The Kindly Ones

My contribution to the London Graphic Novel Network discussion, which is well worth reading in its entirety. As ever, my thanks to Joel for the marvellous job he does organising and steering these conversations.

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OK so there are two things I like about The Kindly Ones, and both of them are about Gaiman beating himself up over what he has written.

The first thing is a short scene between Dream and Odin in the middle of the book, and apologies but I do want to put in a quote here:

"You puzzle me, dream-weaver. Are you a spider, who's spun a web of cunning and deceit and now waits patiently for his prey to come to him; or are you a deer, frozen by the light of a hunter's flame, as disaster comes towards you?
You're a deep one. But how deep? What's illusion? That's the question...
I am disappointed, somehow. I expected more from you, dream-weaver."

From the very beginning of these discussions of the series, I've gone on at length about how the book appears to be more profound than it actually is (cf. the 'muddled uncertainty' Joel mentions above). There is the ~sensation~ of profundity, without the content. He's a deep one, maybe. But how deep? Is it just an illusion? Shouldn't we have expected more from him? Isn't there a lingering sense of disappointment?

I take the scene to be a coded mea culpa from Gaiman, not only an admission that he has lost control of the sprawling plot strands in the series (which is what in context the quote above is about), but actually about what the book might mean as a result of that loss of control as well. As Loz's note about The Kindly Ones being longer than originally envisioned suggests, there is a sense that the series as a whole is being made up as Gaiman goes along – he's freestying with a character who is on the page supposed to be brooding, rule-bound and responsible. I think The Kindly Ones is partly about Gaiman waking up to his responsibilities as a writer, and finding that's he's fallen short.

And this leads me on to the second bit of authorial self-harm in the book. The Sandman's imperious and cruel treatment of Lyta Hall at the end of The Doll's House comes back to bite him here. The origin story of the Furies in #62 suggest their revenge is partly motivated by a reaction against the predations of the patriarchy. It is significant that the Sandman is undone not only by Lyta, but by Nuala and Thessaly as well – all women he has patronised and/or ignored. Reading these bits in a meta direction is much harder – I suspect there may be some personal stuff for Gaiman wrapped up in them. But there is a more general sense in which Gaiman is becoming aware of his responsibility as a writer, and his power to ~shape dreams~. As Delirium points out to Dream: he can sway people's actions and feelings even without intending to. In having the Sandman die by female hands, Gaiman is partly trying to de-romanticise (perhaps de-eroticise?) his hero (and himself?)

Loz shot back at my pet theory that the end of the Sandman is supposed to democratise his ~dream-shaping~ powers by noting that suicide is different to exile. Dream does leave a replacement behind him, but Death's suggestion that he could have done what Destruction did to the same end perhaps makes the distinction less important than Loz makes out. I still cling on to the theory, taking comfort from the final scene of the Kindly Ones, where the Furies read out their fortune: "you can be me when I am gone". The Sandman's (and the author's) death leaves the space open for new authors shaping their own new stories. Perhaps they'll do a better job than Gaiman has done.

Dream Country

The latest edition of the London Graphic Novel Network's coverage of The Sandman is now up, and it may well be the best yet. Lots of people piling in on a range of questions, some of which are only tangentally related to Gaiman's work. As usual, I did my fair bit of arguing, a small bit of which is below. Worth reading through the whole thing though.

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Tend to agree with the Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare reservations, tho am disposed to be a bit kinder than Mazin on the question of whether Gaiman misses the point of Shakespeare. Seems to me Mazin is equating 'stories' with plots, when actually Gaiman may mean something a bit broader. The constituent parts of 'stories' could include plot, character, themes, language, and maybe other things as well. If anything, Gaiman's error is to ascribe a certain archetypal content and mythological force to the plays - which isn't what makes them distinctive in my view. Instead, I would flip Mazin's top two Shakespeare talents and suggest he is most innovative when it comes to character - particularly creating personalities that are open to an almost limitless variety of interpretation. His felicity w/ language is a key part of that, but I think there is a reason why he is remembered as a playwright, rather than a poet, first.

Shakespeare's competing loyalties to creativity and family strike me as less of an insight into the historical Shakespeare and more as an insight into Gaiman himself. My sense is that while Gaiman is a prodigious story-generating machine, there is always a kind of detachment to his writing - his characters are often quite flat, manipulated into the paths he sets out for them rather than having the vitality to knock the author off-track (e.g. as Falstaff did Shakespeare). I would go so far as to presume that Gaiman sometimes would find the ephemeral amalgamations of past stories he rattles off so easily ~more~ interesting (or maybe less threatening) than real people. That sounds mean, but actually I think it's a brave thing to admit, and is a tendency we're all capable of.

Dream sums up the point of the Shakespeare issue as follows: "things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot". This sound like bullshit, except the "dust and ashes" gloss on "facts" suggests he is talking about the way stories outlive people, rather than nature or the universe. Fair enough, but then we get to Facade: "mythologies take longer to die than people believe. They linger on in a kind of dream country that affects all of you". The sun turns out to be a mask hiding the stories which structure our sense of the world. The protagonist's apotheosis is triggered by the surfacing of those 'shadow-truths' behind the world of empirically-determined facts. Is Dream's country becoming Plato's realm of the forms - the hidden structure behind our changable world? Is Gaiman granting myths a kind of metaphysical power over our lives? Or is it just an internal, psychological switch in perspective that somehow physiologically unlocks the ability to commit suicide. I am more comfortable with the latter reading, tho neither is particularly satisfying. Gaiman is always more comfortable dwelling on the awesome power stories have over us, rather than why we tell them or what they might be for.

The Doll's House

The London Graphic Novel Network is going from strength to strength, the discussion on the second Sandman book is now up here. As before, I've pinched my bits to put below, but you should read the whole thing for a clearer view of the back and forth:

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Hob's conclusion that people don't change is (in context) about his own inability to tire of life, and by extension the fixity of an individual's character. The repetition of the overheard bar-room conversations at the end of the issue widens this conclusion - human beings haven't changed in the last 500 years. Sidebar: true enough, in that for the past 3,000 years of recorded human history the species manifestly hasn't changed - evolution works on much longer time-frames. Roman emperors and medieval peasants are just as smart (and stupid) as we are.

This same point is made more overtly at the end of Cages – a comic by Dave McKean (frequent Gaiman collaborator and responsible for Sandman's amazing covers). In that book, McKean suggests that as you grow older and experiences pile up, the patterns of life become more apparent (as above: people don't change, so as they become more familiar their capacity to surprise you is reduced). That realisation (and the completion of their life project) is what lead McKean's characters to accept death with equanimity.

Gaiman's treatment of this idea is less pointy and more suggestive – the concluding note of Hob's story is the rather corny one that friendship is what makes life worth living. But on the whole I think it's a more satisfying issue than 'The Sound of Her Wings'. Which may be another way of saying that I understand its themes and agree with them.

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The beginnings of the Corinthian's speech suggest Gaiman's underlying reading of all the psychopathic behaviour he looks at through this (very long) issue. Serial killing in the US has become associated with stories of "gladiators", "swashbucklers" and "heroes" (the Bonnie & Clyde myth and its various permutations in film might be a good way of looking at this – Malick's Badlands perhaps most of all). The collectors kill out of hubris and an infatuation with themselves as the "maltreated heroes" of their own stories. Barry strips this away and reveals how unheroic ("how LITTLE") they are – the implication being that without these myths to sustain them, the collectors' urges will be hollowed out and they will finally (privately) face the implications of their actions. How sophisticated this reading is, I'll leave up to you, but the dots do sort of connect.

Dream's intentions regarding the Corinthian are far harder to join up. Ostensibly, this masterpiece nightmare is supposed to "be the darkness and the fear of darkness", a reflection of what humanity "will not confront". Instead of this, he has been "something else for people to be scared of", and has "told them that there are bad people out there, and they've known that all along". Now: the gaps between these two outcomes are pretty difficult to parse. If anything, the Corinthian hasn't failed in being scary, it is rather that people have been better able to confront "the darkness" than Dream had expected. And In fairness, Dream admits that he is the one to blame for the Corinthian's flaws – an admission that feels less magnanimous the more one thinks about it.

Preludes & Nocturnes

For the past two weeks I've been participating in a email discussion on the first Sandman book. The entire thing is now up on the London Graphic Novel Network. With the kind permission of Joel, who is organising the venture, I'm posting some of my contributions below. A good deal of very smart stuff has been said during the debate, so if you're interested in the series, you should really go and read the whole thing. If you like an argument and want to join the fray, send an email to the address at the top right.

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I like the first volume a great deal, quite a lot more than most of the series, actually. Joel described the books as not being about hard, important real issues, but as soft and beguiling. "Beguiling" is a very apt descriptor, I think, particularly in its negative sense of "to deceive", because a prevailing impression I've had of the series is that it appears to be more than it actually is. Sandman creates the sensation of being profound (something the horribly fawning introductions to the trades encourage further), but I personally find it quite difficult to interrogate. Gaiman is certainly aware that myths and stories are metaphors we use to understand the real hard stuff (as it were), but he often gets lost in them to the point where the allusions fail to add up to a coherent point. He seems to exercise remarkably little control over his writing (the first issue is 40 pages long, almost twice the size of a regular issue). It came as no surprise to me when it was revealed (I think in the published script for 'Calliope') that he had no idea how to end The Doll's House when he started writing it. Sometimes it works (The Doll's House is for my money the best volume of the series), but often it goes horribly wrong (e.g. A Game of You).

So what I like about the first volume is that it is the least "beguiling" of the lot, in that it is the least deceptive and the most rooted in pulp and genre. "Pretentious" is an unfortunately overused word that can scare people from engaging with something that is difficult and worthwhile, but I have no fear in describing The Sandman to be in many parts pretentious properly so called – pretending to offer value it doesn't actually possess. Preludes' great virtue is that it doesn't pretend to be more than it is – it's actually a very good horror comic, possibly containing the most chilling story Gaiman has ever told (Sleep of the Just contains a small but telling nod to Stephen King, and I suspect the diner sequence bears some of his influence). It is also, I think, ably illustrated. I'm always surprised when Sam Kieth gets a drubbing in discussions of The Sandman. I've just reread the first two issues and I think his layouts are striking and the way he embellishes the page is very impressive. Art is always an eye of the beholder deal, but I find his rubbery and caricatured figures really lovely (Kieth has gone on to write and draw his own comics – check out Zero Girl and particularly My Inner Bimbo, which is fantastic). Kieth is certainly let down quite a bit by the colouring, which was terrible even for the standards of the time. The biggest revolution comics have undergone in recent years is digital colouring, and I think the new Sandman trades have had their colours "updated", which will hopefully make the artwork clearer. People may also disparage Kieth's Sandman because he never cracked the character's look in the way Dringenberg did when he took over on pencils, but I definitely think it has its charms, particularly the face Morpheus pulls when he sees his phallic castle in ruins.

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The most striking part of 'The Sound of her Wings' is Dream's claim to be far more terrible than Death. In his words, death is a gift – but what is the nature of that gift? The poem Dream recites suggests it has something to do with providing an end to suffering (sickness, war, captivity, uncertainty – in order of obviousness). And the anamorphic personification of Death takes the recently deceased almost literally under her wing. She isn't just Dream's big sister, in a way she is everyone's big sister – a kind of universal guardian angel with invisible wings. Her "function" is to provide comfort to the dying. The thing is, death (small d) isn't always so benign – the example of the comedian showcases death as robbing people of their opportunity to become subjects, and the cot-death showcases the devastation caused by bereavement. It is difficult to interpret either of these things as any kind of 'gift'. Dream's reading of Death's function isn't therefore very satisfying. Is Gaiman purposefully muddying the waters, or is he just confused? Something doesn't cohere.

Dream also has "responsibilities" – he, again almost literally, finds his own wings at the end of the issue (but are they made of sand??). What these responsibilities are is left unclear, and I'm not sure if it's ever conclusively answered (if you have a theory, do let me know!). Whatever they are, they contrast with the purpose that Dream has been pursuing in the previous seven issues. Vengeance has left him feeling "empty", but this new purpose promises a real and lasting fulfillment. If it's anything like Death's, it must involve providing some sort of comfort to people facing the pain and uncertainty of human existence. But as we find out, an inherent aspect of Dream's 'job' is to author nightmares, which sort of do the opposite. Again, there is ambiguity as to what the point of these Endless really is. Is that intentional on Gaiman's part, or is he unsure of what they are really about as well? Do they stand apart like indifferent gods? If so, what "responsibilities" do they have that bind them to somehow serve humanity or the universe?

Personally, I suspect that Gaiman is so steeped in myths and fairy tales that he can quite easily riff on them, raconteur-like, and go with what sounds or feels right, without overly worrying about consistency. If Sandman has a point, it is an attempt to valorize that very particular gift, and I think it develops into an exhortation to the reader to unleash their own story-telling powers, since The Sandman's (and the author's) are so limited. I think this confession lies at the heart of The Kindly Ones, and it's what redeems the series in my eyes, but we'll get to that when we get to that.

Does Gaiman provide a reason as to why caps-lock bold-type 'story' (to borrow Mazin's phrase) is such an integral part of withstanding the pain of existence? Does the argument stand up? Perhaps Gaiman prefers to step back and let the medium be the message. And because Gaiman's off-the-cuff stories lack that weight, perhaps that's why I remain unconvinced.

Solanin

Slice of life stuff about what happens after university and before you settle into the rest of your life. In the afterword, Inio Asano talks about her belief that "the most important messages in our lives don't come from musicians on stage or stars on television. They come from the average people all around you". Doesn't include comic book writers in that list, I notice. But then, she (or maybe a he now) wants to draw manga that is "true" to herself. Is art just about representing the lived-in experiences of the circle around you? Is the best art reducible to autobiography? To be fair, some of my favourite comics (Maus, Blankets, Fun Home) certainly fit that description...

Reading through Sandman at the moment for an upcoming thing I'm involved in – originally a kind of hate-reading since I didn't much like the series, but now I'm getting into it – and Neil Gaiman believes something very different. He is a fantasy / horror writer after all, so it's expected that he would want to go on about the "truths" buried in the myths and stories that structure our lives. So far I don't think he's all that successful at it (blood-sworn allegiance to Pratchett, Whedon, Wolfe, rep to the death etc.) But the point stands.

Did Asano go through the bereavement her protagonist Meiko goes through in the book? I don't know, but if not, then that injection of fiction (of myth-making) is an untruth that serves to reveal truths about the characters. A device maybe, a narrative trick (and not a hugely innovative one – imagine Sandman will do something similar at the end). But Naruo is the carrier of a set of attitudes that spreads enlightenment across the rest of the dramatis personae. A fictional tragic hero as much as (if not more than) a real person.

I quite liked the fact that this ideal boyfriend is stuffed in the refrigerator in order to provide the girlfriend with motivation for her subsequent music-making activities. The problem is that the dude is by no means the wise and noble truth-speaker the book sets him up to be. I shouldn't need to point this out, but disappearing for five days without telling the girlfriend you live with (and who pays your rent!) is a textbook example of a dickish move. Also, there's very little trace of irony in the scene where Meiko's mother basically hands responsibility for the care of her daughter to her boyfriend (patriarchal assumptions and contracts alive and well, I see!)

Sounds like I'm hating on this quite a bit. I actually found it quite affecting, particularly as I am in exactly the same age and situation as the characters, and it IS true to life, it DOES have an important message. I liked the way the book was set out, with friendships drifting across and apart, as if everyone was in their own boat trying to float the same way. I even liked the earnest crappy poetry of the conversations and monologues, which aims at some deep and meaningful self-awareness but often comes across confused and ridiculous. Because there IS a truth to that as well. Those emotions and sensations are very effectively evoked. I've spent a bit of time in Tokyo, and I recognise the places and people in Asano's pages.

A note on the craft: I've read quite a lot of anglophone comics, but I'm not a veteran manga reader, so it was interesting for me to see the differences in the way the page was used. For example, the fact that each chapter was only ~12 pages long (rather than 22) and had an average of 4 panels a page (rather than 6). But it's almost all in B&W, which I guess makes it easier to churn out on a weekly basis. It's also really common for scenes to end in the middle of the page: probably designed to keep you reading, but also a great way to loosen up the transitions and have text run over to the next scene (very awkward when comics do that over the page). In several chapters in Solanin, a dramatic episode unfolds alongside a comic one, before being united at the end – a very satisfying balancing act. Finally, the book often enlarges captions to panel size, white on black. Still rare in comics (although apparently Si Spurrier is fond of doing this as well). Momentary blinks, pauses for thought, or a way to highlight thoughts of particular significance. In one scene, these black panels alternate with panels of the protagonist lying in bed trying to explain how she feels to her friend. Speech bubbles run into the captions, and it's like she can say only a fraction of the things going through her mind. It's a brilliant way to use the language of comics, and it's true as well.

Batman R.I.P.

Morrison is so consistently excellent, you end up focusing on the small number of storytelling beats he fumbles. Here, the conversation with Jezebel in the Batcave, and some of Doctor Hurt's speeches, are less sublime, more ridiculous. The pulp needs to touch base with reality SOMEWHERE, Grant. In general, the two villains weren't all that interesting, perhaps because I haven't read the series as a whole. (Le Bossu, on the other hand, was magnificent.)

But this is me quibbling at the margins. Yet another sumptuous performance, hitting that nerve of unrelenting tenacity in Batman's character much better than Gaiman did. The confidence in the storytelling, particularly in the later issues, is a marvel. Morrison is almost better at the lightning fast, hypercompressed scenes, distilling the essentials before zooming on to the next page. He trusts his audience to keep up. And our trust is rewarded.

Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?

After the Morrison madness, it would have been especially difficult for Gaiman to shine. Like a lot of his stories, it's a bit... nice, in that unthreatening, vapid, Gaiman way. Not without merit, however. It's a gem of an idea, cute but poignant. And it does get at something essential about Batman -- his delusional obsession with this ridiculous crime-fighting business. It's all a lie, but not if you believe it. And that unbreakable will that never gives up on a problem. The man's crazy, he can't stop, he'll die in battle.

And be reborn, inevitably. The ending was a very rich cheese even by Gaiman's standards. But if the niceness is a bit sickly, it's still niceness. You can't hate him for it...