Last War in Albion: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)" (Sandifer)

[cahn]

OKAY I am trying to make my way through Related Work! I did read this in record time, because I found it extremely interesting!

This is a survey of Neil Gaiman's work, with a marked emphasis on his work in comics and Sandman in particular. I found this fascinating because I read Sandman relatively recently -- 2021, as it turns out, which I guess is not all that recently -- and that's a major subject of this work. I guess I'm glad to have read Sandman, so it was good I read it then because there is no way I would have gotten through it after the whole Gaiman stuff broke. Like, it's possible (though not probable) I might still have tried, but I would have hit the first horror segment and noped right out.

Anyway, it was really interesting to read about from the viewpoint of someone who clearly loves and knows a lot about comics, because I know nothing about comics, so when she explains stuff about what artist did which parts, and what to look for in their work, and how to judge the arc as a combo of text and art, well, I just think that's really cool and I kinda wish I'd had this info when I read it.

Also, occasionally you get a line like "Blake [provided] a set of twelve illustrations for Paradise Lost... filling Hell with demons who ripple with idiosyncratically proportioned but coruscatingly homoerotic musculature," which I enjoy :D

I wondered, when I began it, how the text would deal with the Gaiman stuff that's come out since I read Sandman, and I felt like the book handled it exactly right. It's scrupulously fair (as far as I can tell) about giving fair credit to Gaiman where credit is due, for example putting a trans woman in a comic in 1991. Sandifer talks about various criticisms one may have (spoilers: the trans woman dies, Gaiman says something that sounds like she is only there "for cis people to have emotions about") and then Sandifer points out, "it cannot be forgotten that this was 1991. Gaiman may pat himself on the back for his readers' turnarounds [from being turned off by a trans woman to feeling for her], but the fact of the matter is that putting a trans woman in a comic was going to alienate a portion of the audience, and that getting that same audience to instead be outraged on Wanda's behalf was a significant accomplishment." Which I think is very fair: in the early 90's if you got a sympathetic storyline about a gay person you were doing well! (And in those days they all died, too, in my experience.) Sandifer does not, in the earlier part of the book, accuse him of anything for which there isn't evidence, and she draws a line from the boy who was inside the abusive cult of Scientology to his early work involving POV characters in messy situations...

But Sandifer is not in the slightest a Gaiman apologist; she is a chronicler and an analyst. Which means that when the text then, in a logical and measured presentation (but with definite feeling underneath), lays out what's known about the horrific man that this boy became, and the line from that man to the characters in his later work -- well, it hits rather harder, for me, than if the book had been terribly loud and emotional about it.

The only thing I quibble with is that one of the only other Gaimans I've read is The Graveyard Book, which she doesn't even name by title and is very dismissive about, and I liked it a lot! :P Also Sandifer says that she formatted it for the Hugo packet hurriedly and to expect typos, etc., and there were some, as well as a few times of rough transitions that I would presume that something that had had more editing time would have worked out.

But anyway as soon as I finished it I really wanted to read her work on Watchmen, which is probably the graphic-novel work I have the most strong feelings about but have really no insight into the graphic part of! I am trying to contain myself because I have to read more Hugo stuff! (And then Redwall for A., which may take a while... there are a lot of them...)

I feel as if Best Related Work is an embarrassment of riches this year and I'm glad I made myself go through it. I want to vote Palmer very high but this is also really good and I also want to vote this at the top!

Comments

[snickfic]

I read this slowly shortly after it came out. I will say I was extremely offput by the framing device of the "war in Albion," which I guess is an ongoing conceit she has for discussing comics history but which felt way too frivolous for discussing a matter as serious as Gaiman.

Otherwise I found it extremely interesting, though. I read the first 3-4 volumes of Sandman in the early 00s and never got further, so it was very nice to read basically a summary of what happened after that. Among other things, the essay confirmed for me that I was fine not reading the rest, even aside from the fact that Gaiman wrote it.

But I also found it fascinating how aggressively Gaiman networked professionally on the strengths of his writing and his sheer chutzpah. That really turned some lightbulbs on for me. I also felt really validated in feeling like he'd basically sat back and wallowed in his fame and riches for the past 20 years rather than pushing himself creatively in any direction at all. (Although The Graveyard Book is one of my favorites of his, so you're not alone there.)

And the various storylines he wrote with themes of rape and power dynamics sure are horrifying in retrospect! JFC!!!!

[cahn]

Ha. I will admit I continue to be baffled by all the "war in Albion" stuff. Is it something that Sandifer made up but takes seriously, or is this literally something that Moore and Morrison take seriously? I can't quite tell from this angle? I don't care enough about comics history to find out, lol.

Yeeeeah, Sandman really stressed the borders of what I was willing to read.

But I also found it fascinating how aggressively Gaiman networked professionally on the strengths of his writing and his sheer chutzpah... I also felt really validated in feeling like he'd basically sat back and wallowed in his fame and riches for the past 20 years rather than pushing himself creatively in any direction at all.

The networking was really fascinating! And the implication that it was his way of getting out. Heh, Gaiman is a big enough name that although he's not one of the authors I consciously track, it was always clear when he was coming out with something-or-other, and I did feel like it used to be that I heard his name a bunch and then I hadn't really heard from him much in a while...

And the various storylines he wrote with themes of rape and power dynamics sure are horrifying in retrospect! JFC!!!!

UGH, right?? OUCH.

[selenak]

As someone who has read - and loved - Sandman and some, but not all, of Gaiman's other work, that sounds like an interesting book to bread. (BTW: Loved "The Graveyard Book", too. Both for itself, and then when I belatedly realised it is also a very clever adaptation of Kipling's "The Jungle Book".)

Re: Gay characters in the early 1990s - they didn't all die, though, including and especially not in Sandman, which is another achievement of that series. One of the things I was worried about when we started to hear about the Netflix adaptation was that the "present day" time frame would be moved from the late 1980s and 1990s to "our" present, because I immediately wondered what that would mean for Alex Burgess and his lover Paul (assuming Dream would still get captured when he did in the comics, which turned out to be the case.) One aspect of the Sandman saga that was and is important to me is that while Morpheus isn't capable of forgiving Alex, Daniel is, that that Alex and Paul are reunited because Paul has spent all those decades caring for Alex and that they end the saga awake, with each other, and able to enjoy however much time they had left. On the lesbian side of queerness, there are Hazel and Foxglove, also alive and together throughout the entire saga, including the end, and that they are messy characters with unidealized bodies who have problems but work them out makes them rare examples of specifically lesbian characters in those years as well. (And now. I mean, let's face it - when did you last see a non-gorgeous Lesbian meant to be a sympathetic character in a visual medium?)

(All of which isn't meant to dispute anything about her and your observations re: the progressiveness (for the time) of the Wanda character, btw.)

Anyway: Neil Gaiman wasn't the first example of a creator responsible for work that truly has great meaning for me who then turns out to have treated other people abysmally in real life. (I think that would have been Marion Zimmer Bradley, but only if we limit it to creators who were still alive when I was - I mean, I like Wagner's operas, and I was always aware about Wagner's terrible non-musical legacy, but he was safely dead for a century when I started to listen to his stuff.) But whenever you discover something like this, it never fails being horrible - first and foremost, of course, because of the victims whose lives were damaged. It doesn't mean, though, that I think the meaning has been taken from those works in the past that gave me something, which is another reason why this book sounds like something I'd want to read.

[cahn]

You were the one who recced Graveyard Book to me! I absolutely adore the Mowgli stories and loved the Kipling adaptation aspect :D (I actually kind of wonder if Sandifer didn't notice that, because it's a large part of the charm for me.)

Heh, yeah, in my personal experience of media in the late 80s/early 90s Teh Gays all died (of course I didn't experience Sandman until decades later), but skygiants just this weekend reviewed a book from 1980 where the gay protagonists lived! (Though possibly everyone else died, lol.)

Yeah, Wagner... And MZB, who was probably the first for me too. Much of her work wasn't as meaningful to me as it was for other people (for instance, I never got into Darkover because my library didn't have it), but there is definitely some of her writing that does mean a lot to me.

Ah, it turns out you can read it! It was first an (extremely long) blog post that will be published as part of Sandifer's history of comics, and is available here:
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-cuddled-little-vice-sandman
Be aware that there's some sort of conceit she uses about "the last war in Albion" between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison...? I don't even know what all of that is about, and you can safely skip any references to it. :)

[selenak]

Thank you for the link. That was indeed a thorough and well written examination, even though I totally disagree re: The Graveyard Book. Even without the Jungle Book adaptation aspect, I would never describe it something that feels like what AI would produce if you told it to write a Neil Gaiman story. Miss Lupescu and Silas are the best werewolf and vampire I've encountered in recent (as in, last 15 years or so) written fiction, without these terms ever mentioned, the various tombstone enscriptions made me smile whenever I reread the book as they did the first time around, and Liza the witch is great.As an adaptation, it has the double layered fun element once you see which character(s) map onto which in Kipling (like Silas = Bagheera, and so forth), and I appreciate that Scarlett is introduced far, far earlier and also isn't just a symbol like Mowgli's eventual wife, but rather refuses such a role and breaks things off with Bod after having lived through a truly horrifying adventure.

All this said, I take her point that neither the children's novels nor the "adult" ones post American Gods feel like NG pushing himself as a writer the way he used to be able to but remaining in his comfort zone. How far that is connected to his increasing darksideness, though, who knows. Because it would be nice to believe that artistic creativity is at least a bit connected to one's ethics, but I think that is just as wrong as using artistic talent as an excuse for terrible behaviour. It may simply be that even had he never abused a single person, he would have done his best and most innovative works at this point - which doesn't mean the rest is rubbish, just that NO ONE keeps churning out those all the time. Going back to Richard Wagner: I think you can argue whether or not, say, Tristan and Isolde (written while he was working on the Ring, hence staged before it) is better, as good, or not as good as The Ring of the Nibelung, and it probably depends on individual taste, but there is no doubt the Ring, as a whole, is the most ambitious thing he ever did and the one where he challenged himself most as a composer and librettist. Post-Ring Parsifal has its strengths, but I don't think it ever was or will be anyone's favourite Wagner opera, or argue it is artistically superior to the Ring. (Or for that matter Tristan and Isolde.) And none of this has anything to do with the stages of Richard Wagner's misdeeds; he was an antisemite through all of those operas, and really good at fleecing people. However, in his later years finally had the opportunity to actually stage and produce the Ring in his very own theatre the way he wanted to, which took considerable time and effort, and so it's not really surprising he only managed one more opera in his post Ring composer life when as a younger man he was capable of composing more, going in different directions with the earlier ones, etc.

(And what about Verdi? Way more sympathetic as a person than Wagner, who was his exact contemporary, but while Falstaff, like Parsifal for Wagner, is an impressive work, I would say Falstaff, like Parsifal for Wagner, is not his best.)

I mean, I could be wrong, and there is a direct correlation in the case of NG as Sandifer thinks. In which case, in retrospect Calliope doesn't just work as an inadvertent self accusation but as an eerie element of prophecy, in that the first of the two writers who kept Calliope prisoner, Erasmus Fry, dies forgotten, his attempt to republish an old novel of his (not a new one, note) being denied, and the second, Richard Madoc, first is punished with the curse of too many ideas to the point of insanity and then with complete emptiness.

[cahn]

Ah, I'm glad you read it and enjoyed it! <3 (Yeah, idek about The Graveyard Book either!)

Because it would be nice to believe that artistic creativity is at least a bit connected to one's ethics, but I think that is just as wrong as using artistic talent as an excuse for terrible behaviour. It may simply be that even had he never abused a single person, he would have done his best and most innovative works at this point - which doesn't mean the rest is rubbish, just that NO ONE keeps churning out those all the time.

This is a very good point, and I can certainly think of a lot of creators who have not had anything like this kind of darkness in their lives but who had a definite period of greatest creativity. (Now that you mention it, it actually reminds me a bit of reading Josephus and how he was insistent on how vice made you have a Bad Ending, even when the bad ending in question didn't... actually sound all that bad, or was just your typical "yeah, dying sucks no matter who you are.")

On the flip side, this is why I'm glad that she does acknowledge that Gaiman's works are in fact important and a substantial contribution, and that the terrible things he's done doesn't change that. And at the same time if the public perception of him changes with this new knowledge to be a "washed-up hack" -- well, maybe in this case that's fitting? (Though I wrote that sentence and then sat and side-eyed it for a while, because I've also definitely seen cases where I thought the harsh public eye on creators was too harsh. But this is... an extreme case.)

(I have actually not managed to watch Falstaff yet. I know there are people who do absolutely think it's the pinnacle of his work, though! But yeah, I keep starting it and am not able to get through it...)

In which case, in retrospect Calliope doesn't just work as an inadvertent self accusation but as an eerie element of prophecy, in that the first of the two writers who kept Calliope prisoner, Erasmus Fry, dies forgotten, his attempt to republish an old novel of his (not a new one, note) being denied, and the second, Richard Madoc, first is punished with the curse of too many ideas to the point of insanity and then with complete emptiness.

Wow. I mean, either way -- I wonder whether NG ever thinks about that.

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I liked this, thanks for posting it!

I did find Sandifer's stance on "catering to the audience" kind of puzzling. At several points, she contrasts a "deliberately alienating approach" against "the calculated populism that would eventually define Gaiman’s aesthetics. "For all that Gaiman got considerable mileage out of his big populist moves... much of what made Sandman work was the fact that Gaiman was also willing to go in more alienating and challenging directions."

I agree that Gaiman has (often, of late) rested on his laurels--- though like you and selenak, I adore the Graveyard Book--- but I wonder whether Sandifer sometimes confuses complacency with cashing in the earned rewards from earlier in the writing process. The audience was puzzled by the smith tinkering with bits of metal, they gasped with recognition as they saw the gun come together, and now what they want is for it to be fired--- because that's what the author taught them to want. If closing the loop is cynical "calculated populism", nearly all good writing is guilty of it.

[cahn]

Oh yay, glad you liked it!

Heh, as someone who has a markedly smaller tolerance for horror than Sandifer does, I sort of assumed that by "alienating and challenging" she meant at least partially "more overt and disturbing horror." I felt like some of the stuff she was most excited about -- "24 hours," for instance -- was stuff that I really honestly didn't like because it was right at the edge of what I could tolerate without putting it down and not coming back. But yeah, what you say perhaps makes more sense, and I think may be related to selenak's point above that artistic creativity shouldn't necessarily be taken as a sign of ethics in a sort of prosperity-gospel kind of way.

[(Anonymous)]

I got the sense that "alienating" meant something like "introduces new characters, especially of a sort the audience is not predisposed to sympathize with--- does not overtly abide by genre expectations--- does not give the audience something they were already looking for." My point is that at the beginning of an ambitious work, it's normal to do this. But at the end, the audience's expectations have been shaped by the work itself; the author inevitably moves from building new expectations and sympathies, to satisfying them.