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!!!!

[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.

[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.