still intended to be a commercial market, and b) if you don’t know the ratio of sharp-to-crap is roughly the same in art/alt comics as in “genre” comics, you haven’t been paying attention) and commerce is always something of a distorting force on creativity, kind of the way gravity naturally distorts spacetime in Einsteinian physics, and partly because so very few people are able to differentiate what they like from what’s good. There’s an embarrassment factor there; nobody wants to believe they like crap. Let me put it bluntly: there’s nothing wrong with liking crap. Everybody does, hopefully not exclusively. What’s wrong is declaring crap to be good because you like it. That’s how you end up with the recent spectacle of Fletcher Hanks and his incoherent inanity being dug up from its grave after 65 years and marketed as surrealistic genius, or Jerry Siegel & Paul Reinman’s ugly, clumsy Mighty Comics misreproductions of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s pivotal Marvel work recategorized as “camp.”

Then again, I had a TV production professor in college who refused to allow anyone to discuss television in terms of good and bad. He had a term for it: buttermilk. He liked buttermilk. But some people like buttermilk and some people don’t. Does that make buttermilk good or bad? It’s not a question with an answer.

I grew up reading bad comics. What choice did I have? It was the ’60s. The early ’60s. Until underground comix got widespread later on (and, man, did I devour them when I found them) it was a rigged game. Someone recently asked me if I started out as a Marvel or DC fan. DC, no question. Marvel wasn’t even around then. But y’know what? If you were a 7 year old in the vanilla Midwest in the early ’60s, less a new decade than a drab runoff from the gray ’50s, DC Comics, specifically the superhero comics edited by Julie Schwartz, were it, man. There was nothing better anywhere that a kid my age back then could get their hands on that similarly promised, even at their most insipid, that things might possibly someday be more than the, as GK Chesterton put it, “cold mechanic happenings” the world back then seemed to be made of. A few years on, that wouldn’t be the case, but then The Flash, Green Lantern, The Atom, the Justice League, they were the closest you could come to the strange. They were pretty much the only door to genuine excitement available in the day, and walking through that door eventually got me here.

But good? I liked them, so, sure. I’d have said good. I’d have insisted. Look back now, what you’ll likely see is character-thin and plot heavy, straitjacketed into structures developed and preferred by Julie in the science fiction comics he edited. For all his reputation for infiltrating scientific fact into his comics, and he did, he cheated. A lot. Deathtrap escapes hinge on semantics, heroes miraculously develop exactly the (temporary) power needed to stop the threat du jour. In maybe the most egregious bit of stupidity in all Julie’s titles, world-hopping quasi-astronaut Adam Strange, collaborating with the Justice League, reasons that if kryptonite, a piece of Superman’s homeworld, will stop Superman, then a piece of a super-powered alien’s homeworld will lay the alien low. What the hell?

Mystery in Space #75 by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson

It’s easily the worst Adam Strange story in the run. Fans of the day declared it the finest Adam Strange story ever. (If you reasoned out “Justice League!” the odds are with you.) Hell, the whole of comics history is punctuated with widely praised material that wasn’t very good. Comics fandom itself is built on twin delusions that ’40s comics represented a “golden age” and ’50s comics (aside from EC Comics) a Carthagenated wasteland only marginally redeemed by the late return of superhero comics. Neither is remotely accurate. While hardly devoid of good comics, the “golden age,” once the cherrypicking stopped and much material became available, turned out to be a vast dumping ground of utter swill, while ’50s comics are a gold field for those willing to go panning for it.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow #87 by Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams

As mainstream comics go, the most influential of the late ’60s may be Denny O’Neil & Neal Adams’ Green Lantern-Green Arrow, which briefly staved off cancellation in a decaying market by launching a short-lived move toward “relevant comics.” This was pretty quickly crushed by the urge to “make comics fun again” (i.e. avoid controversy) but it came back with a vengeance in the ’80s as GL-GA fans broke into the business and launched their own variants. Not too long ago, out of morbid curiosity, I asked various contemporaries in comics if there were any comics they loved when younger that they find embarrassing to read now. Almost without fail: Green Lantern-Green Arrow. Yet it was still a huge breakthrough in its day and its influence continues to ripple through the medium.

Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

The list of highly touted bad comics go on and on. Few stories, even Batman stories, are as bad as Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, an empty exercise in cruelty that depends on sleight-of-hand, Alan’s always splendid use of language and Brian Bolland’s phenomenal art to keep audiences from seeing the joke not only doesn’t have a punchline, it doesn’t even have a joke. That didn’t stop it from becoming, with The Dark Knight Returns, one of the two lynchpins of virtually all subsequent Batman interpretations. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman is among the most lionized series in comics history, but its champions conveniently overlook the almost literal deus ex machina endings diminishing many early arcs, with hero Morpheus appearing from left field at the climax to terminate all storylines with languid boredom and a wave of his hand. That’s not a quality you traditionally find in good endings, in any medium. (Ever see that SCTV fake ’40s crime film that features a crusading DA trying to take down a mob boss that ends with a courtroom-standoff-at-gunpoint abruptly broken up by news “the Japs” have attacked Pearl Harbor, whereon all players throw down their weapons and rush out together arm in arm to sign up for military duty as Patriotic Americans? Same principle.) On the alt side, I’ve always wondered if fans of Craig Thompson’s breakthrough graphic novel Good-Bye Chunky Rice, which helped trigger mainstream publisher interest in alt comics, were unaware it was sentimentalized treacle, were willing to ignore it, or if that’s where its main appeal lay.

I cite these as bad comics not only because they all changed the course of comics in some way, but also because they were each, in their way, quite good. (With Sandman, it fully merited its reputation the moment Neil dropped that annoying gimmick.) If this seems a contradiction, welcome to comics. I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t be read, or enjoyed. I’m not even suggesting badness is an especially good reason to not read a comic book. There are worse things for a comic book to be than bad. A problem with discussing bad comics is that while there are a few really bad enough to be memorable, there are very few really bad enough to be memorable. Many are good enough to be momentarily enjoyable, like eating a Twinkie. Some, like those mentioned in the previous paragraph, are good enough to have altered the business.

Most bad comics are simply forgettable, and it’s more trouble to try to remember then than they’re worth.

As we grow up reading comics, we end up expecting maybe a little too much from them, or end up expecting things the medium maybe just isn’t built for. It’s a medium of shorthand, of tricky balance. As much as many have wanted comics to take their place among the literature of our time – some have even tried making “comics literature” an accepted term – it’s not really a literary medium. It’s not movies either. It’s that words and pictures thing that confuses everyone. It’s a pop medium, a commercial medium, a strangely hermetic medium, where, sure, we may adore Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby and whoever else someone has put forth at one point or another as developing the “rules” of comics, but, really, it’s a medium without rules, where no theory ultimately holds sway. It has boundaries – no sound, no real movement, space limitations – but no orthodoxies, no matter how many publishers, editors, critics, readers, artists and writers have tried inflicting them. No matter what theory, what orthodoxy anyone produces about what comics should or shouldn’t be, someone else produces a comic that shatters it. A lot has changed in comics since I began reading them, but, as they were long before I began reading them and despite all the many, many efforts to gain respect for comics and have them declared “legitimate,” we remain an outlaw medium. Virtually anything goes here. This is the wild west.

In that context, terms like good and bad have considerably less resonance, given there’s no authority of any merit and “badness” has never been much of an impediment to sales, popularity or, frequently, enjoyability of a comic. What does it really matter if a comic is ultimately good or bad, by which we really mean, let’s face it, appealing or disappointing? Allow me to suggest we replace thinking in terms of good or bad altogether with a different and arguably more useful (if equally subjective) yardstick:

Is the comic/graphic novel in question interesting?

That’s what we all really want from comics, right? That what I wanted when I was 7, certainly, it’s what many comics I read delivered whether I ended up deciding I liked them or not, and it’s what I look for today, along with (I suspect) everyone else who still reads comics.

Anything else, however welcome, is gravy.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin on Gaiman and the Art in Sandman

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James Romberger and Robert Stanley Martin had an interesting back and forth on Gaiman and Sandman in comments, which I thought I’d reprint. (I haven’t reprinted everything they said, and there were other folks in the conversation too…click through to the thread for the whole back and forth.)

James started with a response to my piece on Gaiman’s editing of Best American Comics.

Yes, anyone can do comics, but few can master them. The book perhaps reflects that Gaiman doesn’t truly understand the art of graphic storytelling. It is as if he views comics as a stepping stone to other, more profitable forms of expression. I doubt that he is aware why the best comics bearing his name are those done by highly-skilled cartoonist P. Craig Russell, who adapts Gaiman’s text entirely to the comics medium and adds his own sense of timing and poetic visual orchestration to the pages. Left to his own devices, Gaiman’s work is verbose to the extreme. His better artists such as Charles Vess, Dave McKean, Jill Thompson or Chris Bachelo can add extremely sophisticated visuals to the work, but they are exceptions rather than the rule; one gets the sense that to Gaiman, artists are expendable and interchangable. He rarely discusses their contributions with much acuity or depth. He is the star of his own show, so his most lasting legacy is Vertigo’s writer-centric crediting system, writers in large type on the covers, artists as appendages.

He added.

I’ll concede that it is Vertigo who have long had the tendency to put out comics with pages by one artist cut through with jarringly random pages by another, that it is Vertigo who decided to make the writers’ interests supercede that of the artists, beginning the negative credit trend that has infected the entire industry. Perhaps I am overmuch blaming Gaiman and those of his fellow writers who allow this type of thing to happen—maybe they don’t have a say in a policy that gives them the advantage. I do like the Russell adaptations much more than Gaiman’s other work, but I also admire a few of the other collaborations, particularly the Shakespeare revisioning with Vess and and the inventive Mr. Punch with McKean. And I suppose I could be holding it against him that when I met the guy he was dismissively rude.

Another note:

It does seem that the “Best of” series feels interchangable with the Anthologies of Graphic Fiction and that hardcover McSweeneys collection in that many of the same cartoonists are in all of them, and have been lumped together to form a sort of “new establishment” of comics. I begin to feel bad for some of the individual victims who do not deserve to be made part of any army but who because of this generalization appear ripe to be overthrown, as all establishments deserve to be.

Robert Stanley Martin replied.

Eddie Campbell on the prominence of Neil Gaiman’s credit on the Sandman jackets, from TCJ #273:

In the latest editions of the Sandman books, I noticed Neil Gaiman’s name up along the top there, as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. It’s taken some getting there, but it finally got the author’s name on the top of the book. And any artist who’s ever worked on that, I think, he or she knew full well they were doing so as Neil’s guest. Neil is the author of those books. Doesn’t mean he’s the only person working on them, any more than David Bowie’s the only person working on one of David Bowie’s albums.

Gaiman wrote “Ramadan” as a short story for Russell to adapt. He wanted to see Russell give it the treatment given to other works such as the various operas and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.

I haven’t read a Sandman episode in about fifteen years, so I can’t say how well they hold up. (I looked at Mr. Punch again in conjunction with the poll last year, and I gave up on it after about 20 pages.) Regardless, the Sandman material is one of the few things in comics one can show people outside the subculture and have a reasonable expectation that they might hook into it. Gaiman may not be a good storyteller per certain factions of the comics subculture, but his stuff has an appeal to the culture beyond that. He’s one of the handful of comics creators this can be said of, and I think it’s nothing to sniff at.

Robert added:

As for the substance of Eddie’s statement, I actually agree with you for the most part. I do think Gaiman’s collaborators are the co-authors of the individual stories they work on with him. However, I also believe that Gaiman should be considered the author of the Sandman series overall. Eddie made a music analogy, so I’ll make one, too. “My Little Town” is a Simon and Garfunkel record, but the album it appears on, Still Crazy After All These Years, is a Paul Simon solo album, and rightly so. He’s responsible for the direction of that album in the same way that Gaiman was responsible for the direction of the Sandman series. The collaborations don’t change that.

And James responded:

Eddie does most of his work on his own, and so is, I think, self-effacing and somewhat less invested in his collaborative mode…he can afford to be generous with credit.
I suppose you are making a case that Gaiman is like the late Harvey Pekar, another writer whose work I admit that I am not very fond of, who also worked with a lot of different artists, did not have much of a visual sensibility (IMO) and dominated the credit on his collaborations. I guess I can see your point. The bottom line for me is that I am not usually interested in the comics done by either of these writers, it seems to me that much of their work could just as easily have done in another medium…it is no surprise that they both gravitated in more recent years to film.

 

Charles Vess’ art for Sandman

Voices from the Archive: Mercer Finn on The Limits of Sandman

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Mercer Finn was a regular HU commenter for a while. Not sure where he is now, but way back when he had some interesting thoughts on Gaiman’s Sandman, and I thought I’d reproduce them here.

Being only twenty years old, and a relative comics newbie, these fond reflections on Sandman have been very enlightening and moving. I feel compelled to justify my own ambivalence towards the work.

Neil Gaiman is a master storyteller, for sure. You start reading and you *keep on* reading. But in the end, I felt that the intellectual rewards he offers are too meagre to justify the pretentious tone.

Basically, my feeling is that:
1) Sandman is too coy with its themes and characters. I understand that this works for you. It left me cold. I needed more, from Morpheus and from Gaiman.
2) The themes I *have* detected (an important qualification) seem to me simplistic and unoriginal. Maybe it was because I grew up reading Terry Pratchett books, but Sandman wasn’t telling me or showing me anything new.

An example: I roared through American Gods. But at the end, I didn’t think Gaiman had said anything particularly meaningful or interesting about America or religion. Again, I may not be a subtle enough reader to pick these things up.

Or perhaps it’s a matter of expectations. Strangely, I’m rather enamored of Gaiman’s film projects. Patterns, symbols and themes that I found disappointingly bleh in Sandman suddenly become very sophisticated and satisfying when placed in a kid’s film (Mirrormask) or in a film about dragons (Beowulf).

Sorry for spamming your post. It really has been interesting reading. I hope that, 20 years from now, I’ll be able to look back on all the Bendis/Ennis/Ellis stuff I read with the same fondness. Or perhaps it will be more like disappointment…

Mercer went on to add some thoughts on Bendis, Ellis, Ennis, et al.

I do prefer Bendis/Ennis/Ellis. The tone isn’t pretentious and weighty, but pulpy and silly. Their comics have energy. Reading them is wild fun. And yet at the same time they manage to build those grand, operatic, mythic moments. It’s a bit like what Tarantino does, except that Bendis/Ennis/Ellis are all much cleverer than Tarantino.

Bendis believes high output improves your writing. But he’s stretching himself too thin nowadays. His early graphic novels are much more sophisticated and moving than any of the events he is orchestrating at the moment, even if the artwork is crappy. If female characters in comics are an interest, there is a lot to enjoy in his Marvel MAX series Alias. Be warned: Powers, apart from the artwork, is uninspiring.

I think Preacher is one of Ennis’s weakest works. Again, like American Gods, I didn’t gain any special insight into America or religion by reading it. His lauded Hellraiser run is OK, but doesn’t improve on Jamie Delano. Ennis is much better doing ultra-violent nihilism in Punisher, or the superhero farce of The Boys or The Pro.

I think Transmet’s science fiction competes admirably with Sandman’s phantasmagoria. But it does wear thin. Ellis is better doing short stories – Ministry of Space, Desolation Jones, Orbiter and his brief bursts at Marvel.

 

Dave McKean’s cover for Sandman #1

Exit Sandman

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This first appeared in the Chicago Reader.
_____________________

Neil Gaiman, who edited the 2010 installment of The Best American Comics, occupies a prominent but strange place in the history of the form. His Sandman series (1989-1996) was hugely popular and critically acclaimed. Although set in the traditional DC Comics universe—with walk-on parts for everyone from Hellblazer’s John Constantine and members of the Justice Society to obscure villains like Dr. Destiny—the book was original in tone and appeal. In place of steroidal underwear fetishists done up in primary colors Sandman offered pale, thin Dream, who wore somber contemporary or period garb and angsted rather than fought his way through unhurried, character-driven fantasy narratives, strewing portentous bons mots in his wake.

In short, Sandman was goth.

Superhero comics mostly appeal to guys who’ve been reading them since they were 12. Goth, as any Sisters of Mercy fan will tell you, often appeals to girls. Sandman offered enough pulp adventure to keep many young male readers—myself included—interested. But it reached beyond that fan base. As Best American Comics series editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden note in their 2010 foreword, Sandman “single-handedly upped the ratio of women reading comics.”

Trouble is, Sandman only increased the number of female readers as long as those readers were reading Sandman. The book didn’t change the demographics of the industry as a whole. Though highly respected and popular, the series had remarkably little influence.

Certainly there were loads of Sandman spin-offs. DC has, following Gaiman, shown some interest in fantasy-oriented series—the currently ongoing Fables for example—and independent titles like Gloomcookie and Courtney Crumrin followed a goth-oriented, female-friendly path. But these efforts were marginal. Overall, post-1990s, the mainstream comics industry first drifted and then scampered towards massive, complicated stories mostly of interest to a male, continuity-porn-obsessed fanbase. Gaiman moved on to writing novels (notably, sophisticated fantasies like Neverwhere and Coraline), and the formula he created was largely ignored. Instead of creating goth comics for girls, American companies chose to stick with insular cluelessness and let the Japanese have the female audience. Manga comics, especially those aimed at girls, exploded in popularity here. And that, in case you were wondering, is no doubt why the Twilight comic adaptation isn’t drawn by homegrown artists like Jill Thompson or P. Craig Russell or Ted Naifeh but by Korean illustrator Young Kim, in a manga style.

Gaiman’s influence is weak even when it comes to Best American Comics 2010. One of the oddest things about the book is how little it has to do with its editor’s oeuvre.

I mean, yes, it’s possible to make connections between Sandman and some of the selections here. An excerpt from the lyrical The Lagoon, by Chicagoan Lilli Carré, plays on goth tropes and the meta-contemplation of storytelling in a Gaimanesque way. The dreamlike pacing, melodramatic romance, and kissing skeletons in Lauren Weinstein’s “I Heard Some Distance Music” might also be seen as at least elliptically referring to him. And the heavy-handed cleverness of a passage from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp—a billboard advertising firmamint for diarrhea, for instance—points to one of the less appealing aspects of Sandman. A more positive echo can be found in the first selection in the book: an excerpt from Omega the Unknown by Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple, and Gary Panter that fuses superhero goofiness with literary smarts.

The American mangaesque style, arguably descended from Gaiman, is represented in a few places, such as an excerpt from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Still, there’s nothing in this anthology that you can look at and say, “This wouldn’t exist without Neil Gaiman.”

That’s OK though. Sandman had some serious problems, one of the most prominent being the inconsistent, generic, and even shoddy work of some of its pencilers. The visuals throughout this volume are much more distinctive and engaging. Theo Ellsworth’s “Norman Eight’s Left Arm,” from Sleeper Car, sets crude figures against detailed natural backgrounds to create a look that’s half clip art, half woodcut—a lovely complement to his surreal tale of woodland creatures, weeping gnomes, and gambling robots. John Pham channels Chris Ware to create an elaborate, fractured board-game-like layout for his tale of despair and neurosis among spindly, cosmically marooned characters in a Sublife excerpt called “Deep Space.” Comics canon standbys like R. Crumb and Ware himself are represented with visually pleasing selections. And sometimes when the art isn’t so great—as in Dave Lapp’s charmlessly clunky “Fly Trap” or Michael Cho’s bland, text-cluttered panels for “Trinity”—there’s at least a consistent visual style.

Even when he makes awful choices, you’ve got to admire Gaiman’s eclectic enthusiasm for a comics world that has so little to do with him. I cordially loathe Derf’s nostalgic hagiography of punk rock. Peter Kuper’s indifferently rendered anti-Bush commentary is as vacuous as it is predictable. And one earnest account of a national disaster per book is fine—either Katrina or 9/11, please, but both makes it look like you’re straining. Still, I found it pleasantly disorienting to see all of the above clumped together under a single editorial imprimatur.

Of course, not-something-you’d-expect-Neil-Gaiman-to-like doesn’t really constitute editorial vision. Gaiman actually cops to the lack of coherence in his introduction, saying that what he likes most about comics is that it’s “a democracy, the most level of playing fields.” Foolish inconsistency is the point—a celebration of “the biggest secret in comics: that anyone can do them.” And yet there remains a curious lacuna in Gaiman’s collection. Critic Stephanie Folse (aka Telophase) picked up on it immediately. After reading the collection she e-mailed me to say that it ironically “reinforced that . . . I don’t much like slice-of-life stories, autobiographical fiction, surreality, or political ranting in prose or comics. . . . Escapism all the way for me!”

Personally, I like surrealism, and can make my peace with slice-of-life, autobiography, and political ranting in at least some contexts. But I get Folse’s complaint. There are lots of different kinds of comics represented in this book, but intelligent, imaginative, escapist Gaiman-esque pulp for all genders isn’t here.

Maybe it’s the nature of the project. The Best American Comics series aims for a literary bookstore audience. Still, if you’re going to invite Neil Gaiman to be your editor, it seems like you might sneak in a few pieces for his fans, however scarce that kind of work is these days. Gaiman’s Dream wasn’t perfect, but he did have a dark, melancholy charm. It’s sad to see him abandoned so utterly that even his creator seems barely to remember him.