THE GAIMAN CONTROVERSY

 I've recently finished listening to the six-part "Master" podcast series from the British news outlet Tortoise, which collated interviews from five women, all claiming that they had been sexually assaulted in differing ways by famed comics-author Neil Gaiman.                           

First, though there have been many public "he said she said" allegations that lacked corroborative evidence-- not least the 2018 accusations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey-Ford and her copycats-- I must admit that the Tortoise reporters generally seem to play fair. They present both evidence that supports and evidence that does not support the allegations of the five women. That doesn't mean that Tortoise's conclusions are correct. But the journalists are not guilty of constructing a hit-piece.                                                                         

  All that said, of the five women who spoke with Tortoise, only two prove consequential. This Wikipedia article provides a summing-up of the testimonies. Two of them report their getting nonconsensually kissed or groped by Gaiman, while the third, a tenant on land owned by Gaiman and his then-wife, alleges that Gaiman required sexual favors in exchange for her tenancy. But these three don't have nearly as much punch as the other two testimonies. One woman said that in 2003 she began a romantic relationship with Gaiman (he was about forty, she had just turned twenty), but she was distressed by an incident in which he initiated anal sex with her despite her stipulation that he should not do so. The other of the two, and the one who provided Tortoise with the original testimony, alleged that she became a nanny for Gaiman's young child in 2022 at Gaiman's house in New Zealand. Gaiman, then a little over sixty, encouraged the woman to take a bath to relax. The nanny says that Gaiman then inserted himself into said bath and fingered her. This woman did not state that she refused his attentions, however. And I believe the last two are the only ones who reported that during their experiences with Gaiman, he required that each woman call him "Master"-- hence the name of the Tortoise podcast.                       

   Gaiman insists in a recent response that even though he wasn't always as "caring" as he should have been in his relationships, everything that transpired was consensual. This may be a rationalization, but as one of the podcasts explains, under British law at least, consent does not protect the accused from the law if the law determines that the accused has wrought harm. Yet some of the testimonies don't support the allegation that the rough sex was non-consensual, and thus the New Zealand police, after the nanny filed a change of sexual assault against Gaiman, declined to charge the author precisely because the nanny's own texts and recorded phone calls suggested that she had consented.                                                                                                                                                                                       As a reader who only spoke briefly with Neil Gaiman once, I have no idea of the true nature of his character. The testimonies certainly indicate that he likes rough sex and rough talk in his relationships, which for some might seem a one-eighty away from the affable, literate persona Gaiman adopts in public. At the same time, I think it's important to note that all the faux-horror generated by the use of the term "master" does not indicate Gaiman's devotion to the principles of a full-time sadist like the Marquise de Sade. I think Tortoise did slant their reportage somewhat to reflect a horror of whips and chains, much as Frederic Wertham did when he accused comic books of turning all juvenile readers into budding young sadists. In one podcast, Tortoise raises the topic of BDSM, but only to make an invidious comparison: regular practitioners of BDSM have "safe words" and even contracts, and Tortoise comments that Gaiman had no such restrictions. But none of the testimonies allege anything about rituals of dominance and submission except that of the New Zealand nanny, who said that in the past she had indulged in "light BDSM." But none of the five women testify to being whipped or placed in bondage. So the only connotation of "master" is one of playing a humiliation-game: "I have power and you don't," "You need me more than I need you." Maybe Gaiman, reacting against the nice-guy persona he projects as a celebrity, enjoys acting like a jerk in private. But at present I'm not seeing that anything Gaiman had been alleged to have done rises to the level of criminality. However, he probably will suffer some economic penalties for these accusations, and for once I can't entirely say that's a morally wrong response. This situation isn't comparable to the cowardly vilification-in-advance of Kevin Spacey, where he was denied employment years before he met his accusers in court, and their testimonies were shot down. I think Gaiman's too important an artist to suffer total cancellation for being a horndog-- but I could be wrong on that.                 

THE READING RHEUM: SNOW, GLASS, APPLES (2019)

I was about to write up SNOW, GLASS, APPLES, a collaboration between writer Neil Gaiman and artist Colleen Doran, as a major mythcomic. But then I learned that Gaiman first wrote "Snow" as a 1994 short prose story. That means it's not a work original to the comics medium. I made an exception for the Thomas-Smith "Song of Red Sonja" because the adapters took a prose story by Robert E Howard and not only tweaked the original narrative, they incorporated the tale into a more extensive narrative as well.

But though I've not read the original Gaiman prose story, I see no indications that SNOW is anything but a straight adaptation. So it can't be a mythcomic, though it's now going to be the first time I've labeled a review as "high-mythicity fiction" without its also being a "prose fiction review."

SNOW is a reversal of current culture's popular understanding of a famous folktale, starting from the proposition that the Queen with the magic mirror was entirely virtuous and the snow-white heroine is actually a monster. For that reason, I'm not going to do the usual plot breakdown, but instead, I'll focus upon the three symbols of Gaiman's title.

SNOW-- There is no character named Snow White in Gaiman, and all of the other characters are similarly nameless, to emphasize being totally defined by their roles in the story. In the original folktale, the whiteness of Snow White's skin seems to connote fundamental innocence, while the redness of her lips is there mostly as contrast. But in Gaiman the Snow White analogue, whom I will call The Princess, has snow-white skin because she's undead, and her red lips connote her dependence on drinking blood.

GLASS-- In the original story, the magic mirror of the nameless evil queen is an "all-seeing-eye" through which she ascertains herself to be the fairest in the land. Glass is thus the medium through which an older female seeks to remain her position as the Foremost Beauty, and through which she seeks to eliminate all rivals. There's no Oedipal struggle between a younger and older female in the best known versions of the folktale. But Gaiman includes one, in which the undead Princess not only causes the death of her mortal father, but also co-opts the Prince whom the Virtuous Queen prizes, causing the Prince to betray the Queen. Whereas the magic mirror of the folktale causes that queen to obsess about her supremacy, the mirrors commanded by the Queen give her only minimal aid, and cannot prevent her doom by her nemesis. Indeed, the Princess proves that even in death she has a superior command of the Power of Glass, since it's through her transparent coffin that she beguiles the liberating influence of the Prince.

APPLES-- In the folktale, the apple is not a fruit that fosters life, but an agent of death, possibly with some distant inspiration from the fatal fruit from the Garden of Eden. But in the early sections of the story, the Queen offers a dried apple to the Princess before the Queen knows what she is, and the Princess' choice of another red substance establishes her monstrosity. Later, The Queen does deceive the Princess into taking the fatal bite, but because the monster is undead, her immortal beauty allows her to survive. The Queen then meets a fate usually doled out to a certain barnyard animal when served up on a platter-- though in Gaiman's description, the whole "roast beast" is stuffed with dried apples, not just one in the mouth.

Colleen Doran has a follow-up text piece in which she discusses her influences and the intensive work behind the adaptation. As far as I can tell, SNOW seems to be her magnum opus. I don't envy her trying to top it.

THE READING RHEUM: STARDUST (1999)

 

The short review: STARDUST is more like "moonshine," in the sense of its lack of substance.

I don't think I have a problem with a creator of genius simply tackling less ambitious projects. That's the nature of creativity: one is drawn to this or that endeavor by some internal muse, and there's no gainsaying that imperative.

That said, even in 1999 STARDUST feels like a very minor effort, particularly when it's compared to the section of BOOKS OF MAGIC that Gaiman completed. partly in collaboration with STARDUST-illustrator Charles Vess, about eight years previous. Though the subtitle styles STARDUST a "romance," the novel is centered on its male protagonist, around whom various female presences revolve.

A prologue describes how the novel's hero Tristran Thorn is conceived by a unison between his mortal father Dunstan and his faerie mother Una. This is possible because Wall, the English village Dunstan occupies, is separated by a literal brick wall from the dominions of Faerieland, which are represented by a loose association of entities. Some of these beings are almost indistinguishable from mortal people, like the royal family of Stormhold, while others include more overt fantasy-figures like witches and unicorns.

Tristran grows up in Wall, having no knowledge of his Faerie parentage, and falls in love with Victoria, a mortal girl. He pledges to undertake all manner of tasks to please his lady love, and when the two of them witness the falling of a star from the heavens, Victoria playfully suggests that he bring her the star. But to do that, Tristran must venture into the lands of Faerieland. And among the many magical entities he meets is "the star" herself in human form, eventually given the name Yvain. Additionally, there's a witch who wants to eat Yvain's heart to gain immortality, while the sons of the Stormhold kingdom are set a task that will end with one of them gaining their late father's throne, and this task too loosely coheres with finding the star.

All of these are perfectly respectable fantasy-tropes-- a cannibal witch, rival brothers seeking to complete a task, a love affair between a mortal male and a supernatural female. But STARDUST never escapes a mannered quality that may be Gaiman's worst creative failing. 

Some complaints are minor. Gaiman burns up a lot of space describing how Yvain, once she became a living yet immortal woman, broke her leg falling from the sky. Okay, but if you're going to go with that idea, why just her leg? Why didn't she break her neck or back? Because Gaiman had to keep Tristran's destined real romantic partner alive, of course, but the constant reminder of the broken leg serves no actual purpose in the narrative.

The major problem is that the romantic byplay between Tristran and Yvaine seems tepid rather than intriguing. Though Tristran had nothing to do with Yvaine's fall, she constantly rags on him, just for having come to capture her, when he didn't even have any way of knowing she would be a sentient creature. The literary woods are full of acrimonious romances that turn out okay, but the acrimony needs to be rooted in some natural male-female conflict. 

Moreover, Tristran only has one or two moments where he distinguishes himself with some act of wit in order to escape trouble. Most of the time, various magical donors show up to solve problems for Tristran and his stellar companion-- so many that Tristran never assumes any stature of his own. Further, the subplot with the royal brothers never ties into the main plot in any meaningful way, and the threat of the cannibal witch simply peters out at the end.

Despite an adult level of sexuality and violence in a few scenes, STARDUST feels like it should have been written more like a modern upbeat fairy tale, in which the good people suffer a little at first but end up having an uncomplicated happy ending. As for Vess, his art is technically proficient but he's illustrating a fantasy without much depth, and that undermines the potential mythopoesis.

MYTHCOMICS: THE SANDMAN OVERTURE (2015)

 

Some million years ago, I wrote some essay for THE COMICS JOURNAL which included observations on the conflict between what I then called "altruism vs. selfhood." I'm reminded of that sense of conflict-- the need for community with others versus the need for a conviction of one's own stand-alone importance-- as I read SANDMAN OVERTURE for the first time. This work by SANDMAN creator Neil Gaiman and PROMETHEA artist J.H. Williams III was originally published in six continuing issues in 2015, but I first encountered in a huge, coffee-table reprint replete with essays about all of the creators (even celebrated SANDMAN letterer Todd Klein) and with a supplementary reprint of the six issues' art sans coloring, the better to show off Williams' consummate sense of design.

OVERTURE is in one sense a "continuity catch-up" work, in which an author returns to an earlier concept and reveals things he either left out or hadn't thought of earlier, not unlike H. Rider Haggard's WISDOM'S DAUGHTER, a quasi-revision of SHE. In 1989 Neil Gaiman began the saga of his main character Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming, by showing him weakened by some undisclosed conflict, so that he was captured by a mere human sorcerer. This imprisonment was principally a device by which Gaiman could allow the reader to learn about Morpheus' world once he broke free of his confinement, sought to regain control of his dream-dimension once more, and became acquainted with all the ways his world and others had changed in his absence. The reader thus also was painlessly introduced to the other members of Morpheus' family, who were also incarnations of cosmic principles-- such as Desire and Destiny, who alone play crucial support roles in OVERTURE. 

Within his dream-dimension, Morpheus is supreme, but he is inevitably tied to the community of mortal beings-- both Earth-humans and all other species who dream. This makes for a dichotomy that's less one of "selfhood vs. altruism" that of "solipsism vs. universalism." Morpheus is always conscious of his connectedness to the rest of the cosmos, and yet his persona is aloof and haughty, as of one who's seen it all. OVERTURE gives Gaiman the chance not simply to tie up some loose ends from the original SANDMAN series, but to examine the dichotomy at the heart of his best-known character.

Also, btw: end-of-story SPOILERS.

Very little of Earth, even DC-Earth, is seen in OVERTURE. The original comic series established that Morpheus's sovereignty extended to the dream-worlds of other species, but this is without question The Sandman at his most "cosmic." The first page gives us an alien world inhabited by three species, one of whom is humanoid "who believed that their planet was alone in the universe" (which POV will seem like a form of naive solipsism by the time the epic's over). But it's not any of the humanoids who witness the Death of a Dream-Lord, but an intelligent plant.

We never meet any inhabitants of this planet again, but we see the impact of the death on Morpheus, for the death of the Dream-Lord-- an "aspect" of Morpheus' own identity-- instantly draws him from his familiar haunts to a convocation of a few dozen other Dream-Lords, all deeply concerned that one of their own has died. I actually don't recall the regular comic book giving us anything like this "multiversal Morpheus"-- seen at the center of the two-page spread wearing his finest Wesley Dodds helmet; I thought Morpheus himself just "morphed" into an alien Dream-Lord whenever he encountered an alien. But even at this point in the story it's a better use of multiversality than I got from the MCU series LOKI, so I can roll with it.

What follows is structured less like a whodunnit than a "Meetings with Remarkable Beings." After conferring with his other selves, Morpheus eventually finds his way to an entity called "Glory," possibly in some way related to God. Glory informs Morpheus that a star has gone mad, creating the chaos that not only destroyed the Dead Dream-Lord but also several inhabited worlds. Morpheus more or less tells Glory "that ain't my department," but Glory spurs him on in the quest by saying that the chaos is occurring "because a child lived and a world died, long ago." 

After the conversation with Glory, Morpheus is joined by one of his other Dream-selves, whom for the time being I'll call the Dream-Cat. Morpheus and Dream-Cat consult with the Kindly Ones, a version of the Greek Moirai. And then, as if to give the series just a little more grounding in common humanity, Morpheus and Dream-Cat pick up an orphan girl named Hope, whose cognomen is sort of a "call-forward" to one of Gaiman's first stories for the regular series, issue #4's "A Hope in Hell." 

Morpheus and Dream-Cat undertake other meetings-- with a city of sentient stars, and with both Time and Night, the respective father and mother of Morpheus, but they serve more to illustrate the cosmos in which the Sandman moves than anything else. In essence, Morpheus is no longer seeking to solve a mystery, for he knew as soon as Glory spoke of a "child spared" that he Morpheus was responsible for the chaos of the mad star. The madness was created by a woman on an alien world who, through no fault of her own, was born a "dream-vortex," a concept Gaiman had dealt with in a "later" story in A DOLL'S HOUSE. Morpheus sought out the unnamed woman long before she began to create any chaos, but he declined to act because, as his present-self says, "I thought myself too wise, too noble, too gentle, to murder."

This forbearance, then, is what costs Dream one of his dream-selves and lots of collateral damage to boot. Upon confronting the mad star Fomalhaut, the star subjects Morpheus to the ultimate solipsism, propelling him into a black hole, in which there is "no light, no information, no dreams." Morpheus is only "rescued," if one can call it that, by his conceptual brother Destiny, who pulls Morpheus from the black hole because Destiny's own garden has been invaded by a mysterious ship. Morpheus does not recognize the ship, but he acknowledges Destiny's intuition: that the ship belongs to him. Boarding the ship, Morpheus finds it inhabited by Dream-Cat, a ghost-like version of Hope, and a few thousand alien beings, whose purpose is to erase the chaos of Morpheus's mistake by "re-dreaming" the cosmos into a "new continuity." Morpheus succeeds in getting his "do-over," but he's so exhausted by his efforts that-- wait for it-- he's weak enough to be captured by a mere mortal sorcerer, thus setting the entire continuity of the original comic into motion. Then there's a coda, a little on the confusing side, revealing that "Dream-Cat" never existed, for "he" was Morpheus's sister, the aforementioned Desire, who assumed the masquerade because she knew that he was too self-absorbed to accept help except from a being who seemed to be another version of himself.

OVERTURE is a good metaphysical romp. Both writer and artist deliver a breadth of extraterrestrial manifestations that suggests the prose works of Olaf Stapleton, albeit one tied to a previously established continuity, as much as any other "DC crisis." I don't think a reader not acquainted with the SANDMAN mythology would get a lot out of OVERTURE, though.

A small personal digression: as I was reading the section in which the multiversal Dream-Lords confront Morpheus, for some reason I thought of the encounter between Superboy's dog Krypto and "the Space Canine Patrol Agents" from a few of the goofier issues of SUPERBOY in the sixties. There was no literal resemblance between the depictions of Dream's other selves and Krypto's encounter with other anthropomorphic superhero dogs, and yet, that's where my mind took me-- a little before reading the page in OVERTURE #3 in which Gaiman and William humorously depicts the SCPA as a viable entity. I suppose it's possible that I either saw the OVERTURE page if I flipped through the book-- though I don't think I did-- or that on some occasion I read about the SCPA's appearance in some online essay. Or maybe I just-- dreamed it all?

NEAR-MYTHS: THE ETERNALS (2006-07)

 

Prior to the original run of Jack Kirby's ETERNALS, there were a couple of attempts to revive the franchise. I read one and not the other, but have the impression that neither one particularly grabbed the Marvel audience. If anything, the EARTH-X appearance of the Celestials, the "space gods" of the series, might be the most mythic use of any element from Kirby's concept. Neither the eight Eternals who comprised Kirby's ensemble nor their devilish foes the Deviants really caught on in the Marvel universe, despite Roy Thomas having brought them into contact with Thor and other Marvel-cosmos deities.

Neil Gaiman, no stranger to mythic motifs himself, took his shot at finding a new approach to the wonky premise. Gaiman decides to attempt re-introducing the main characters by having them all subjected to the diaspora of memory loss, so that for many years they've become integrated with humans. Their more numerous foes the Deviants are still out there, and some of them are attempting to knock off the Eternals before they regroup. For once the Celestials, except for a particular one, are offstage during the conflict.

Ikaris, who was most often the focal hero during Kirby's run, is one of the first Eternals to begin reviving the others in his quasi-family. The battles between Eternals and Deviants are punctuated by appearances of a handful of Avengers, who don't have much to do except to spoof the "Civil War" tropes of the time. 

Gaiman has to take a lot of time both introducing the Eternals' current identities and re-establishing the quasi-mythic personas they held in quantity, and the result that the plot drags. Some of the characters are moderately interesting, but the size of the ensemble mitigates against developing any of them. Possibly Gaiman could have done more with the heroes and their opponents had he come back for an encore.

Yet toward the end, Gaiman and artist John Romita Jr do summon some of that old Kirby awe as Eternals and Avengers bear witness to the resurrection of the so-called "Dreaming Celestial," whom Kirby introduced toward the end of the original series. The Celestial's revival ends without a proper resolution, though I imagine some other Marvel raconteur followed up on it.

Since I haven't read all of the ETERNALS reboots that followed Kirby, I'm not sure whether or not Gaiman introduced the most daring wrinkle: that the Celestials actually bred the Deviants as fodder. This might be deemed a reversal of the H.G. Wells trope of the Eloi and the Morlocks from his TIME MACHINE, for instead of the gross humanoids eating their fairer-looking kindred, we have the handsome humans being kept on a pedestal by their creators, while the ugly ones are the Celestials' livestock. But the idea isn't developed, and I will be surprised if anyone else has done so since 2006.

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY

I've recently hunted through past posts and added the tag "self-mastery" to any post where I used the Nietzschean term "self-overcoming." I find Nietzsche's term a little too obscure for my own use, but "self-mastery" serves to express the ways in which fictional combative characters illustrate humankind's ability to do more with their "might" than to dominate others. I wrote in 2015's NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES:

Nietzsche is interested in war and violence only as forces within humankind that must be overcome by the overman-- not indulged in, like the Nazis to whom Frederic Wertham compared the philosopher. The overman was Nietzsche's solution to the vagaries of rule by the mob or by the tyrant:

Now, in fiction combative characters embody a plethora of philosophical attitudes, and Nietzsche's idea of self-mastery diverges even from that of, say, Frank Miller. (Interesting side-note: in ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche castigates a "Spirit of Gravity," which is a value Miller and his co-writer Azzarello champion in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. ) But I would still argue that the semantic manner in which both the philosopher and the comics-writers express the idea of self-mastery is essentially the same.

Now, in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, I  used the ideal of "fair play" as an example of what I then called "self-limitation" and considered essentially identical with "self-overcoming:"

In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming."

And yet, I find that I've used it not in terms of limiting oneself but also in terms of exceeding limits. In WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 1, I compared two protagonists whose dynamicity was certainly not at the highest level, but who both utilized particular weapons to overcome obstacles. I argued in part that although Richard Mayhew of NEVERWHERE gained possession of a super-sword and used it to kill a monster, he lacked the quality of "self-mastery," since the weapon's power did all the work. In contrast, Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA didn't command a lot of power with his one weapon, a simple throwing-knife, but like Aristotle's hedgehog he mastered one good trick. Thus his triumph over the villain Lo-Pan is entirely the result of Burton's self-mastery.

In my philosophical cosmos, the acquisition of a skill or power comes about through a process of self-monitoring, a subject's attempt to understand his or her natural limits at a given time, after which the subject seeks to exceed said limits, to gain greater self-mastery. The appeal of fair play is affective rather than cognitive; the subject believes, for instance, that he shouldn't use a weapon if his opponent does not have one. Thus, in THOR #152, the thunder-god "sheathes" his hammer after destroying his foe's mace.

However, this "noblesse oblige" gesture can have an objective effect, in that it forces a given character to "dig deeper" in order to defeat a worthy opponent. Of course, one doesn't need the gesture, since combative narratives are replete with dozens of situations wherein combatants seek out worthy opponents purely to improve themselves. DRAGONBALL frequently uses this scenario, in that the Seiyans Goku and Vegeta repeatedly challenge one another, even when on relatively friendly terms:

Having dovetailed these two related concepts, my next consideration is: what are the most familiar story-tropes through which fictional characters may demonstrate self-mastery?

Both of the two previous examples fall into the most elementary category, that of the hand-to-hand battle. This is also the easiest trope with which an author can express self-mastery.

The trope of weapons-use, however, becomes more complicated, as seen in the WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS analysis, wherein I found that Mayhew did not display self-mastery even though he had a bigger, badder weapon than did Jack Burton. An even greater complication is that any form of "super-power" not intimately tied to the human body becomes similarly problematic. If Nightcrawler's ability to teleport demonstrates self-mastery, can one necessarily say the same of a comical type of teleporter like Ambush Bug?

The third major trope of self-mastery is that of the indirect commander: a figure whose main role is often to order others into battle. In this essay I said that I discounted the "Adama" character of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA in terms of "combative status" because he functioned largely as a figurehead. Yet there are millions of villains who are basically "master planner" types who get henchmen to do their fighting for them. However, the difference between Adama and, say, Fu Manchu is that the latter's genius for evil infuses every errand his servants perform in his name.

More on these matters later, perhaps.

MYTHCOMICS: "RAMADAN" (SANDMAN #50, 1993)

A few months back, an acquaintance asserted the extinction of the literary tradition of "Orientaliam." In its original use, this term usually concerned non-Oriental artists, principally Europeans and Americans, who attempted to reproduce the tropes associated with Oriental cultures.

(Parenthetical aside: it's currently incorrect to use the term "Oriental," with "Asian" being preferred, though both words connote "Eastern-ness." I'll use "Oriental" just because that was how this quasi-genre was traditionally denoted, ranging from William Beckford's VATHEK to the pulp magazine ORIENTAL STORIES.)

My associate was largely correct about the extinction of literary Orientalism. However, one of the few exceptions to this rule appeared as recently as 1993: in the stand-alone story "Ramadan" in SANDMAN #50.

According to Craig Russell's statements online, Gaiman wrote the script with Russell in mind, and the choice was borne out in full. Visually, "Ramadan" is a powerful evocation of many of the visual tropes common to medieval Arabic culture-- minarets, semi-clad harem-maidens, genies and ifrits, weird beasts like a Pegasus and a phoenix, and lots of calligraphy-inspired lettering (the last courtesy of Todd Klein). As for Gaiman's story, it might be characterized as a love-letter to the Thousand and One Nights, whose stories are frequently referenced-- although the content of the "letter" might be seen as a farewell missive.

Only once in the story does Neil Gaiman define for his readers the Muslim custom of Ramadan, though there are throughout the narrative references to the fasting-rituals associated with the holy day. Fasting is a form of renunciation, of giving up the pleasures of the body-- food, sex, etc.-- to commemorate the day. But main character Haroun Al-Raschid, ruler of the medieval city of Bagdad, finds himself obliged to give up his entire city.

There are many types of stories in the Nights-- comical, tragic, ribald, adventurous-- but Gaiman chooses to embody his Bagdad with the world-weariness best represented by "The City of Brass."
Gaiman spends six pages establishing that Bagdad is a place of incomparable marvels, but that all of its joys and wonders fail to give surcease of sorrow to its ruler.

Gaiman flawlessly emulates one of the many repetitive structures of Arabian-Nights narratives: that of having a hero pass through a series of imposing chambers in order to obtain some prize or treasure. Using a key of gold, Haroun, whose disquiet remains obscure, traverses chambers full of forgotten prisoners and fabulous treasures, swords that hang from the ceilings and flames that never die, and two of the eggs of the Phoenix. (One of the eggs, we are told, hatches the Phoenix's scion while only Allah knows what is born from the second one.) The prize that Haroun gains is a device he uses to summon Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, into his company-- and though Morpheus does come, he's not pleased to be called "as one might summon a steward."

Gaiman keeps the reader curious about the ruler's motives as long as possible, when the reader finally learns that he fears that Bagdad, City of Wonders, is destined to go the way of all flesh, and all cities, to be consumed by time and death. Haroun proposes to sell his city to the Sandman if Morpheus can assure him that its wonders will never die. Intrigued by the mortal's selfless offer, Morpheus agrees, and the City of Wonders joins the Sandman in his world of eternal dreams. Haroun for his part continues to live out his life in a now ordinary Bagdad, and like his people he no longer remembers his previous existence. All will live out commonplace lives in a commonplace world, and this extends to the Bagdad of the present, where a young boy has just heard the whole story of Haroun's sacrifice from an old teller of tales. However, though the story is infused with the spirit of Arabian-Nights pessimism, Gaiman allows a ray of hope, telling us how the boy, despite his hunger and poverty, because "behind his eyes are towers and jewels and djinns, carpets and rings and wild afreets, kings and princes and cities of brass."

"Ramadan" shares with other SANDMAN stories the theme of using dreams to anneal the miseries of real life. However, it's also one of the few stories I've covered that has nearly no overt conflict. There is no real conflict between Morpheus and the ruler of Bagdad; rather, the conflict is within Haroun,.who seeks to protect his fabulous city rather than simply enjoying its wonders until he himself passes from the world. His ability to act against the expectations of the readers bears some resemblance to the conflict in Ray Bradbury's "The Last Night of the World," which I analyzed here. Most amusingly for a pastiche of the Arabian Nights, Gaiman frequently has supporting characters start to unwind some long Oriental tale, but neither Haroun nor Morpheus will stay to hear, given that both are more intimately involved in the greater story of the wondrous city's preservation.

WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 1

In MESSING WITH MISTER INBETWEEN PT 2 I explained my reasons for not deeming Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE star Mayhew to be a less than combative protagonist.

Mayhew may kill a monster with a great weapon, but the weapon's just given to him, with no sense of his having mastered it. 

The sense of mastery-- which I also referenced as a form of Nietzschean "self-overcoming" in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4-- can be a factor that plays a vital role in determining whether or not a given character can be seen as possessing at least "exemplary dynamicity." of the type described in DYNAMICITY DUOS PT. 1.

Jack Burton, my earlier example, might be styled a "weakling with a weapon," just as Gaiman's Mayhew character is. Burton's weapon isn't even as special as the one Mayhew inherits-- it's just a common throwing-knife-- but Burton uses a common object in an uncommon way, while Mayhew uses an uncommon object in a common way. The former places a positive light on Burton's self-overcoming, while a negative light is cast upon the short heroic career of Mayhew.

Another example appears in the British SF-film THE TERRORNAUTS, which I reviewed in August 2013. Main character Joe Burke and his tiny coterie of allies are roughly on the same level of "ordinariness" that I find in the Gaiman character. However, for what it's worth, the characters do have to pass some tests before they can get hold of the super-weapons with which they repel a horde of alien invaders.

Suffice to say that the humans pass all the tests, despite getting no help from the comedy-reliefs.  This accomplishment proves that they've capable of rational thought, and they receive presents, such as a ray-gun weapon, as rewards from the automated test-givers.  They soon learn that there had been a living caretaker of the asteroid facility, but he has died, which may explain why they never get a proper briefing on their reason for being here.  Fortunately, they stumble across the answers through various accidents, one of which teleports Sandy to the very planet of which Joe Burke dreamed.  After a violent encounter with some savage natives, the scientists learn that an interstellar space-fleet, which previously caused the destruction of the asteroid's makers (I think), is now headed for Earth.  Burke and his fellows then activate long-dead weapons and manage to blast the interstellar fleet into dust (hence my LAST STARFIGHTER comparison). 

True, the everyman heroes get some help from electronic skull-caps that instruct them on the use of the space-station weapons.

However, they, like the main character of LAST STARFIGHTER, have to figure out how to use the weapons in combat. so that the film slightly anticipates the 1970s vogue for video games like SPACE INVADERS.

I mentioned in my review of TERRORNAUTS that I hadn't re-read the source-novel, Murray Leinster's THE WAILING ASTEROID, at the time that I reviewed the film. However, I eventually did reread the Leinster novel, and found that the film followed the novel fairly closely-- except for the one scene that makes TERRORNAUTS a combative film for me. Leinster's characters pass more or less the same tests and don the skull-caps-- but they don't get to play "first-person shooters" with alien invaders. Instead, the Earth-people simply unleash what might be termed a "Maginot line" of explosive asteroids, and the enemy ships blunder into them.

Leinster's conclusion, though it has the same narrative value in terms of destroying the alien threat, lacks the significant value of combative sublimity, and so his everypeople don't quite ascend to even the "exemplary" level of megadynamicity I observe in the movie's characters.

More on this subject anon.

MESSING WITH MISTER IN-BETWEEN PT. 2

Not long after finishing IVANHOE, I also completed Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE, a 1996 novelization of a British teleseries on which Gaiman collaborated. I didn't care for the book, but I must admit that its lack of imaginative scope is probably due to the fact that all elements had to be kept within the bounds of an inexpensive live-action series.

In keeping with what I wrote earlier about the Scott work, I'm only interested whether or not NEVERWHERE qualifies as a combative work, and if not, why not. (SPOILERS ahead.)


In the tradition of Carroll's Alice, modern-day British businessman Richard Mayhew falls down the wrong rabbit-hole. He ends up in London Below, a perhaps extradimensional domain that has a separate but sometimes parallel culture to that of the real world. Mayhew, who possesses no physical skills, becomes involved with a small coterie of freedom-fighters as they're pursued by assassins sent by a corrupt angel. The novel concludes when one member of the team, named Door, manages to propel the assassins and their master into another dimensional plane.

In my view, though Gaiman devotes a lot of space to Door and the other allies, NEVERWHERE's focal presence is not an ensemble of connected characters, but Mayhew alone. Thus, by the transitive principles I've advanced, the novel can't be combative unless Mayhew has some claim to being a combative hero.

Now, whereas Ivanhoe is a protagonist with a lot of battle-skill who doesn't get a final combat-scene, Gaiman does put the microdynamic Mayhew in the position of a hero. Without getting into the plot heavily, one of the coterie, Hunter, seeks to destroy a fabulous beast, a sort of oversized wart-hog. Hunter, who is a masterful fighter, attempts to spear the beast, but she's gored fatally. She gives the spear to Mayhew, and then Hunter distracts the animal's attention. When the beast attacks Hunter, Mayhew spears it to death. For the remainder of the novel, Mayhew is credited with the monster's death, and is even called "the Warrior," even though he has no illusions about his capacity in that respect.

There have been some occasions where I've judged a work to be combative even if the principal protagonist was not the most powerful person around. In Part 1 of MEGA, MESO, MICRO,  I discussed the breakdown of dynamicities in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, as represented by main hero Jack Burton and two of his allies, reporter Gracie and tough kung-fu practitioner Wang.

Burton, like Mayhew, is the focal presence of the story, and just as Mayhew's ally Hunter is far more powerful than he, the same applies to Burton vis-a-vis his ally Wang. However, I considered Burton a combative protagonist because he's like Aristotle's hedgehog, possessed of one really good trick. Mayhew may kill a monster with a great weapon, but the weapon's just given to him, with no sense of his having mastered it. Further, the fact that he can only kill the beast because Hunter distracts it defuses his claim to combative status.

Thus, even though Ivanhoe doesn't get a final fight-scene, everything else in the novel makes clear that he has the capacity for such a battle. Mayhew is the opposite: he does participate in a final fight-scene, but he never really has the capacity even to touch the boundaries of the *megadynamic* combatant, as does Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE.

PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES

The strongest influence on my theory of the four persona-types has been the work of Schopenhauer, but I'll confess that Northrop Frye's writings on literary dynamis had an impact on the theory, even if I renounced his confusion between dynamis and dynamicity in the essay DYNAMIS AND DYNAMICITY. Frye showed a slight tendency to equate social station with "power of action," probably because he was following Aristotle in his groundbreaking formulations in ANATOMY OF CRITICISM.

To quickly summarize between the personas of the "hero" and the "demihero," one incarnates the value I've called "positive glory" while the other incarnates that of "positive persistence." I won't repeat the distinctions I've made in earlier essays' I merely revisit this topic to correct my possible tendency to assign the persona of the demihero to the "ordinary man" rather than figures of high social station. (Not that this is a dominant tendency, as seen in some of the characters cited in DEMIHERO RALLIES.) 

Since positive persistence is not really correlated with social station, it's entirely feasible for demiheroes to be not only aristocrats, but rulers of whole domains, who may command considerable forces. However, not all kings and princes function to display "glory," and many function simply to keep their positions stable, a practice which allies with the value of persistence, as much as any of the "ordinary man" protagonists I've touched on.

Within the medium of comic books, one example of a powerful ruler is DC Comics' Morpheus, a.k.a. The Sandman. I've reviewed only two works in Neil Gaiman's corpus of Sand-stories, here and here, and in both of these storylines Morpheus is largely concerned with simply keeping his dream-empire stable for however long the universe lasts. He does undertake a personal duel of sorts in "A Hope in Hell," so he's certainly not without courage. However, for the most part Morpheus does not engage in any form of combat, nor is he concerned with the hero's goals of casting out evil in order to promote good. Thus the Lord of the Dream-World aligns with similar demiheroes who only perform positive actions when pressed to do so, like the LOST IN SPACE characters, to whom I've perhaps devoted the most analysis, starting here.

An example of heroic rulership appears in Nozomu Tamaki's DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND. The "bund" of the title is the domain ruled by Mina Tepes, queen of the world's vampires. Mina, like Morpheus, spends a fair amount of time protecting her empire from incursions, and though she and her retinue are much more violent than Lord Moepheus, the difference between them is more one of their personas than of physical dynamicity.  In the arc titled THE SCARLET ORDER, the origin of the vampire race is revealed, and Tamaki makes this narrative reflect elements of heroic glory:

Vampires are in essence spawned by a mystic force known only as "the Darkness," and its goal is much the same as that of the three vampire-lords from the first arc: to successfully begat a child to perpetuate its heritage. Tamaki's description of the Darkness' methods reminded me somewhat of the Hindu myth of Prajapati, who creates a woman to be his mate. Like Prajapati, the Darkness must then seek to overcome the woman's resistance to spawn the offspring he desires. But the unnamed "Woman" does resist the dark god's purpose, just as Mina resisted the corrupt desires of the three lords, and from the fact of the Woman's defiance springs the history of the vampire race.

By comparison, Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

Interestingly, very few American-made superheroes have any propensity to be rulers, whether due to aristocratic birth or simply taking power by force of will. Thus they must be seen as "ordinary men" who make the transition to heroic status, which only shows that even characters who start out as demiheroes can feel the demands of "noblesse oblige."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DOLL'S HOUSE" (THE SANDMAN #10-16, 1989-90)

In the same year that Neil Gaiman began his long run on THE SANDMAN title, he also did a couple of (apparent) tryouts for the SWAMP THING title: scripts that appeared in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, reviewed here. One of Gaiman's stories, which revived DC's "Brother Power" character, posited a world of "doll elementals" as the reason for Power's existence, in line with the plant elementals Alan Moore had introduced as a rationale for Swamp Thing's existence.

Over the next two years the SANDMAN title showed Gaiman stretching his creative muscles, as he varied between "short dreams" (essentially stand-alone stories, often featuring Morpheus of the Dreaming as the "host") and "long dreams" (longer, more involved story-arcs, some of which did not bear fruit until the end of the series). The first long arc, "The Doll's House," also invoked the image of dolls, but, like the famous Ibsen play, with a somewhat negative connotation, in which dolls were seen not as magical non-living presences-- as in the Brother Power story-- but as metaphors for being helplessly controlled by another's will.

As rendered by then-current Mike Dringenberg, the world of the Dreaming was taking on increasingly more complex, almost Jungian connotations, and this in part accounts for readers' enthusiastic reception of a world where dreams were real. "Doll's House" is perhaps not the best exemplar of this unique perspective. Though it's a long arc, parts of it are still more like short stories than anything, particularly "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the plot of the arc, though it has a loose thematic relationship to the rest of the story.

At this point in the series Morpheus, having been released from magical captivity, is dealing with various problems in the dream-world he rules. Four entities, his "creations," have escaped the Dreaming, and there's an additional threat in the appearance of a "vortex," a rare phenomenon in which a mortal manifests the ability to wreak havoc on the dream-world. Morpheus must corral his errant creations and terminate the threat to his kingdom.

I said that Gaiman's conception was "almost" Jungian, because at this point Gaiman is still strongly oriented upon the Alan Moore model. In his early works for DC Comics, Moore helped pave the way for 'adult comic books" within the context of genre-productions, and one of his main strategies was to take an ironic or reductive view of key genre-fantasies. I won't attempt to recount the fine details of Gaiman's arc, particularly since they don't dovetail particularly well, but almost all of them relate to the ides of exposing some personal or cultural fantasy as deeply flawed or misunderstood. Taking them on an issue-by-issue basis:

#10-11 -- this issue introduces Rose Walker, the mortal vortex, who will in time learn that her everyday waking existence is actually a threat to the world of dreams.

#12-- Superhero Hector Hall, who took upon himself the identity of "the Sandman" within the pages of another DC comic, is exposed as nothing but a ghost with delusions of grandeur, manipulated by two of the nightmare-creations that escaped Morpheus' realm. The issue not only undermines the original Simon-Kirby conception of a "dreamworld superhero," from which Gaiman's Sandman was very loosely derived, it also features a few sequences in which a young boy experiences fanciful dreams evocative of Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo," but wakes up to ugly realities (a rat biting his face, for example),

#13-- the "Good Fortune" issue, in which Morpheus allows a mortal man to enjoy virtual immortality. During Morpheus' visit to Elizabethan England, it is revealed that a certain Bard owes his talent to having made a Faustian bargain with none other than the King of Dreams.

#14-- Morpheus tracks down one of his nightmare-creations, the Corinthian, to a very special convention, in which seasoned serial killers come together to discuss their avocation. In addition to destroying his creation, Morpheus forces all of the mortal killers to see themselves without the benefit of self-delusion. To some extent comic-book conventions and their attendees are the butt of the issue's satirical jokes, though it's reasonably clear that Gaiman isn't drawing a one-on-one comparison of comics-fans and serial killers.

#15-16-- Morpheus finds that the last of his errant creations, an entire dream-realm known as Fiddlers' Green, has taken mortal form and come into contact with Rose Walker. Though Morpheus' initial contact with Rose saves her from one of the serial killers, he then tells her-- within one of her dreams-- about her true nature, and that he must kill her to prevent her from destroying his world. He almost does so, but learns, through a very involved plot-line I won't recapitulate, that one of his supernatural siblings has been manipulating him to commit that transgression in order to destroy him  Although Rose survives, she lives on with the feeling that all of humanity are merely "dolls" to greater, merciless forces, echoing Shakespeare's theme in KING LEAR: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,." However, in his confrontation with his plotting sibling, Morpheus reveals a new wrinkle: that he and all of his metaphysical kindred are also merely "dolls," for they are brought into being by the passions and aspirations of mortal beings. At the end the sibling in question refuses to acknowledge the truth revealed by Morpheus, and the story ends with her thinking that she's "nothing like a doll at all."

It's a promising theme, that of the interdependence of mortals and their archetypal creations, but "Doll's House" doesn't live up to its potential. It's obviously an amalgam of separate story-ideas that Gaiman sought, only with partial success, to meld into a unified structure. Nevertheless, even if this early Gaiman work goes a little overboard with all of the "beautiful dreams hide nasty realities" schtick, there's still enough attention to the symbolic resonance of the dream-world that it isn't totally reductive in nature. One example is "Fiddler's Green," who is apparently the incarnation of an Earthly Paradise, without any attempt to reduce him to something else. Rose Walker is a little on the dull side, as if Gaiman wanted to make her as simple as possible for contrast's sake, but I found this simply made it harder to invest much conviction in her character.

It's a flawed story, but not so over-intellectualized as to fall into the category of the "null-myth," and it does prove to be of major importance in elucidating Gaiman's not-quite-Jungian concept of a universe of dreams.

ONE NULL, ONE NEAR: SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 (1989)

            

Since Neil Gaiman was never the regular writer on the SWAMP THING title, it may be that his stories for 1989’s SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 were just fill-in works, or possibly audition-tales. Though I’ve labeled one story a “null-myth” and the other a “near myth,” both languish under the long shadow of Alan Moore’s tenure on the feature.

“Brothers” is the null-myth here: a good idea that never quite works, despite Neil Gaiman’s considerable talents. The living dummy known as Brother Power the Geek has remained out in space for roughly twenty years, only to suddenly crash to Earth. Brother Power not only survives, he has no understanding that any time has passed, and still speaks in hippie-talk. He has apparently gained a new power, though, in that he can now assemble new bodies for himself out of random junk, and expand said bodies to giant-size, so that he becomes an unwitting peril to the citizens of Tampa, Florida.

The “monster-menacing-city” structure of the story is strongly indebted to a two-part Alan Moore story in SWAMP THING #52-53, and Gaiman more or less admits the indebtedness by having two of Swamp Thing’s support-characters called in to consult on the matter of "The Flower-Child That Time Forgot." Swamp Thing himself is not present in either of the annual’s stories, due to events in the regular title. Still, Gaiman picks up on the character’s basic concept—at least as it was re-imagined by Moore, that of making the muck-monster into a plant-elemental—and declares that Brother Power was created by a process analogous to the one that created Swamp Thing. Abby Arcane, the Swamp Thing’s wife, receives an oracle that says Brother Power is “a doll god—a puppet elemental—like others before it.”

Gaiman does not choose to say more than this, however, and so the idea of what a “puppet elemental” might be is dropped. (Was Pinocchio one of the “Parliament of Puppets?”) Eventually the problem is solved when the other support-character, belated hippie Chester, gets Brother Power’s attention, talks with him a little, and then sends him on his way. Given that most of Gaiman’s observations on the generation of the Flower People are trite, it may be that the story’s main point was to bring Joe Simon’s most peculiar creation out of mothballs—though Gaiman does a decent job with his characterizations of Chester and Abby.

“Shaggy God Stories” might sound like a myth-nerd’s dream, though the tale fails to be more than the sum of its parts. The story focuses upon a character whom Moore adapted early in his run: Jason Woodrue, a super-villain so obsessed with plants that he mutated himself into a plant-human hybrid. Woodrue, more than a little crazy, wanders into the domain of the Parliament of Trees, the largely immobile plant-elementals who preceded Swamp Thing. For most of the tale, Woodrue meditates on the many ways in which trees and other plants have been intertwined with the lives of holy men and deities. He seeks out the Parliament, rambling about gods and trees, and finally reveals that, “I want to be a god too.” The representative of the Parliament gives Woodrue no satisfaction, though he gives the former super-villain a warning about a future danger. The deranged plant-man pays no attention and wanders away, and the story ends on the suggestion of a future menace, which eventually manifests in the Doug Wheeler SWAMP THING run.

Still, limited as the story’s scope is, it does toss out a few good myth-kernels, particularly at the opening, when Woodrue mediates on the “two trees” of the Bible’s Eden narrative. I find it particularly interesting that Gaiman has Woodrue harp on the existence of the “two trees” at the story’s  opening, because “two trees” also figure in the next and last major appearance (as of this writing) of Brother Power, the Geek.   

ADDENDA: On this forum a poster shared a part of a Gaiman interview from an online source that no longer seems extant. In the spirit of knowledge I share Gaiman's statement on the Annual here:

"I was going to bring [Woodrue] back as a villain. He was getting back to being Woodrue, the Rue of the Wood, and probably on a much bigger scale, a much nastier scale. It would have been fun, but again it didn't happen.
I probably would have brought back Black Orchid in there. I don't know, because as I said, it never got that far. Rick still had a few issues. I talked to Rick, we sort of co-plotted Rick's last few episodes, which never saw print."