In my habitual blog perusal I discovered the Gaiman chapter of The Last War In Albion, and had a nice cozy two-day reading. As I approach 50 (and we are counting down all the time, now) it has become ever-more important for me to understand the cultural forces that resulted in me-as-I-exist-now, & my attachment to the medium of Comix. One of the influences I've always glossed over is Gaiman.
Because of course Sandman was an influence.
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I got into it for the pull quote.
There was this record store owner who was your typical sleazoid, naturally named Carl-- beware all Carls! --who liked my mom, and my mom was into comix, and I'd read all her favorite trash. She had the o.g. Heavy Metals, and had taped the animated movie off HBO* (which we were pirating). I grew up reading a diet of horror & violence & rape, because my parents were the Dr. Spock generation of childrearing where the m.o. was stay near-but-stoned & let Nature figure that shit out because Nurture is refilling the waterbed.
* I got suspended from school for "trafficking pornography" because I'd loaned the Heavy Metal animated movie to a friend. And when I say friend, I mean my best friend, Ira Johnson, a stringy unpredictably violent kid. First to break my nose. Fun guy. We liked all the same shit, including the rising tide of paramilitarized superhero dreck popularized by Marvel & the Image kids. I loaned him a lot of mom's comix. Got most of 'em back.
Comic book people of my parents' generation were also Record Store People, and everyone had a waterbed. We were not advanced.
I am saying welcome to Dogwater, Alabama, and the hangover that was the 80s.
That's how easy I was. Clive Barker thinks this is the business? Lemme taste & see.
Mom loved Clive Barker for all his gothic viscera & sacriligious anger, and I think I did, too, but in those days I lacked the vocabulary & emotional cognition to articulate WHY anything appealed to me. Usually the appeal was the tease of sexuality mingled with danger.
But you know... There weren't many women in my mom's libraries. She read a fuck of a lot of Stephen King. Sure, she had Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived In The Castle, The Lottery & Other Stories. Baller. But mostly I was surrounded by Dude Shit. And mainly straight dude shit. (Lovecraft is straight dude shit. Don't be lulled into believing otherwise.) Not too many queer artists, no. Barker was the big exception. I don't think mom knew I was into the queer parts of Barker.
They say mothers always know, but mom was kinda surprised when she walked in on me sucking dick.
Anyway, my worldview was predominantly defined by dude shit.
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That's what we're talking about, right? Dude shit. Record shops. Sketchy ponytailed would-be-motherfuckin' Cool Guys. All-american dude shit, bruh.
Like I said, my mom had hundreds and hundreds of Warren Magazines. Loaned lots of 'em to Carl. So Carl was totes down to pass on this sensitive new work of "horror" being published by DC.
You may have gathered from my general environment & media intake, I was not accustomed to writing in the particular emotional register that Neil Gaiman maintained: that sensitivity resonated with my own closeted struggle with becoming a fully-formed human being. Mom seemed relieved to see me taking an interest in something as subtle and slow-burn as Sandman because it didn't go hard the way Wetworks or WildC.A.T.S. or PITT wanted to.
Suddenly I wound up getting the collected Sandman volumes for chistmas & birthdays. My mom bought me a limited edition Death watch, for fuck's sake. I was given a first edition of Angels & Visitations. I really fell into it, for a minute, not gonna lie. I would read & re-read those volumes just to feel the feedback ringing in my skull: soaking in Kelley Jones' inks, poring over Vince Locke's lines, pining to make woods sing with life the way Charles Vess could. Arguing with myself over whether Jill Thompson was actually good. Lusting after Drinenberg & McKean's verisimilitude & ability to capture the feeling of AIR on paper. And letting Gaiman affect me, calmly & philosophically, finding pleasure in the Tone his books had, the uncannily welcoming way he had with words.
Signal To Noise became, in fact, one of my all-time favourite graphic novels. That book really rocked my fucking world. McKean & Gaiman knew the music of the medium and they really knew how to be sorrowful & still elicit a smile. Violent Cases kinda hit me the same.
And I'm pretty sure somewhere in the time I became addicted to Sandman & nearly became a statistic by having a black boyfriend in backwoods Alabama-- if I wasn't bucking for my father to actually kill me, I don't know *what* I was thinking --the notion of running away from home started to form.
Because, as Elizabeth Sandifer cannily notes, child abuse & the need to escape violence in the home underpins the majority of Gaiman's writing. Those elements constitute the baseline of sympathy, and probably why there was / is such a large feminine / genderqueer fanbase for Sandman. The reader who has survived child abuse & violence in the home can *hear* genuine pathos in a text, and Gaiman knew his strengths. He seemed earnest in his desire to express stories for womenfolk, and children struggling to become adults in a world where only adults have power, and then only a select (but arbitrary) few.
Neil Gaiman was (let's not be uncharitable) THE writer for an audience that would now be termed Woke. And he seemed clean. He had a stable marriage (as far as most of us cared to investigate) and he had friends everybody liked (I was a teenage Tori Amos addict too) and he was making Real Art and not just capeshit. Neil Gaiman seemed wholesome in a Tim Burton but more roundly-read way.
So of course my mom encouraged my becoming a Sandfan, for the season it lasted. I went to my first comic book convention with only five bucks and what did I walk out with? The John Bolton volume of Books of Magic. I fucking LOVED Books of Magic...
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After I ran away Sandman ceased to mean shit. Signal To Noise stayed top of my pop charts, and I still rolled for 'Violent Cases', but the rest of that stuff stopped having any real meaning for me. I'd reread the Woke Classics every few years-- the Invisibles, Sandman, Finder, Love & Rockets --but as time ticked on Gaiman faded from my life because he'd kind of left comics, too. I mean he'd do a stunt like write two whole issues of Batman or whatever but who gave a shit? His comics were all weak sauce, really. They didn't chart any specific new weird waters, and all they had to offer, ultimately, was competent visual storytelling with a clean grasp of narrative form & formula. He worked with queer creators, and he seemed like an Ally, but other than being Nice To Gay People what has Gaiman ever done for me, really? None of my boyfriends were ever into Gaiman. They didn't like 'A Game Of You' at fucking all. So it's not like Gaiman ever got me laid.
I think Gaiman got a lot of dubious guys laid. I think Gaiman's popular art has provided a lot of cover for a lot of questionable dudes. I think that's the sum total of the cultural impact we're talking, here. Gaiman got a lot of people laid, of all persuasions, because books get people talking, and usually at one point or another, the other thing happens. So if we're looking at Gaiman's private fascination with women being degraded & humiliated & harmed and his apparent need to experience that, in complete contradiction to all his anodyne Woke cred as this sensitive author who's besties with Tori Amos, then we're looking at that in the context of Dude, Where's My Boner Gone.
Nobody talking about the Gaiman thing wants to really talk about that: the fact that there was an eroticism adjacent to his production of the written word, and now that has been more than spoiled: it has been revealed as a swollen to bursting carton fuming in the fridge in a puddle of fetid curds. The Gaiman lawsuits are just gross to think about. The story of Sandman and most especially Dream's women problems are gross to think about. The DC machine being as fueled by Gaiman's IP as it is by bloody Batman is pretty goddamned nasty to think about.
Like basically Neil has taken a rather public private shit on the medium itself and it's a turnoff because who WANTS to talk about this stuff? It's depressing.
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Every time I pick up 'Only The End of the World Again' by Troy Nixey & Neil Gaiman, it's for Nixey.
I wonder if anybody's thought to ask Troy Nixey how he feels.
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I wasn't surprised when the murmur of criminal sexual behavior became a sewage backflow of revolting details. The deviance was always there, in the text. The hypocrisy is offensive. The human cost is what truly bothers me, inasmuch as my moral hackles can be raised by something as cheap & tatty as Gaiman privately being a sex monster.
Anyway. That's all my thoughts, & memories, related to that pile of nonsense. I don't see myself ever revisiting the misty Gaiman realms. Once it was Woke. Now it's broke. Bah-dum-tish.
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