Tag Archives: Sandman

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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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.

__________

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

Just a Thing In Our Dream

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morpheus Strip: Dream Is Dead (All Hail Dream)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Morpheus Strip: Revisiting Old Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I will tell you.

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

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

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

Check out this page:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaiman’s Desire would have felt right at home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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