Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods, Good Omens, all of that)

[Mister Six]

I could've sworn there was a general Sandman thread focusing on both the comics and shows on here at some point, but Google is being useless, so fuck it - let's have a thread on everyone's favourite Goth bae turned lazy, Twitter-obsessed huckster.

I've been re-reading The Sandman over the past year for the first time in ages, and even though I can remember the broad strokes of most of the stories, I've been blown away by the imagination and skill present in the details; the toying with form that I'd totally forgotten (like that lovely bit in A Game of You where we see the dreams of various people rendered in different art styles) or the effortless shifting from playful whimsy to cold-hearted brutality, even within issues. I like how comfortable he is having all of the Endless (except, ironically, Death) casually fuck up the lives of the mortals they encounter, and Dream's slow change from heartless bellend to sympathetic and remorseful fellow. Adds tension to everything.

One thing, though - I'm about halfway through The Kindly Ones, and it's struck me how frequently black people are maimed and murdered in this comic. I mean, it happens to white people too (Asian people are almost completely absent), but because every leading character is white - and most of them survive - it makes things feel queasily off-balance. The two main human characters in The Kindly Ones are both white women, and while one of them is being put through the wringer a fair bit, the only two prominent black characters are a creep who ends up with a broken arm and a helpful woman who gets burned to death.

This follows another helpful black woman being burned to death in a previous arc, a black woman being crushed by a falling building, Dream's black ex spending 10,000 years in Hell...

I don't think Gaiman is a racist, but I think his 1990s progressive politics - "Yeah! I'm going to centre women and queer people in this comic, not just straight cis men!" - came with a big old racial blindspot, and so his attempts to add diversity in a comic where the supporting cast have the lifespan of mayflies led to some unfortunate consequences.

(I get the feeling gay men tend to get it in the neck a fair bit in Sandman too, but I haven't tallied the numbers. Having Corinthian be gay-coded and Dream put a gay man into the Eternal Waking as revenge in the first issue isn't helping, mind.)

Anyway, Neil Gaiman. Let's talk about the man and his work. Even if that work has mostly just been rehashing old stuff and flogging artisanal mahogany carvings of Morpheus' glans on Twitter for the last couple of decades.

[Mister Six]

Oh, and you can talk about the Sandman TV show, that Beowulf movie he wrote, the Good Omens telly show, whatever, too.

[13 schoolyards]

I really don't know whether to be impressed that Gaiman has spent his entire career finding new challenges and new areas to try and conquer, or sad that he's never written anything better than The Sandman in comics, or... let's say Anasazi Boys in literature, or made any television better than that one episode of Doctor Who (heavily re-written tho it supposedly was), and so on.

If you're not interested in his master of stories / extremely nice guy persona he's a frustrating author to follow, as he never seems interested enough in one format or the other to master it and put out a solid body of work. Unless you're a huge fan of Good Omens the series I suppose (I was not).

I mean, pretty much all his non-Sandman comics work is good rather than great, but then when DC finally offered him enough money to make a Sandman prequel worth his while, it turned out to be up there with the original series. So either* he could be writing good stuff but can't be bothered, or he could be writing good stuff but he knows his fans are happy with what he's currently up to and it gives him more time to promote his work / his persona.

_{*the third possibility is that The Sandman was so perfectly suited to his talents and interests that nothing he does outside that will ever be as good, but that seems a little unlikely for a master of stories}

[Mister Six]

_{*the third possibility is that The Sandman was so perfectly suited to his talents and interests that nothing he does outside that will ever be as good, but that seems a little unlikely for a master of stories}

I'd probably lean towards this, TBH. Like Jamie Delano, whose non-Hellblazer stuff is spotty, but who shines whenever he gets to take control of John Constantine.

I wonder if his flitting about is coloured by anxiety over matching his own reputation. He wrote The Sandman, which was Vertigo's top-selling comic and made him a comic book star, but everything he's done in comics since then has been fripperies, more or less.

He moved to prose and wrote massive bestseller American Gods, but other than Anansi Boys (which was obviously a much lighter, less imposing follow-up) his prose work has mostly been kids' books and novellas that he probably knocks out in a couple of weeks.

Now he's mostly doing telly - and screenwriting has always been his weakest hand, with Good Omens being no exception - but he's relying on his old brands because it's less intimidating than trying something new and potentially failing.

Or maybe he's just run out of ideas. Shame he's so bloody rich - I reckon if he had to, if keeping a roof over his head meant grinding away at the coalface of creativity and polishing up whatever he found - he could turn out some really compelling stuff again.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I could've sworn there was a general Sandman thread focusing on both the comics and shows on here at some point, but Google is being useless, so fuck it - let's have a thread on everyone's favourite Goth bae turned lazy, Twitter-obsessed huckster.

There was but I couldn't find it when searching for it on google, and only knew how to find it as it was a thread I started and I could search through my own topic history. Anyway, rather than linking to it, here's the post I wrote about The Sandman having just finished re-reading it:

First off - There's going to be spoilers all over the place here, so it should only be read by those who have read all of the comics / just don't care!

I figured I'd start a new thread for this as the tv show starts on Friday, and I've recently finished a read through of the comics, I bought and read them all originally as they came out on a monthly basis but had never gone through them in trade paperback form over the course of about a month or so until this year. Here's some poorly thought out and often random notes which will probably be quite unsatisfying!

The Sandman Vol. 1 Preludes and Nocturnes - Minor aspects of this are a bit clunky, and I'm glad Sam Keith buggered off fairly early on as while some of his art is stunning some didn't quite work for me, but otherwise I thought this was fantastic stuff, I actually like Dream's interactions with the DC Universe characters as it's such a weird idea, but it's probably a good thing that Gaiman (all but) never included them again.

The Sandman Volumes 2 - The Doll's House - Sees the series really find its feet, Gaiman introduces a whole bunch of supporting characters who'd play fairly large roles at times in the rest of the series, though weirdly I never really clicked with Rose Walker, she always seemed a bit bland, a bit aimless, but maybe that's the point after she was stripped of her role as the vortex.

The Sandman Vol 3 - Dream Country - This for me is the one off's at their best, I still struggle with Gaiman being a wanky pretentious sort these days, but this proves that he once was able to create something pretty special.

The Sandman Vol. 4 - Seasons Of Mists - The Nada storyline is resolved, Dream has the key to hell but is the only lifeform who seemingly doesn't want it, and this storyline is great in general. Though one thing I think the series really never addresses is just how much of an utter cunt Dream was for sending Nada to hell for so many thousands of years, I get it that it's used as a device to show how Dream was changed by his period of incarceration, and character's chastise him for having done it, but jesus Morpheus, ten thousand years in Hell just for rejecting you? Ugh, you utter piece of shit you.

The Sandman Vol. 5 - Fables  & Reflections - Dream Country shows how Gaiman can write a one off perfectly, but for my money this is the first collection that hints of him buying in to his own acclaim as the king of stories, telling long drawn out tales which have a tenuous link to Dream and his world, and most of them have a moral which is a glaring obvious. It's not all bad, I quite liked The Hunt and Three Septembers And A January, but Thermidore and August (with the ah, he's miserable because he was raped by Julius Caesar reveal feeling like Gaiman at his worse) were both a drag, and while I know it was only for Vertigo Preview, Fear Of Falling is embarrassingly on the nose.

The Sandman Vol. 6 - A Game Of You - We're back to form with Gaiman playing with fantasy tropes as Barbara and Martin Tenbones return (albeit brutally briefly with the latter) and the series is far, far better. I'm not happy with the eventual fate of Wanda, I think Gaiman deserves some acclaim for the positive portrayal of a transgender woman all of these years ago, but killing her off seemed like a shitty, pointless move.

The Sandman Vol. 7 - Brief Lives - A wacky road movie with lots of larks as Dream and Delirium attemp to find missing brother Destruction, and we dip in on those he knew along the way. The stand out issue is the one set in the strip club if only because the art is stunning. Delirium is an incredibly annoying character at times but she's tolerable here, and I was fond of the insights in to Destruction and Barnabus especially, the latter of whom definitely should have had a spin-off comic.

The Sandman Vol. 8 - World's End - Where I started to to think I don't like about 50% of the one off's, "Cities might wake up" has a lot of dull prose and great art, while the one about the fairy being imprisoned is a cute tale but what is it really saying other than power corrupts, fairy's shouldn't be crossed, and Dream wasn't always a pompous prideful turd? On the flip side I did like Hob's Leviathan and Cerements so that's, um, something?

The Sandman Vol. 9 - The Kindly Ones - The End is nigh, but old Sandy doesn't seem too upset by this, as it turns out that murdering your old son (twice, if you count the time you didn't help him) causes a great deal of grief. I've very mixed feelings about the art, sometimes it works (the scenes featuring Lyta Hall especially as she descends in to a grief filled madness), but at other times it feels bizarrely cartoonish and just plain poor, this contains some of Gaiman's best writing but I really, really wish a different artist had been chosen.

The Sandman Vol. 10 - The Wake - I didn't connect with the ending to Sandman when I first read it in comic form when it was published, but did wonder if it was due to reading it one issue at a time, but having read the whole series over the space over a relatively short time I still didn't really feel anything other than mild interest. The Wake itself is okay, and seeing various characters getting something of an ending was sometimes satisfying, but I really think it should have ended with issue 72 and the new Dream meeting his new family. Mainly as I didn't click with the final three issues, the one with Hob seems mainly to be Gaiman making an apology for how the series dealt with Hob and his past actions regarding slavery, issue 74 and the story of a desert crossing issue was another parable I found bland and the message behind it was weak, and then The Tempest left me with a shrug, I just didn't care about any of the characters, and Morpheus only turns up to explicitly spell out themes found within the rest of the series regarding the nature of stories, and those who tell them, which felt patronising. I'm fully open to it being me who is missing something here, but while I loved the majority of the run these final three issues really left me cold.

The Sandman Vol. 11 - Endless Nights - Stories about the Endless, some of which are weirdly pointless (Destiny), packed with cliché and some quite bad writing (Despair), exploit rape (Delirium), though I half liked Dream, Desire and Destruction, and some of Death, though I'm not quite sure what Gaiman was trying to do with the soldier character as if we were supposed to like him, as sort of feels the case, it didn't work for me at all.

Absolutely Inessential Spin-Off: Sandman Midnight Theatre - A one off plotted and drawn by Matt Wagner but written by Gaiman, this sees Wesley Dodds and Dream briefly encounter each other but it takes a long while to get going, some of the art impresses but some of it murky and ugly, and even though this is relatively short I found myself reading it over three evenings rather than in one go. 2/5

One more minor moan - towards the end there's discussion of exactly what Dream was, and Abel supposedly reveals the shocking secret that he was "A Point Of View". And you could argue in many ways he is, he's an example of a view which rarely changes and can only do to a certain extent, but he has his limits and will choose death over breaking the main beliefs he has. But I think it's a bit of a simplistic description, there was a lot more to Dream than that, good and bad, from those he loved, the friendships he created, and the relationships he's had with various family members. Unless I'm interpreting the phrase badly, which is more than possible.

The Sandman Overture - Blimey, I quite liked this. Not all of it, and sometimes the writing is a bit embarrassing, like this early part:



which is the kind of whimsy that makes me wince, it's not even that inventive and the language is simplistic, but I can't help but think of Gaiman masturbating furiously over print outs of his scripts. Which is very mean of me to say, but anyhow, otherwise it mostly works and introduces some intriguing ideas, while also tying up a few unanswered questions from the original series. Oh yeah, and the artwork is stunning, some of the best I've seen in a comic and certain pages are point blank beautiful. 4/5

EDIT: Right, I've finally finished editing it. There's probably still plenty of typos, but this will have to do for now.

That's a great opening post Mister Six and I'm looking forward to responding to it when I have more time over the coming few days.

And I'm in agreement with you 13 Schoolyards, he really peaked with The Sandman but I've very mixed feelings about the rest of his output, and even the comics he's written after that (I think 1602 was afterwards, anyhow) have never really impressed me, though I haven't revisited them in a long time.

[Mister Six]

@Small Man Big Horse - ah, just throw us the link anyway and maybe Barry can merge them?

I'll read that post of yours when I'm done with the series, but I skimmed it and saw The Sandman Mystery Theatre and remembered that my local library has the first omnibus of that, so thanks for the reminder!

[Small Man Big Horse]

@Small Man Big Horse - ah, just throw us the link anyway and maybe Barry can merge them?

Sure, it's: https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=95990.msg4998225#msg4998225

I'll read that post of yours when I'm done with the series, but I skimmed it and saw The Sandman Mystery Theatre and remembered that my local library has the first omnibus of that, so thanks for the reminder!

I've only read about three issues of that, and the one off short graphic novel which is a direct crossover, but a friend rates it so one day I'll have to check it out.

[Mister Six]

Hm, actually, this thread is more broadly about Gaiman so maybe it should stand. If anyone else replies to it!

[Small Man Big Horse]

Hm, actually, this thread is more broadly about Gaiman so maybe it should stand. If anyone else replies to it!

I think so too, it would be great if we could import the part where there's discussion about Dream and his relationship with Nada, but that's about it really.

[13 schoolyards]

Sandman Mystery Theatre is excellent, but it's a pulpy 30s-era crime series that has next to nothing (title aside) to do with The Sandman aside from the crossover special. I'm glad to see they're trying yet again to reprint it, even though I drifted away sometime after issue 50 - it's a string of almost stand alone stories of four issues in length, so after a while I was feeling "yep, had enough of these". But yes, highly recommended.

[bakabaka]

The Sandman Overture - Blimey, I quite liked this. Not all of it, and sometimes the writing is a bit embarrassing, like this early part:



which is the kind of whimsy that makes me wince, it's not even that inventive and the language is simplistic, but I can't help but think of Gaiman masturbating furiously over print outs of his scripts.

It's certainly not inventive by Gaiman, but it's not whimsy either; it's a reference to a philosophical question posed by Chuang Tzu in the 4th century BC about the nature of reality. https://www.philosophy-foundation.org/enquiries/view/the-butterfly-dream

Not that Gaiman isn't prone to occasional annoying whimsy, just not there.

[Small Man Big Horse]

It's certainly not inventive by Gaiman, but it's not whimsy either; it's a reference to a philosophical question posed by Chuang Tzu in the 4th century BC about the nature of reality. https://www.philosophy-foundation.org/enquiries/view/the-butterfly-dream

Not that Gaiman isn't prone to occasional annoying whimsy, just not there.

Ah, I stand corrected, and thank you for that, it made for fascinating reading.

[Mister Six]

I got the reference and still thought it seemed like smug whimsy. A cutesy reference masquerading as a joke.

Although I'm more annoyed by the double space between "a" and "start".

[bgmnts]

Regarding his perhaps lazy output, I'm to understand Sandman is considered a masterpiece. Probably fair enough to rest on your laurels after writing something seminal. Just chill out counting the cash and pumping out whatever you want.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I mean yeah Sandman is so great his legacy is assured even if he never does anything good again. And that's in spite of the first seven issues often being a bit rubbish

[PlanktonSideburns]

What do people make of his punch and Judy one

[Mister Six]

Regarding his perhaps lazy output, I'm to understand Sandman is considered a masterpiece. Probably fair enough to rest on your laurels after writing something seminal. Just chill out counting the cash and pumping out whatever you want.

The thing is, he's not really pumping out much of anything any more. His last wholly original (ie. not co-written or rejigging old mythology) prose fiction work was a novella, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, ten years ago. The one before that was a kids' novel, The Graveyard Book, five years earlier.

These days he's mostly just flogging gold-leaf collector's edition copies of Good Omens in mahogany boxes or whatever on Twitter and rehashing old properties (GO, Sandman) for telly.

I dunno, maybe he's earned his right to do fuck all, but I'd prefer it if he'd have the dignity to just amble off into retirement and fart out the odd charity short story from time to time or something. It's the endless hawking of collector's tat on social media that gets my goat. He's already a multimillionaire, does he really need more cash? Have some dignity, man.

[13 schoolyards]

What do people make of his punch and Judy one

I liked it, though it wasn't as good as Violent Cases and I was a bit disappointed Gaiman and McKean never did the rest of the memory quartet or whatever it would have been called (I guess Signal to Noise was maybe the third installment). Gaiman doesn't seem to have a wide range of interests outside of stories, but his thinly disguised biographical stuff is usually up there with his best (see also The Ocean at the End of the Lane)

I feel like Gaiman decided that exploring his past - even fictionalised - would disrupt his persona as an idealised master of stories so he quietly gave up on that side of things for a few decades, even though it was probably the most interesting work he's done. Then again, Mr Punch is constantly available in bulk at the local book chain that sells remaindered books, so it might not have been much of a hit either.

[Small Man Big Horse]

I dunno, maybe he's earned his right to do fuck all, but I'd prefer it if he'd have the dignity to just amble off into retirement and fart out the odd charity short story from time to time or something. It's the endless hawking of collector's tat on social media that gets my goat. He's already a multimillionaire, does he really need more cash? Have some dignity, man.

I'm with you there, and though I haven't read it the new Miracleman issues he's produced (The Silver Age 4 onwards?) are awful according to a close friend who otherwise really loves his work.

[MoreauVasz]

There is a style of comic that was pioneered by Moore with Swamp Thing where words and visuals are built up in layers and feed off of each other in quite complex ways. Try and nail down the plot or the characters, or the symbolism, or the allusions and you'll miss out the subtleties as they're all meant to be taken in at once.

Swamp thing is the blueprint for this style of comics writing but Sandman is what hit big because it's a bit more accessible and it draws upon mythology rather than the obscure British comics, weird occult nonsense, and 1950s science-fiction stories that seemed to serve as Alan Moore's touchstones for Swamp Thing.

I would say that the form reached peak efficiency with first Hell blazer and then Lucifer. Both are like Sandman for grown ups, present me with a page of either and it can take me ages to make sense of either. Hyper-compressed storytelling.

[Deskbound Cunt]

There's a bit where a copper(?) annoys Death so she inflicts torture on him. That he will feel insects crawling over his body for the rest of his life.

A few issues later we see him strapped in a bed in an asylum whilst Gaiman relishes in his description of spiders and insects crawling over him.

Seemed sorta' too cruel and nasty.

Other than that- great!

[13 schoolyards]

The early issues of Sandman are all over the place, but that's their big strength - Gaiman is trying out different styles and approaches to see what works. Unfortunately, he then decided what worked was a fairly flowery fantasy approach (whereas the horror stuff early on was the best stuff for mine).

I mean, he wasn't wrong, as the extreme horror of the 80s was starting to fizzle out and even Clive Barker would move off into fantasy. But looking back now the horror issues stand out for having a viciousness to them that Gaiman never bothered with much afterwards.

Put another way, there's a reason why The Corinthian is the stand out character early on, and the antagonists after him barely register.

[Mister Six]

There's a bit where a copper(?) annoys Death so she inflicts torture on him. That he will feel insects crawling over his body for the rest of his life.

A few issues later we see him strapped in a bed in an asylum whilst Gaiman relishes in his description of spiders and insects crawling over him.

Seemed sorta' too cruel and nasty.

Other than that- great!

That's Delirium, not Death. It's in keeping with basically all the Endless except ironically Death (and maybe Destiny?) being scary, sometimes unempathetic arseholes who fuck up people's lives on a whim when it suits them.

But yeah, it was nasty. I think that's kind of the point, though - to show Delirium isn't just a cute manic pixie girl, but a fucking scary representation of madness itself.

There is a style of comic that was pioneered by Moore with Swamp Thing where words and visuals are built up in layers and feed off of each other in quite complex ways. Try and nail down the plot or the characters, or the symbolism, or the allusions and you'll miss out the subtleties as they're all meant to be taken in at once.

Swamp thing is the blueprint for this style of comics writing but Sandman is what hit big because it's a bit more accessible and it draws upon mythology rather than the obscure British comics, weird occult nonsense, and 1950s science-fiction stories that seemed to serve as Alan Moore's touchstones for Swamp Thing.

I would say that the form reached peak efficiency with first Hell blazer and then Lucifer. Both are like Sandman for grown ups, present me with a page of either and it can take me ages to make sense of either. Hyper-compressed storytelling.

I don't agree with this at all. I'm a massive fan of Hellblazer - I wrote essays about it for a book and everything -  but past the initial Delano run and sporadic moments from the subsequent 210 issues I wouldn't say it ever came close to applying the kind of layered storytelling that Moore used in Swamp Thing, past maybe the occasional caption used to connect scenes during a transition.

Lucifer is an incredible comic too, but it's also substantially more direct and conventional in its storytelling, and less ambitious in its scope. Which is great - it fits the personality of its protagonist in the way that Sandman's drifting, meandering form perfectly suits Dream and his realm. But I certainly don't consider it particularly deep.

Calling either one "Sandman for grown-ups" seems like opposites day-level Bizarro thinking, given that both of those comics are less formally and narratively innovative. I can't think of an issue of either comic that comes close to, say, that one issue of A Game of You where Barbie is floating through people's dreams, and each one is written and drawn in a different style that tells you all about each person's inner life.

[Mobius]

I just finished American Gods last night

I enjoyed the idea of the book but the ending was pretty anticlimactic, and the main character was dead boring. Half of the book was dream sequences too, got on my nerves by the end.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I read the sequel Anansi Boys earlier this year. From what I can remember it meanders all over the place and is quite pap. Good title though.

[Mister Six]

Yeah, the coda for American Gods is weak as fuck and felt - at the time - really unnecessary. I should give it a re-read at some point now I know the story better and see if it makes more thematic sense or something. My overriding memory is thinking it should have been cut, though.

Anansi Boys I liked quite a bit as Pratchett methadone. There's a lot of fun stuff in there, and I like the way

Spoiler alert

he deliberately withholds a character's race until halfway through the book just to wrongfoot white people (me, I'm white people) who weren't paying attention and imagined him to be white too.

[close]

It's a minor work for sure, and I do wonder a bit if it rattled Gaiman a bit that he didn't really have a heavyweight follow-up to American Gods, hence the slow dribble of novellas, kids' books and co-written stuff followed by a shift to TV.

God, I've really set a miserable tone for this thread, haven't I?

I can't think of an issue of either comic that comes close to, say, that one issue of A Game of You where Barbie is floating through people's dreams, and each one is written and drawn in a different style that tells you all about each person's inner life.

Just realised I meant Rose in The Doll's House. Ah well.

[13 schoolyards]

I haven't read Anansi Boys since it came out, but I remember at the time feeling it was a much more confident and competent read than American Gods, which was very much all over the shop. I suspect Gaiman gave up on novels more because - much like comics - he'd written one that was a hit and writing more would be a lot of work for not much reward as far as promoting himself went, so why bother?

Honestly, I think Gaiman figured out pretty early on (possibly while writing Sandman) that his real interests lay more in supervising and guiding others working on his ideas, and the way to reach that goal was to become a brand name in and of himself while creating the bare minimum of creative work required to sustain that brand.

It was just lucky (while also being a bit disappointing) that he was also a pretty good writer, otherwise he'd be as blandly remembered as any one of those other big name US authors who always seem to be collaborating with other writers or working on television adaptation and never create anything on their own. There are a lot of writers who do one interesting thing and then vanish into Hollywood forever

[Mister Six]

Honestly, I think Gaiman figured out pretty early on (possibly while writing Sandman) that his real interests lay more in supervising and guiding others working on his ideas, and the way to reach that goal was to become a brand name in and of himself while creating the bare minimum of creative work required to sustain that brand.

Has he done much of that, though? One co-authored novel series and... I guess the Sandman TV show, maybe?

[Dayraven]

Many of the non-Gaiman Sandman spinoffs would fit — that's the sort of thing comics do anyway of course, but the emphasis on Gaiman as creative consultant is unusual.

[Mister Six]

I don't think he's that involved in most of them, though, except the handful where he gets a co-writing credit for the first few issues, like Books of Magic: Life During Wartime (and I have my suspicion that's just DC passing him a beermat, a pen and an envelope full of cash more than it is him eagerly nurturing new talent).

IIRC, he used to be totally hands off until The Dreaming (the main Sandman spin-off of the 1990s) killed off Matt the Raven. After that he demanded that the storylines be run past him before being written. I believe he also has to sign off on the actual written scripts whenever one of the Endless (usually Dream or Death; nobody's champing at the bit to squeeze Destiny into their books) makes an appearance.

He and Kieth, Dringenberg and Jones get credited whenever a Gaiman Sandman character pops up, which is unusual for characters created under contract to DC, but that's just the firm trying not to fuck up like they did for Moore, because they know that periodically being able to trot Gaiman out for another Sandman spin-off is worth a little black ink. The moment Gaiman dies you can expect Death to become a supervillain in The Batman and Rorschach Adventures, totally uncredited.