Tag Archives: Sandman

Morpheus Strip: Post-modern something

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It looks like most of what I have to say will be in the Comments threads to Noah’s post, so go here if you’re curious. More important you’ll find Noah’s thoughts on Sandman, and over here is an illuminating discussion by the distinguished Ng Suat Tong.
In this post I’ll add a paragraph from an article about Gaiman that I did for TCJ (namely “My Gaiman Decade,” issue 273, January 2006). And I will add a one-liner that I took out for some reason. It goes like this: Gaiman is so temperamentally averse to big systems of thought that his idea of a cosmology is alliteration (Dream, Destruction, Death. etc.).

The TCJ article was about why I liked Sandman so much and why I felt let down by the series. A lot of me, me, me, which I think was an honest way to approach the subject. For a little while the series had somehow got into the center of my life, and I wanted to figure out why. But I put some ideas in there too, and the paragraph below has a couple.
For instance, wish fulfillment. Here are two secret little payoffs that I got from the series, and I suspect they’re hooks for other people too:

Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes, like folds in a paper fan, and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will. That’s very comfortable; it suits me down to the ground. The characters can go anywhere, travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers; so am I. Go deeper and there’s a more embarrassing source of attraction. The Endless’s fundamental power is that they matter. Wherever they go, they count, and most often anybody else in the same panel counts for less. (The Endless are aware of this, as shown by Dream’s easy way with a high horse and Death’s ambling among the confused.) Superheroes beat each other up; Gaiman’s superbeings see who can matter the hardest. At their crudest, these contests are expressed through staredowns and well-seasoned rebukes. But what underlies the encounters is mana; to use Gaiman language, what underlies them is the fundamental stuff of mattering. [We have no idea what this stuff is, neither in the series or in real life.] Why some people have more self-possession than others is hard to pin down; so is why the universe cares so much about the Endless. After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests in outfacing each other, in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.

I stuck in the bracketed sentence, the one about “We have no idea what this stuff is,” because I still wonder if that section of the extract really makes its point. Ah well.
I’m going to break down the paragraph and expand on individual points.
1)  “Gaiman’s universe is divided into a crowd of further universes … and the Endless can materialize in and out among them at will … travel through any sort of story, change their surroundings like turning a knob. Not only are they superheroes, they’re media consumers …”
Kind of meta, I guess. These days most of us spend most of our lives being media consumers. Sandman is the only property I can think of whose characters act out a deluxe, all-power-is-in-your-hands version of same. Wotta hook!
A related point. As I read it, around about the early ’70s genre entertainment fans realized they could just pile all their favorite genres into any single work. Underlying the innovation was the idea that a story didn’t really have to take place anywhere, not even Middle Earth. The idea of a solid world was gone; instead there were just entertainment tropes, with nothing needed to house them but the ready-to-hand sf concept of billowing and necessarily undefined dimensions rolling one into the other.  The Man-Thing story that introduced Howard the Duck is the first example I can think of. The two issues had everything: pirates, space men, dragons, funny animals. If I recall right, Gerber shanghaied the idea of the multiverse, pioneered by Michael Moorcock, and refitted it from an assortment of sword-and-sorcery worlds into the broader sort of assemblage I have in mind.
It was part of Gerber’s sad life progress that, having wandered onto this rich territory, he then wandered off it again. Dave Sim took up the idea in the late 1970s, and he didn’t even need dimensions: pretty soon he was having superheroes pop up in Conan-land with no explanation, and eventually Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway too. Terry Pratchett joined in during the ’80s with Discworld, again shoving disparate genre tropes into a place that didn’t really have to be any place. In the late ’80s Sandman came along and Gaiman hauled dimensions back into play as an explanation. To tie in with the paragraph just above: though all these works have settings that are less places than entertainment-trope warehouses, only Sandman simulates the all-powerful-media-consumer experience because the Endless get to flicker in and out pretty much anywhere they want to go. The people in the other series generally have to walk.
2)   “After age eleven, fistfights are a lot rarer than simple contests … in self-possession. If you’re nine years old and want to matter more, you’ll think of superhuman muscles. Past that age you’ll be thinking of other types of advantage, such as a superhuman source of mattering.”
I guess this in line with David Riesman and inner directed/outer directed. I say “guess” because I’ve never read Riesman, he admitted casually. But a muscles superhero gets his way thru straightforward physical instrumentality: he hits something and then it is no longer standing up, it’s lying down. The Endless, on the other hand, have a lot of big moments that rely just on how one person reacts to another, and these exchanges tend to be a matter of who can out-crust the other. It’s a bit like CSI, if you’ve seen that. Every damn episode has a moment where some poor guy has to swallow his gum and shift his gaze, look down and away in shame as a detective stares at him, and often enough these guys aren’t that important to the story. The episodes still make time for them because those moments are money shots. The audience loves the sight of a poor sap wilting in front of another because those are the moments people chase in their daily lives at the office. 
Put the two ideas together and you get, I don’t know, post-modern something. Physical reality downplayed, agreed-upon social realities played up. But to tell the truth, I’ve been up a long time and now I’m going to bed. 

Morpheus Strip: Impressions of Sandman #1-20

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[Being a cursory reexamination of The Sandman #1-20 by a non-devotee]

The last time I read the first few issues of The Sandman was sometime in the late 80s as the individual issues were being serialized. I suppose it must say something about my appreciation for the comic that it was one of the few mainstream continuing series which I collected from beginning to end. While my interest in the series waxed and waned even as I was collecting the issues, it was these initial episodes which have stuck with me most over time. My general lack of interest in The Sandman is probably best demonstrated by the fact that I had completely forgotten that Morpheus had died towards the close of Gaiman’s tale until Noah brought it up in his roundtable entry. So little did this series mean to me at that point in time (I say this only in retrospect).

When Noah suggested this roundtable discussion last week, I decided to follow his lead and simply reread some issues of The Sandman to reassess my feelings towards the book. The consistent refrain in recent years is that The Sandman as a whole doesn’t hold up. This would suggest that The Sandman represented some high watermark at the time among the comics “cognoscenti” but I don’t remember it ever actually achieving such adulation among readers with a restricted diet of men in tights. I could be mistaken of course. Its reputation among the comics agnostic was and is immense, a fact which was perpetually enshrined by Gaiman’s honoring with the World Fantasy Award in 1991 for his tale with Charles Vess in The Sandman #19 (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”)

The most surprising thing about my current reappraisal of The Sandman is how little my impression of these initials issues has changed. I’ve been impressed by the extensive planning involved from the very first issues, now confirmed by a review of Gaiman’s initial Sandman proposal at the back of The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1. He has a good feel for the material and has the right ear for the kind of dialogue required by his characters. These comics are clearly the receptacle into which Gaiman poured a multitude of his ideas. His script for the aforementioned Shakespearean story is precise and well planned, meeting its equal in his collaborator, Charles Vess. We see in these early issues the foundations for the various complexities among The Endless later in the series. The bricks from which Gaiman’s constructs The Sandman fall into place methodically and with great facility throughout these 20 issues. On the other hand, these perceived “virtues” would appear to be among Noah’s chief irritants with regards the series.

Of course, with the passage of time and some personal growth and development in taste, certain ideas have begun to appear more musty. Dr. Destiny’s path of violence and humiliation through The Sandman # 6 (“24 Hours”) no longer seems as viciously violent as it once seemed. “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” from The Sandman # 18 now appears much more simplistic and derivative. The damage frequently wrought to Gaiman’s ideas by Mike Dringenberg, Sam Keith and Colleen Doran is even more evident to my eyes than it was before.

Is Gaiman’s depiction of love as leaden and functional as Noah suggests? It’s entirely possible. Yet it must be said that it has never occurred to me to ask for anything more from Gaiman’s series if only because the comic never seemed to be more than a simple yet appealing entertainment. Perhaps this explains why the seemingly inexplicable nature of Nuala’s love for Morpheus and the reasons Noah posits for this seem more than sufficient in my eyes; these seemingly simplistic justifications being the very fabric of fairy tales and myths. Gaiman gifts are for plot and narrative (enlivened by a thorough immersion in his subject matter). Whenever he strays into the realm of heartfelt emotion, he almost always falls flat on his face. The Sandman has never moved me in the way it appears to have moved much of its audience.

Noah’s passion for The Sandman comes through in his piece. He wants more from it even when there is only so much to squeeze from this fruit. Even when he seems to be criticizing Gaiman’s pretentious depictions of repression, what comes through seems more like bitter disappointment with a beauteous love now tarnished. Yet even these grievances seem well worth exploring and reading if only because of the passion I detect beneath them. Similarly, Tom Crippen’s Sandman retrospective (“My Gaiman Decade”) in The Comics Journal #273 is worth reading precisely because he feels so deeply for the work. It reads like a love letter (tinged with regrets) to a high school sweetheart 10 years on.

For me, Morpheus and his sister, Death, have always remained cyphers and plot devices meant to push forward the narrative and communicate simple homilies – characters for which I have never felt any real warmth or affection. What I see in The Sandman is an intricate fireside story informed by fantasies both old and new. There are modern trappings scattered around the series but the overwhelming feeling is that of myth making and all the richness and sparseness this entails. In much the same vein, I remember the Death mini-series more for Chris Bachalo’s depictions of Death than any semblance of characterization. My memory of it after all these years is that it was rather poor reading. It’s a different matter when it comes to Jaime Hernandez’s depiction of Maggie and Hopey in his most recent comics. Maggie’s crushing depression and sense of loss is palpable when she revisits her old haunts in Ghost of Hoppers. Jaime’s chosen path seems almost like an oppressive hand on his characters lives. The situations in Jaime’s stories are meant to advance his characters while the reverse, more often than not, appears to be the case in Gaiman’s comic.

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These were never books of immense complexity but simply reasonably well told and plotted comics (two elements in short supply in mainstream comics both then and now) served fitfully and to varying effect by a few of the most respected artists in the field (McKean, Vess, Talbot, Craig Russell and Zulli). It’s still a good deal better than 90% of what you get on primetime television. And that’s the key to its success – accessibility mixed with a not insubstantial helping of intelligence and imagination to tickle the nerves of an audience used to much blander food. The richness in its textural references seem mostly skin deep (at least in these early issues). These reference are rarely integral to a clear understanding of the plot nor are they particularly useful as passageways to even greater insights. Evidently, Gaiman understood his audience well.

When I reread Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun every 5-10 years or so, I still find new things to marvel at and more mysteries to uncover. The series remains a continued source of pleasure for me whenever I find the time to revisit it. With The Sandman, I see an old friend who hasn’t changed much since I last met him over a decade ago – still amusing and entertaining in parts but a little shelf worn (though not drastically so). I remember much about him and of his personality even though he’s faded a bit with time. To spend a few hours in his company isn’t particularly painful.

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Notes:

(1) I recently had the chance to read an article by Matthias Wivel at The Metabunker about Gaiman’s work across all mediums with particular reference to Coraline. Wivel appears to have read most of Gaiman’s works including most if not all of his novels. He is of the opinion that the comics represent Gaiman at the height of his artistry. This would include parts of The Sandman I imagine but also his other works such as Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise and Violent Cases. I wonder if he’s right.

(2) Perhaps it would be of some interest to collectors and admirers of original art that some of the most famous pages and covers from the series can be found on Comics Art Fans (CAF). The cover to The Sandman #1 recently surfaced on CAF and is owned by a prominent art dealer who is also an avid collector.

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Update by Noah: As fascist blog overlord promoting gratuitous synergy, I feel it incumbent to add that my initial post in this roundtable on Sandman is here.

Morpheus Strip: Dream Lovers

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This is the first in a roundtable on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Suat, Tom, Vom Marlowe, and Kinukitty will be along later in the week with their takes on the series as well. (Update: And you can now read the complete roundtable)
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I loved Sandman back when it came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and I’ve probably read the whole thing through at least a couple of times. However, it’s been a while…partially out of nervousness. I strongly suspected that the epic wouldn’t hold up on rereading.

And…yeah. It doesn’t exactly hold up. I reread the entirety of “Fables and Reflections” and skimmed through a couple of the other books (“A Game of You” and “The Kindly Ones” especially, I think.) Part of it is the art, which bounces around inconsistently and is often just not especially good. There are undoubtedly some very nice walk-ons — Bryan Talbot’s creepy take on the giant, cadaverous Persephone was memorable, and, as Suat recently pointed out, the P. Craig Russell “Ramadan” story is pretty spectacular. But then you’ve got atrocious efforts by folks like Kent Williams.

No wonder he looks startled; he appears to be improbably made out of rock. Maybe he’s related to the Thing?

Aside from the inconsistencies in the art, though, the real problem is that my former enthusiasm for Gaiman’s writing has dimmed a lot. I can still appreciate his cleverness and the care of construction…but after a while, both of those virtues are pushed so enthusiastically and unilaterally that they start to feel oppressive. After a while you start to almost want to plead — please, somebody, anybody, could you just once say something that doesn’t come back a panel, or a page, or several issues down the road with an ironically profound or profoundly ironic twist? Could we have a story end without a smug little O’Henry meets dumbed-down Borges twist? Could everybody just for a fucking second stop talking?

The thing that crystallized my irritation with the series was Nuala. She was a fairy with a glamor that made her appear as a beautiful woman, but in actuality she was kind of a dumpy elvish little thing. The fairy gave her as a gift to Dream for some reason or other (maybe to try to get him to give them the key to hell? I can’t remember exactly.) Anyway, she fell in unrequited love with dream, and ends up nervously and apologetically causing his downfall. She’s a sad, sweet character. I liked her.

But as I was sort of skimming over her story again it occurred to me that, while her unrequited love is certainly poignant, it’s also weirdly unmotivated. That is, we certainly do feel her pain and sadness to some extent…but we never really get much of a sense of her love. What about him appeals to her? Does she think he’s beautiful? Is it his (on again off again) kindness to her? His power? There don’t have to be individual or even clear answers to these questions, obviously, but they’re never even asked, much less answered. For Gaiman, Nuala’s love is an almost magical fact; it drops onto her and possesses her, and that’s all we ever really need to know about it.

And that’s how love functions throughout the story. Gaiman almost never, that I can remember, actually bothers to show love as a functional, or even dysfunctional, relationship between two people. Instead, it’s just another plot device, a story element to push the action…or, more accurately, the words. In “A Game of You” the cuckoo casts a love spell by talking; in “Brief Lives” Desire does more or less the same thing.

That seems to be how Gaiman sees love; a verbal whammy that comes out of nowhere to make a clever point or set up a clever scene, rather than as an actual relationship which is maybe worth exploring in its own right. Destruction accuses Orpheus of loving the idea of Eurydice more than the actual person…but is that really Orpheus’ failing? Or is it Gaiman’s? Certainly, Gaiman never shows the couple in a tender moment — Eurydice gets more time with a Satyr in the narrative than she does with her supposed love. And the big love affair of the book, between Dream and Thessally, occurs almost entirely off-screen..ostensibly because doing it that way is clever and surprising, but maybe actually because Gaiman has no idea how to deal with an actual love affair and is scared shitless to try. Certainly, the hints of the romance we get sound deeply unconvincing — when they’re in love they walk about idyllically among the bowers prattling sweet nothings, making some of Dream’s attendants uncomfortable; when theyr’e out of love it rains a lot because Dream is throwing a tantrum. Gaiman is clear that these are cliches, and he’s making fun of them because they’re cliches…but that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t seem able to deal with love in anything but cliches.

There’s actually an analogy here with another, more recent tween phenomena: Twilight. In both, there’s a lot of darkness and angst, which gives an exciting frisson of danger even as it distracts from the things that an actual adolescent might really find dangerous or threatening. In Twilight, the danger of vampires and blood and werewolves and melodrama all stands in for, and obscures, the looming, oncoming reality of adult relationships and sexuality. In Sandman, similarly, the pretension and the cleverness and the angsty melodrama seems, at some points, like a magician’s trick; the left hand is bobbing and weaving and throwing out fireworks so that you don’t notice (except with a kind of unacknowledged satisfaction perhaps) that there’s not much at stake in the right.

Though that all sounds kind of harsh, I’m actually not against this kind of tween repression categorically; in the Twilight series ( which I’ve mentioned liking before) I think the sustained effort to avoid looking at the obvious ends up energizing the series; it’s both winning and squicky, a kind of pop sublime. In Sandman I’m not sure it works so well. On the one hand, Gaiman is in some sense obviously a better writer than Stephanie Meyer. Though, as I said, the cleverness is irritating, it is, nonetheless, often actually clever, and he does manage to come up with some genuinely creepy twists (the treacherous stuffed toys in “A Game of You”) as well as some moving ones (Nuala’s story for example, as I mentioned above.) Meyer is not as bad as she’s sometimes claimed to be, but I doubt she could have pulled off either of those things.

On the other hand…Sandman is way more pretentious than Twilight…and the distance between the pretensions and the delivery is sometimes painful. For instance, there’s this panel:

Ah, those harem maidens…so exotic! So poetic! So unaccountably possessed of the sweaty metaphorical unease of a randy 13-year old trying to look impressively sophisticated!

It’s significant too, I think, that the so-thoughtfully entreated king declines the request. In Twilight, the heroine and hero eventually do, in fact, after much deferral (and marriage) have sex. This is in itself problematic; the whole tension of the series rests on the balance between safety and desire which is more or less vitiated when everybody gets what they desire and ends up safe. Gaiman is more canny; Dream, elaborately and with much fanfare, refuses to alter the structure of the series. Rather than change he decides to kill himself. Gaiman makes the “change” in question specifically about responsibility; Dream is not willing to give up his duties as ruler of dream, and so his only way out is death. But one has to wonder — is it really his (quite amorphous) duties that are at stake? Or is it something else? His ex-lover and Nuala more or less engineer his final downfall, his realm is torn apart by the furies, a rampaging feminine archetype — and the way they taunt him at the end is borderline sensual. “We are destroying the dreaming. Can you not feel it?” “Yes I can.” But then interrupts the foreplay, and Dream scurries off into oblivion, leaving one more fraught relationship we don’t get to really explore. Like a cadaverous Peter Pan, he never grows up, never has to stay with Wendy, and never gets out of the dream.

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Update: Suat’s post is now up.

Update: Vom Marlowe and Tom weigh in.

Update: And Kinukitty finishes up.