1.
I know that there are folks who believe that Neil Gaiman has had just about enough praise for any one writer's lifetime. I'm also keenly aware that some of these women and men can become profoundly irritated if Mr Gaiman is acknowledged as a master of anything beyond the dark arts of sentimentality, self-promotion and social climbing
But I'll be taking the opposite tack in what I'll be writing below. I'm going to be suggesting that, especially where his comic book work on "The Sandman" is concerned, Mr Gaiman doesn't receive nearly enough recognition and respect.
What's more, I'm going to attempt to start to back up that contention by discussing what's probably the least competent script that Mr Gaiman ever wrote for an American publisher, namely that entitled "Sleep Of The Just" in The Sandman # 1.
I just add all of this as a gentle warning about what's to come. If you belong to either the camp of those who loathe the very ground that Mr Gaiman walks upon, or if you're from the "Neil-is-a-beneficent-aspect-of-the-Goddess" tendency, then what follows really won't be for you.
It's not that I'd make any claims for what I've written. I really wouldn't. It's just that I'd rather save you the exasperation that even the mildest acts of apostasy inevitably provoke amongst the sure and the confirmed.
2.
I doubt that there's ever been a writer of comic books whose work has developed as swiftly and prodigiously as Neil Gaiman's did in 1989. If the script for the first issue of "The Sandman", published in January of that year, bore every mark of the gifted but inexperienced amateur, that for August's "The Sound Of Her Wings", in "The Sandman" # 8, was solidly competent and highly promising. Shockingly, the very next month's "Tales In The Sand" was simply brilliant, its form and content so tightly and expertly woven together that the myth of Neil Gaiman the innately gifted writer could almost be said to have been born right there. For it's almost impossible to separate Mr Gaiman's authorial voice and the content of "Tales In The Sand"; the way the story is told is indivisible from the events it describes, and in many ways, that artifice actually is the story's content. So apparently effortless is the construction and progress of "Tales In The Sand" that it's as if Mr Gaiman had simply sat down and idly reeled off a yarn for us in between completing the more prosaic and demanding business of his day, such as the shopping and his tax returns. It seems to be a tale that's delivered straight from his imagination to the reader without any of that time-consuming effort and craft having been involved, because the story appears to be so seemless in its form that it's hard to imagine that it ever had to be made. And the presence of such a distinct and guileful voice in a DC/Vertigo book, in a sub-genre traditionally characterised by content far more than writerly strategy, helps feed the impression that Mr Gaiman had just popped into comic books for want of something to do before becoming a big wig elsewhere, that he'd just decided to invest a year or two in comics carving out the basis for a literary career before exiting for pastures far more Arcadian, worthy and lucrative.
As such, it's unsurprising but disappointing that Neil Gaiman should be so rarely mentioned as an influence by so many of today's creators of superhero mainstream titles. In many ways, it's as if he never pursued a career in comics at all where the be-costumed continuities which "The Sandman" initially drew upon are concerned. "The Sandman" seems now to be a thing apart, just as the likes of projects such as "Mr Punch" with Dave McKean always did. "Miracleman" was uncompleted and is long out-of-print, the likes of "Black Orchid" and "The Light Brigade" are minor and obscure works, and later dalliances with the superhero genre have been rather gentle and restrained exercises. Never has such a comic book author had such a ubiquitous degree of success while remaining, in so many vital ways, quite invisible. For such an incredibly popular and successful writer of monthly comic books, there's remarkably little sign that Neil Gaiman was ever here. There are learned books about the academic content of The Sandman, of course, and there's no denying the general level of respect which his peers hold for him. Yet where today's books by Marvel and DC are concerned, Gaiman-ness is quite off the radar. The influence of the likes of luminaries such as Moore and Milller, Lee and Broome, Eisner and Kirby can easily be traced and professionals are quick to recognise the clear if always misty-edged lines of succession. But Neil Gaiman seems somehow to have passed over into other areas of the culture, leaving little trace of his impact and example in the most popular of the publications from the comicbook publishers he so successfully worked with.
I find this process to be close to inexplicable. If nothing else, self-interest on the part of today's creators and fans would surely suggest that Mr Gaiman and The Sandman are well worth the paying of attention to. For Mr Gaiman and his collaborators created an entirely new character, and one clearly rooted in part in DC Comic's continuity, which succeeded in reaching a massive audience far beyond that which most of his peers ever attained. Given how rare and lucrative that success was and remains, I'd have thought that "The Sandman" would be studied and the techniques used in its creation adapted if not emulated with the fiercest of passions. To temporarily put aside the artistic value of his work, if we may, and just accentuate the point being established here; Neil Gaiman created something new and sold it not just to the folks in the comic book stores, but to those who'd never, and who'd still never, think of placing a monthly order with the local floppies'n'action-figures store. On the printed page, the Sandman is a character which can walk every bit as comfortably with the JLA and the JSA as he can with Orpheus and Loki, while in the world of merchandising, he can shift high-value product in landfill proportions while inspiring the most learned of responses from far beyond the thrilling and carping of the comicbook press.
The likes of Norman Mailer and Stephen King thought that The Sandman was the knees of the bees. It defied the dismissive preconceptions attached to heroic-narrative monthly comic books and opened a door to the tastemakers of the cultural elites which has as yet rarely if ever been passed through since by Marvel and DC. Far, far more importantly, so too did it win the loyalty of market-swamping numbers of women long alienated by the be-muscled product of the not-so Big Two. "The Sandman" was a book which rose above the creative and commercial limitations of both its medium and the genres it drew upon. In doing so, it serves, or at least it surely should do, as the Holy Grail of post-Watchman mainstream publishing for Marvel and DC. It was and it was not a monthly comic-book, it was and it was not a traditionally enticing product, it was and was not a product that appealed just to hard-core fans.
Even if creators and publishers were thinking of nothing more than the possibility of making a great deal of money indeed, I would have imagined that Neil Gaiman's work on The Sandman would be being constantly studied, adapted, and, in the best and worst of ways, nakedly stolen from.
But more dispiriting than merely seeing relatively little acknowledgement of Mr Gaiman's achievements, I can perceive hardly anything of his influence beyond of a bare few of today's Vertigo titles. Neither the details of his craft or the literary sensibility which he brought to bear can be easily recognised in the products of the immersive cape'n'chest-insignia universes, and given how successfully both have been tried and tested in the marketplace, that's surely a ridiculous, and somewhat shameful, business.
It's as if we've all bought into the myth that "The Sandman" was somehow all about the business of being Neil Gaiman, as if he created his work from whole cloth and never had to master - really master - the skills of his craft, as if no-one else could learn from his approach and benefit from his example because they could never actually be Neil Gaiman himself. And yet, the varying quality of the scripts for much of that first year of "The Sandman" is evidence of how very hard he had to work at making the title the success it over time became, and they show that whatever Mr Gaiman's innate qualities were, they had to be savagely polished until he could earn the success he was to achieve. And in noting what was rejected and what was refined in the process of Neil Gaiman becoming Neil Gaiman, it is still possible to grasp something of what he learned, and of what we might glimmer from that experience.
3.
There's a debilitating absence of character and conflict at the heart of "Sleep Of The Just" from that very first series-launching issue of The Sandman. In truth, it's hard to understand why Mr Gaiman wasn't asked to rework the story yet one more time, despite his having worked on the script for six long months already, because its flaws are so evident that a compassionate word and a touch of extra time and guidance was surely what was required. And yet, given that folks often learn far more from their public failings than from private advice, I suspect that the structural weaknesses of the very first issue of The Sandman were in themselves a vital part of Mr Gaiman's learning process.
The plot of the issue is, in essence, laudably simple and straight-forward. In 1916, the Crowley-esque Roderick Burgess sets out to trap Death in order to become as impossibly powerful as any one-dimensional evil magician might want to be. Instead of Death, he succeeds in capturing her brother immortal, Dream, who, refusing to cooperate with either Burgess or his son as the decades pass, remains imprisoned and helpless beneath an English country house. Finally, carelessness on the part of the younger Burgess's associates allow Dream to escape, whereupon he wrecks standard-issue horror-comic disasters upon his captors before beginning the process of regathering his former power. It's apparently an elegantly taut and focused scenario, and its easy to see why it was accepted at face value by the editorial office at Vertigo.
But The Sandman himself barely appears in the book until its climax, meaning that the story needs to be carried by other characters. Yet neither Roderick nor Alex Burgess are given either enough panel time or sufficient character to allow them to drive the narrative forward. Indeed, they're so thinly and uninterestingly drawn as individuals that they can't even provide the reader with anything of even the slightest interest, which poses a serious problem for a story which travels some 26 pages before the Sandman himself takes an active part in events. Roderick Burgess is truly nothing more than just another Crowley clone, and Mr Gaiman even has him refer to his desire to be respected by "Aleister and his friends";
"They will make no more jokes ... when death is at my command ... "
A stereotypically evil magician powered by low self-esteem and ego-mania. It's simply not an interesting brew in any way at all, and Roderick's character is never truly developed beyond that point. His lust in middle-age for power is briefly replaced, it should be noted, by a measure of frustration just before his death, a bitter regret that he's failed to bend the Sandman to his will. But then, he might as well be shown chewing the carpet, or displaying any other behaviour that always passes as a marker for a very bad person, because that's all we're really being told about him. There's nothing particularly human about Roderick Burgess the cutout malevolent sorceror, and so he's as dull an antagonist as he might be, and in the absence of the tale's protagonist until late on in the story, events unspool without any informing human relations at their heart to inform them, to make them matter. Things happen, but they don't count. Plot points are counted off with some measure of efficiency, but it's tremedously hard to care that they're doing so.
Of Roderick's son Alex there are faint glimmers of a more interesting nature, but that's in no way to suggest that the next generation of Burgess's succeeds in making the leap from one to two dimensions where the matter of personality is concerned. There's the suggestion of a gay and loving relationship between Alex and one Paul McGuire, who eventually assumes more and more power where the affairs of the narrative are concerned, but the reader notes the passing and slight details of these characters not because they're well and touchingly evoked, but because that's all there is to note in the flattest of stories. Alex remains, as his father was, a bad guy, although, because he's far less of a cape-swirler of a villain than his daddy, he projects even less wattage into the tale than Roderick did. After all, it's better to shamelessly chew the scenery than it is to be barely discernible on stage at all, unless such a lack of flash and surface is the point of the tale being told. In what's so obviously a homage to several sub-genres of horror story, such a lack of glee and spark is, again, utterly counterproductive. Alex doesn't even seem to have his father's bitterness and extreme callousness to motivate him. As a comment on how the occult has passed from the theatrical and esoteric into the comfortable mainstream of "alternative" thinking and commercialism, the transmission of power from father to son, and then to son's lover, is potentially of intellectual interest. As a story, "Sleep Of The Just" is in truth unforgivably dull and uninvolving.
4.
If the pity that might be inspired by the Sandman's plight was in any way intended to fill the gap in "Sleep Of The Just" created by the absence of any convincing and compelling character and conflict, then sadly the design was misconceived. We're never worried for The Sandman because we know nothing of him and little of the privations enforced by his capture. The Lord Of Dream's suffering is never convincingly transmitted to us, his stoical patience creating a sense of a creature above Earthly machinations while, regrettably, failing to inspire our empathy beyond a sense that nobody ought to locked up for that long, no matter how uninteresting they are. Even Mr Kieth's art fails to trigger our empathy, for what he presents us with is a calm, grown man dressed not unlike a Goth practising his noble-suffering face. With no previous experience of the character, the reader has nothing to draw upon to engage with The Sandman's entrapment, and since we can't care for the Burgess's and their stupid plan either, we're isolated from caring for either victim or perpetrator. They're beneath our interest, and he's beyond it.
When finally the Sandman does succeed in taking control of events, two further factors stand in the way of the reader caring. The first is that his as-yet ill-defined power is indistinguishable from that wielded by many of the characters in the DC horror comics of the Sixties and Seventies, which of course the book is in part riffing off of; is this really how a fearsome immortal deals with his pathetically human persecutors? Similarly, the fate of the tale's villains is so close to that of characters brought low in EC chillers, and in the endless titles which followed in that tradition's wake, that it's hard to work out how the slow historically-informed procession of "Sleep Of The Just" ended up with the likes of cackling heads falling off of nurse's shoulders.Such regressive comic-book "terrors" can either work as pastiche or even homage in the right setting, but here it's impossible to tell how such over-familiar fare is to be read. The reader couldn't care less about the villains, knows nothing about the titular protagonist, and the final battle is an entirely predictable, utterly cliched and totally one-sided affair. And so a book that lacked conflict ends in a climax that's entirely without threat. The Sandman was caught, he was patient, he escaped, he hurt his captors, they suffered, and he went home.
No conflict, no character, no innovation, no surprise. It is a desperately mediocre, and often quite incompetent comic book. Had Mr Gaiman abandoned comics at this point for a life on the open seas or a career hunting down legendary animals on the Mongolian steppes, few on this evidence would twenty years later be bemoaning the loss of a great comic book talent. In truth, I don't think anyone beyond his own and a few die-hard comics fan would even have noticed his absence.
Yet, whatever the many failings of the story itself, what distinguishes it is ironically the very creative decisions which hamstring it. For it's absolutely obvious that Mr Gaiman had excellent, if misjudged, reasons for the decisions he made. In "Sleep Of The Just", there is, buried underneath what today's market might very well have judged to be a series-killing opening episode, the evidence that Mr Gaiman was focused upon the form of his work every bit as much as he was upon its content, and that in doing so, he was with an absolute determination developing towards becoming something far more substantial than a competent writer of "mature readers" content.
To be continued;
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