SOURCE: Worcester, Kent. “The Graphic Novels of Neil Gaiman.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism, 195. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2004.

[In the following essay, Worcester examines the works, life, and career of Neil Gaiman.]

INTRODUCTION

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) is an imaginative, prolific and highly popular contemporary author whose impact has been felt in a variety of media and genres. He is the author of several fantasy novels (Neverwhere, Stardust, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), and American Gods), and numerous short stories (some of which are collected in Smoke and Mirrors), as well as stories for younger readers (Coraline, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, and The Wolves in the Walls). While Gaiman has written for film, television, stage, magazines, and newspapers, he is probably best known for his work in comic books. In recent years Gaiman has received the Hugo, the Nebula, the Harvey, the Eisner, the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and other honors in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, children's fiction, literary fiction, and comics. Gaiman's website (www.neilgaiman.com) receives thousands of hits per day and offers links to comprehensive bibliographies as well as interviews, essays, message boards, and a web journal.

Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, where his father owned a vitamin company. He was educated at Ardingly College Junior School and the Whitgift School. In the early 1980s he worked as a freelance journalist in London, contributing articles, reviews and interviews on popular culture topics. While he was a fan of Marvel and DC comics as a child, he stopped reading comic books in his teen years and only reluctantly looked at them again as an adult. In an interview with Hy Bender, Gaiman described “waiting for a train at Victoria Station” in 1984, when he “noticed a newsstand with piles of comics, and Swamp Thing 25, “The Sleep of Reason,” caught my eye. I was dead set against buying it, but I read it just standing there and flipping. As I did so, I started thinking, ‘This is really good. But it can't be, because comics are no good” (Bender 15). The following year he became friends with both Alan Moore (b. 1953), the British comics writer who had already achieved critical acclaim for his work on Swamp Thing, and Dave McKean (b. 1963), an innovative young artist. Alan Moore's burgeoning success helped convinced Gaiman that a career as a comics writer was not only possible, but worthwhile, while his numerous conversations with Dave McKean helped him to lay out an ambitious agenda for comics. As Gaiman later recalled, he and McKean “had very definite ideas about the kind of comics we wanted to see, the kind of comics we liked. They were heady times. We were both intoxicated by the potential of the medium, by the then-strange idea that comics weren't exclusively for kids anymore (if they ever had been): that the possibilities were endless” (Violent Cases 3).

The comics industry in the mid-to-late 1980s was undergoing a period of change and transformation. Independent companies were being set up to take advantage of the specialist comics shops opening in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Politically minded figures such as Moore, Frank Miller, Paul Chadwick, and Art Spiegelman were part of a creative turn that emphasized the contribution that multilayered scripts and unconventional artwork could make to a supposedly lowbrow medium. DC Comics, then as now part of Time Warner, one of the world's largest entertainment corporations, performed an important catalytic function by signing and promoting UK writers who brought a distinctive sensibility to a U.S. dominated industry. These writers included not only Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, but Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, and a handful of others. Meanwhile, a growing number of comics creators experimented with longer, self-contained stories for adult readers—a format that became known as the graphic novel.

Gaiman played a starring role in this period of creative ferment and he remains one of the biggest names in the field. His friendship with Dave McKean led to a series of high-profile collaborations, beginning with the remarkable Violent Cases as well as the “prestige format,” three-part series, Black Orchid. While the former drew readers via word of mouth, the latter was enthusiastically received in the comics subculture and helped mark the arrival of a “British wave” in comics. With the success of Black Orchid, DC invited Gaiman to develop a new monthly series, which led to the launch of The Sandman at the end of 1988. The Sandman featured Gaiman's densely plotted, emotionally resonant scripts, McKean's fanciful cover art, and interior artwork by a procession of talented illustrators. It was possibly the most critically acclaimed English-language comic series of the 1990s. Gaiman further consolidated his reputation with Signal to Noise (1992) and Mr. Punch (1994) both with McKean, as well as his scripts for Miracleman (1990-1994) and various side projects, including Sandman spin-offs Death: The High Cost of Living (1994) and Death: The Time of Your Life (1997). While Gaiman brought the monthly series to a close in 1996, he returned to “the Dreaming” with his illustrated story collaboration with Yoshitaka Amano, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999), and in The Sandman: Endless Nights (2003).

This essay focuses on the longer and more ambitious comics that Neil Gaiman has undertaken over the past two decades. These projects can be divided into two main groups: first, the experimental, boundary-expanding projects with McKean, and second, The Sandman and related graphic novels. The essay refers only in passing to his other comics writings and does not address his prose fiction. In the concluding section the essay takes stock of Gaiman's influence on contemporary comics and his contribution to the revival of fantasy in mainstream comics. The conclusion also considers whether and to what extent Gaiman and McKean were able to implement the sweeping artistic and cultural agenda they laid out for the comics medium in the mid-1980s.

COLLABORATIONS WITH DAVE MCKEAN

Comics often involve a group undertaking that brings together writers and illustrators and sometimes inkers, letterers, and colorists. While there are many individuals who write and draw their own comics, comics published by the larger companies (such as DC) tend to be produced by creative teams whose rosters change from time to time. In the case of the seventy-five issues of The Sandman, Neil Gaiman worked alongside no fewer than 50 artists, letterers, and colorists, along with 3 editors and assistant editors, and one cover artist, over a span of eight years. This turnover in personnel can be explained in part by the pressures of monthly publication, but Gaiman also wanted to deploy different artists for distinct storytelling purposes.

The graphic novels Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch were produced under very different conditions from The Sandman. Each is a self-contained, coauthored package designed to appeal to culturally literate readers who would normally never pay attention to comics or genre-based fiction more generally. As McKean wrote in the dedication to Violent Cases, “For my teacher, Malcolm Hatton. You see? This is what I mean by comics.” In each case, their purpose was to explore the medium's largely unrealized potential, to combine words and pictures in ways that took full advantage of the form—panels, word balloons, and sequential storytelling—without invoking the familiar conventions and tropes of mainstream comics. The stories themselves diverge from the norm as much as the artwork. Rather than telling heroic adventure stories, these books are concerned with intrinsically grown up themes, such as memory's imperfections and the solace that meaningful work can provide in the face of death.

Gaiman and McKean's distinctive visual-verbal agenda is also promulgated in their only slightly more cheerful books for younger readers, each of which recapitulate aspects of the graphic novel, but under a different publishing rubric. The term “children's book” would be misapplied to these stories, especially Coraline, given their edgy content. “Graphic novel” might be more accurate, even if they do not consistently use a panel-by-panel illustrated narrative structure as such. But, in contrast to Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch, Coraline, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish are mainly sold in bookstores and are not retailed or consumed as comics.

Violent Cases is the earliest of the Gaiman-McKean collaborations and yet it holds up quite nicely. It tells a quasi-autobiographical story about a four-year old boy in provincial southern England who meets (or at least recalls meeting) Al Capone's osteopath. Almost everything about the book departs from the traditional comic book—from the cover, which features a disturbingly indistinct, puffy-cheeked older man in a gray suit, to the inside pages, which veer from collages and oversize panels to dense overlays of penciled sketches and exploding borders. The story itself rests on precarious foundations—the memories of a child, for whom violin cases are “violent cases” and “the giants always looked like my father.” “The actual subject matter of Violent Cases,” Gaiman explained, “is a subject matter that fascinates and obsesses me: violence, cruelty, madness, and what it's like to be a kid in an adult world, and how horrible parties are, and all that stuff” (Thompson 71).

The book opens with a disturbing childhood incident in which Gaiman's shoulder was sprained or dislocated by his father. “I wouldn't want to gloss over the true facts,” Gaiman explains, as he addresses the reader via multiple panels. “Without true facts, where are we?” The action centers around three successive conversations with the osteopath, whose appearance changes over the course of the book, as the narrator tries to form a clear image from his unreliable memory. The porous nature of mental images is something that the book captures quite effectively. As Gaiman later said, “I think we pulled off something you couldn't do anywhere other than in comics, where the osteopath suddenly looks younger, and for the rest of the book he looks that way. You couldn't do that in prose, because by that time the reader would have built up a mental picture of what he looks like. In film or TV people would be distracted by looking at the make-up job required, or the fact that a different actor was suddenly playing the part” (Lawley and Whitaker 47). This sense of makeshift recollections is further suggested by McKean's fragmented pages, which combine odd details with abstracted depictions of imperfectly remembered episodes.

The four-year old Gaiman chats with the talkative osteopath for the last time at “Louisa Singer's fifth birthday party at the Queen's Hotel.” Sipping a cola at the Hotel bar he hears about the time when Al Capone tied up and then clubbed some of his closest associates to death. In Gaiman's mind Louisa Singer's party and Al Capone's orgy of violence merge, so that in one panel, Capone's men are screaming, and in another, “four children run around three chairs … and a little girl—Louisa Singer herself, the birthday girl—stomps away from the others, her lower lip trembling.” This leads to a genuinely unnerving page in which a thick spray of black ink, symbolizing blood, splashes over the men's tortured faces. “Nobody was sick, which kind of surprised me,” Gaiman intones at the bottom of the page, in a borderless image that features party favors and a handgun. “I thought of the other children. Their heads bloody caved-in lumps. I felt fine about it. I felt happy.” Despite the seething hostility that this passage reveals—a rage that has its roots, presumably, in the behavior of his parents, and particularly his argumentative father, who has a taste for bickering and empty threats—the young Gaiman merely says “thank you for having me” to Louisa's mother at the end of the party. While Neil Gaiman has a reputation for being one of the nicest people in comics, Violent Cases suggests that his knack for writing tragic and occasionally morbid stories has at least partly autobiographical origins.

Signal to Noise similarly juxtaposes two apparently unrelated themes—the impending death of a well-known film director, and the end-of-the-world anxieties that ordinary Europeans felt on the eve of the last millennium—just as Violent Cases contrasts and then conflates kid's parties with the mafia. Here too the ending unites the two themes, with the now spectral film director joining the crowds on a hillside at the end of 999 AD. This volume is more optimistic than Violent Cases, insofar as the director hopefully peers upward in the final panels, and the reader learns that the script he's been working on has found an audience. “The world is always ending, for someone,” muses the director. But in this case art can outlive the artist, whereas in Violent Cases all that's left are memories. Art carries the signal that distinguishes meaning from the “noise” of meaninglessness. In this book at least, Gaiman seems to suggest that the dying are threatened by noise rather than peace.

In mainstream comics one of Gaiman's best-known characters is Death, the older sister of Dream (aka the Sandman), who wears a stylish black costume and is everyone's best friend. The faintly menacing aspect of her character is occasionally acknowledged, but her high spirits and savoir-faire suggest that the universal experience she embodies is a thrilling mystery rather than a source of dread. In Signal to Noise, death is not stylish. “My chest began to hurt, and I told myself I should not have walked,” the unnamed director says to himself as a dull orange colored glow hovers above his outstretched hand. The fact that the main character is aging, balding, and thickening around the waist—decaying, in other words—is another form of “noise” that comics have not always been willing to contend with. The Sandman has its deeply tragic elements, but it is mostly about people who look and act as if they are under 35 (even if some are elemental beings that predate homo sapiens). By way of contrast, the concept of youthful glamour is almost entirely absent from the core Gaiman-McKean collaborations, even if their coauthored pages are often stunning in their artistic virtuosity.

With Signal to Noise Gaiman and McKean introduced new approaches to their assigned roles. Gaiman's prose is more epigrammatic this time around, with whole pages devoted to terse and sometimes elusive phrases: “I had a lie,” states the narrator on one page; “stop looking at me!” says the director in another, as he shouts at the photos in his study. In one particularly unconventional two-page spread, rows and rows of photocopied, blue-tinted eyes stare out at the reader while the text reads “And I saw as it was a sea of glass mingled with fire.” McKean's trademark blurry sketches turn up on some pages, but there are a greater variety of visual styles on hand, from full-page paintings and photographic collages, to computerized mindscapes and disturbing paintings of each of the four riders of the apocalypse. Many of these pages achieve a sense of paintings-that-talk that is generally absent from the action-oriented, plot-derived graphics that accompany most comic book stories.

While Violent Cases and Signal to Noise appeared under small press imprints, Mr. Punch was published by DC's Vertigo line of mature reader comics. Even by Vertigo standards Mr. Punch is an unusual project, one that was presumably facilitated by Gaiman's growing fame as the guiding spirit behind The Sandman. Once again, the emphasis is on each page as a thing in itself rather than incessant narrative stimulation. In many pages McKean places dark gray borders between panels, which lends these passages the feel of a family portrait album. The panels themselves are mostly brown, sepia, and gray, with occasional discordant splash of green, purple or blue, depending on the storyline. It's an unusually bleak look for a major comics publisher. The story itself—which returns to Gaiman's childhood, when he is introduced to the time-honored secrets of Punch and Judy, by way of his grandfather's dilapidated seaside amusement arcade—is no lighter in tone than artwork. The story culminates, after all, in a miserable scene in which the arcade's pregnant “mermaid” is whacked in the stomach and face with a two-by-four by a shadowy figure (quite possibly a family member). Mr. Punch revisits such familiar Gaimanesque riffs as memory, uncertainty, incipient violence, and family mysteries, but it also introduces an ambivalent romance with archaic forms of English folk culture, a theme that also surfaces in The Sandman. While there may be less emphasis on formal experimentation in this book, there is never any danger that McKean's pages could be mistaken for anyone else's in comics.

Both the adult-oriented graphic novels described here and the illustrated books for younger readers referred to earlier are the products of an unusually long-lived creative partnership. Gaiman and McKean's careers have operated on slightly different tracks, however. In a 1993 interview, Gaiman said “Me and Dave, we're like Venn diagrams: There are places of intersection, but then we have completely different tastes and sensibilities going off on each side. I miss him appallingly, terribly. We only used to see each other once every couple of months, but we probably talked on the phone practically every night for years” (Thompson 68). While they continue to share a passion for taking comics in new directions, Gaiman exhibits a far greater fondness for genre. “I tend to like genres: I like to play with them and take them apart and put them back together,” Gaiman said in the same interview. “But Dave, I think, feels that genres are essentially slightly silly things” (Thompson 68). Even his covers for The Sandman, while popular with many regular comic fans, looked quite unlike anything else on the racks. While McKean's dense, melancholy, and painterly covers invoked a sense of mystery and sometimes horror, they did so without playing on horror comic conventions. Nor did they connect with the rest of the “DC universe” (DCU) in any obvious way.

Black Orchid is the only long form Gaiman-McKean collaboration that takes place within a mainstream comics environment. Lex Luthor, Swamp Thing, Poison Ivy, and other hardy DC perennials play supporting roles in a story that reintroduces readers to a pair of gentle, bioengineered flower creatures who share the power of flight. Gaiman seems especially attuned to the ecological underpinnings of the story, with its lyrical contrast between Luthor's looming office tower and the lush green forests of the Amazon. The story's final resolution is a little easy, perhaps, but some of the pages are stunning, with their mix of Gaiman's snappy dialogue and McKean's vivid greens and purples. In an interview with Comics Forum, Gaiman confessed that “Orchid has a lot of flaws. We were having to do our learning in public. We'd figured out our manifesto of how to do comics, and we were trying to apply it” (Lawley and Whitaker 59). McKean's characteristically bold page compositions looked cramped in a standard format comic book, and some of the plotting seemed forced. Two years later, Gaiman penned a four-part story called The Books of Magic, also for DC, which introduced a significant new character, the young magician Timothy Hunter, into the DCU. This book represented an enjoyable but similarly strained compromise between Gaiman's literary sensibility and the existing DC mythos and ethos. Gaiman's other DC universe stories are collected in Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame and Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days.

THE SANDMAN AND RELATED PROJECTS

With The Sandman, Neil Gaiman was granted a license to construct an entire world (or, more accurately, entire worlds) of fairies, monsters, demons, humans, and ancient godlike creatures at the fringes of the DCU. He also retained a greater degree of control over his domain than creators had previously negotiated from the major companies, including the power to bring his own series to an end. “Sandman is a fantasy,” Gaiman once said in an interview. “It wanders around and smudges the border of genre from time to time and is often historical; it will go off and very occasionally be horror. But mostly it's fantasy, that's what it is. It's a story about things that do not exist” (Groth 76). While some of the series' minor characters were already part of the DC universe, they were mostly obscure figures from non-superhero titles of the 1960s and 1970s who had been languishing in comic book limbo before Gaiman dusted them off and placed them within The Sandman. The key cast members are the seven Endless: Destiny, Death, Dream (i.e., the Sandman), Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium, formerly known as Delight. With the partial exception of Destiny, they are all Gaiman's inventions. Each represent intrinsic aspects of the human condition, and as such they are older and more powerful than humanity's gods. It is suggested that the Endless will outlive humanity and that Death will outlive the universe itself. They regard themselves as members of a single family, but like all families they argue and bicker and quarrel.

In the course of the story we learn that Destruction has given up his role (he now dedicates himself to such pursuits as painting, writing and music), a dereliction of duty that unnerves some of his siblings, especially his brother Dream. We also find out that Desire has a penchant for stirring up trouble, which indirectly sets into motion the concluding story arc, in which Dream more or less allows himself to be snuffed out by “the kindly ones,” the famous weird sisters of European mythology. The kindly ones take some pleasure in taking down one of the Endless, but another Dream soon takes his place. The Sandman closes with the first Dream's wake, in which various characters, human and non-human, come to terms with Dream's passing.

By making Dream, who is sometimes referred to as Morpheus, the main protagonist, Gaiman is able to write about stories themselves, the ways in which dreams, nightmares, and narratives exert a powerful hold on the contemporary imagination, even as modernity seeks to diminish myth in favor of science, logic, and instrumental reason. Myths, Gaiman insists, retain the power to tell us about ourselves. But according to Gaiman we don't always want to obtain that kind of knowledge. As a character named Rose Walker tells herself at the end of The Doll's House story arc, “the world's about as solid and reliable as a layer of scum on the top of a well of black water which goes down forever, and there are things in the depths that I don't even want to think about.” Or as Gaiman said in one interview, “One of the things I wanted specifically to look at was, what does the twentieth century do with, to and about myth … myths and legends still have power; they get buried and forgotten, but they're like land-mines” (Lawley and Whitaker 51).

The first issue of The Sandman introduces Roderick Burgess, an eccentric English magus along the lines of Aleister Crowley, who attempts to kidnap Death via a pagan ceremony. While Death eludes them, Burgess and his followers manage to capture Dream, and for a period of seventy years, 1916 to 1986, Dream remains locked away—trapped and stripped of his powers—in the basement of an English manor house. The dreams of the twentieth century were as troubled as they were, it turns out, because the Sandman went missing. When Morpheus finally escapes his captors, his first thoughts are of revenge, and recovering the possessions that had been taken from him. Vengeance, for the king of dreams, is relatively easy to arrange; retrieving his belongings, and throne, proves a little more difficult.

Most difficult of all is the fact that his involuntary leave of absence leads him to reopen uncomfortable questions about his past, and his unbending personality structure, which generates unfamiliar feelings of remorse and misgiving. He especially regrets his decision to banish his one-time human lover, Nada, to Hell (on the grounds that she spurned him), and even more importantly, he feels guilty about the tragic disregard he has previously shown his son Orpheus. These feelings, and Morpheus's struggle to come to terms with their ramifications, motivate much of the series' meta-story, although there are numerous points where Gaiman slows things down and presents stories in which the Sandman plays a minor role or in which we see the Sandman in earlier incarnations, prior to his traumatic imprisonment.

“Sandman is incredibly traditional,” (Lawley and Whitaker 55) Gaiman once admitted. Rather than trying to incite political action, or moral outrage, the comic spins a series of fine yarns, the kind that deserve a deep chair and a warm fire. In The Sandman Gaiman borrows freely from ancient fables, myths, and legends, and somehow fashions them into an appropriately oversized postmodern mythology for modern-day readers, complete with a sprawling setting and an eccentric cast of characters that lends itself to endless adventures in myth-making, where the reader's imagination becomes as important as the recorded stories themselves. At the same time, every story ever told is part of the Dreaming, the other-worldly realm ruled by Morpheus, and therefore every story is part of The Sandman, at least in theory—which allows Gaiman to incorporate everything from Elizabethan drama (William Shakespeare is featured in two stories and writes both A Midsummer's Night Dream and The Tempest at Morpheus' behest), to the countless books that have been dreamed rather than written down, which can only be found in Morpheus' library. The reason that Dream has to die, perhaps, is because new myths and stories are needed; but Dream can never die, at least not as long as there are dreamers.

As this suggests, the dream world, for Neil Gaiman, is a vital source of collective myths and stories rather than an expression of the subjugated forces of the id, as Sigmund Freud famously argued. Dreams, Gaiman suggests, are a kind of “shadow-truth” that haunt and inspire entire societies, rather than highly individualized experiences. Interestingly, Freud's name is never invoked in a self-consciously literary comics series that explores the relationship between stories, consciousness, and dreams. Arguably, The Sandman is more about what Freud referred to as the super-ego than the id, and it is at least debatable that the comic blurs any distinction between storytelling and dreaming, thus ignoring or downplaying the psychological dimensions of dreaming.

The shape of The Sandman's larger story only gradually came into focus for readers, who were teased with hints of Dream's growing self-doubt throughout the course of the series. Two smaller-scale stories that proved especially popular with readers were “Ramadan,” illustrated by P. Craig Russell, and “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” illustrated by Kelley Jones and Malcolm Jones III, in which alley cats dream of a world in which “no cats are killed by human caprice.” Both stories confirm Gaiman's talent for crafting emotionally engaging characters, even or especially non-human ones, and they also exemplify the Dreaming's extraordinary flexibility as a storytelling device. Furthermore, they offer stories in which dreamers are represented as heroic figures, and important leaders, rather than easy marks. Gaiman's comics work is free of the cynical impulse that characterizes many contemporary comics, both alternative and mainstream.

Many readers were reportedly less enthusiastic about A Game of You, the fifth volume in The Sandman reprint series, which Gaiman has nevertheless described as a personal favorite. On one level this volume takes up the story of one of Dream's many responsibilities, which involves keeping an eye on “distant islets in the shoals of dream.” One particular islet, where much of the drama unfolds, is a fantasyland for emotionally neglected girls, complete with princesses, evildoers, and talking stuffed animals. The fate of this remote skerry is determined in the course of the story. On another level the volume concerns a circle of eccentric New Yorkers, bohemian residents of the lower East Side, who make their way to the islet by way of lunar magic to assist their friend Barbie, who lives in their building. Each of these Manhattanites is struggling with issues of identity—from Barbie herself, who cannot say with any confidence where she belongs, to their neighbor George, who is not who or what he appears to be, to Barbie's good friend Wanda, a vivacious pre-op transsexual. The reader also meets the memorable witch Thessaly, who was “born in the day of greatest darkness, in the year the bear totem was shattered” and who certainly knows her way around a corpse.

Witchcraft occupies a pivotal position in this story, as it does in several Sandman issues, and as is true in the case of the Dreaming the reader finds that magic is not without its perils, and terrors. But the most powerful parts of the story have to do with good old punk rock New York, its rhythms and personalities, rather than fantasy or the supernatural. Some readers may have been turned off by the book's uncompromising sexual politics, its unconventional mishmash of imaginary worlds and street scenes, and its unapologetic gore (what happens in the bathtub is not for the faint of heart). But it nevertheless showcases Gaiman's talent for placing fully realized, three-dimensional characters in unworldly and some might say ungodly situations and letting them discover for themselves how dangerous things are “out there” and how little they (and we) know.

The artwork in The Sandman is usually excellent, although it is also tremendously varied. It ranges from Marc Hempel's argumentative, staccato lines to P. Craig Russell's lovingly detailed renderings; from Jill Thompson's engagingly busy pages to Mike Allred's colorful hippie vibe. Some of the earlier stories are firmly rooted in horror, and these feature murky pages by Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III, who specialize in dark corridors and ghastly visages. In some of the historical episodes, such as those having to do with medieval or early modern England, the artwork is far more refined and delicate. The English artist Bryan Talbot proved a splendidly muscular choice for handling ancient Rome in “August,” in which Emperor Augustus spends a day disguised as a beggar in the marketplace. Gaiman specifically asked each illustrator he worked with what kinds of things they liked to draw, and then tried to accommodate their requests in his stories. Judging from “August,” Talbot may have specifically expressed an interest in drawing pock marked faces amid the sculptural splendors the ancient world.

In 1993 DC launched a new imprint, Vertigo, which was designed to take advantage of the renewed interest in more intellectually ambitious comics that the British wave, Neil Gaiman very much included, helped generated. In part this move reflected DC's unabashed interest in building on the success of The Sandman itself, and in the intervening years Vertigo has issued a stream of monthly series, one-off titles, and mini-series based in and on the Dreaming. While DC has agreed not to publish any stories about the Endless, unless written by Gaiman himself, this has left ample room for stories about Faerie, dreams, Timothy Hunter, and Merv the Pumpkinhead (the dream world's wise-cracking handyman). DC also spared no expense in packaging and promoting Gaiman's recent Sandman-related titles, The Sandman: The Dream Hunters, and The Sandman: Endless Nights. While Vertigo should not be considered synonymous with Gaiman-derived fantasy, a substantial share of the company's output over the past decade has been directly based on worlds and characters that Gaiman introduced in his best known title.

Many observers rate The Sandman in particular, and Neil Gaiman's comics and graphic novels in general, as milestones in the development of literary-minded comics. Gaiman's work is beginning to attract attention from scholars and researchers in literature and media studies. (Rauch 2003; Sanders 1997; see also www.holycow/dreaming/academia) At least one cultural historian, however, has argued that Gaiman's writings lack the political bite of other UK comics writers, such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. “The quality of Gaiman's writing, his inventiveness, his wit, his sensitivity,” Newsinger concedes, “all combined to produce a contemporary romantic hero, Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, the protagonist of a series of classic Gothic tales. There is, however, another reason for The Sandman's cult status and critical acclaim. The comic was conservative with a small ‘c’, resolutely middle class in its appeal. It posed no challenges, cast down no icons, trashed no temples, violated no taboos. Instead it provided a conservative exploration of the ‘human condition’, of our existential predicament, abstracted from any social or political context. This is certainly not to dispute the quality of Gaiman's writing or the pleasures to be got from it, but rather to point to a dimension of his achievement that is not generally recognized: The Sandman is horror for the middle classes” (Newsinger 81).

Gaiman would probably accept the charge of showing scant interest in explicitly political topics. As he once conceded in a long interview with Gary Groth: “Would I describe myself as a rebel? No!” (Groth 85) Feminists might point to the substantial number of strong female characters who feature in Gaiman's stories (up to and including Eve, of Adam and Eve fame, who lives on the edge of the Dreaming), and environmentalists might reasonably view Gaiman as one of their own, given his obvious appreciation for animals and nature. But Newsinger is onto something when he contrasts Gaiman, who is at root an entertainer, albeit an unusually inventive one, to the more agitational minded members of his pop-literary generation. At the same time, there are plenty of hints that Gaiman holds to a social democratic sensibility that does not exactly command the center stage in U.S. politics. As Gaiman recently told a web-blogger: “Of course, when stood next to the choice of American political parties (“So, would you like Right Wing, or Supersized Right Wing with Extra Fries?”) my English fuzzy middle-of-the-roadness probably translates easily as bomb-throwing Trotskyist, but when I get to chat to proper lefties like Ken McLeod or China Mieville I feel myself retreating rapidly back into the woffly Guardian-reading why-can't-people-just-be-nice-to-each-otherhood of the politically out of his depth” (See nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/002700.html).

CONCLUSION

Many fine writers and artists have contributed to the vitalization of the comics medium in recent years. Even without Gaiman's persuasive voice it seems likely that greater numbers of comics would have been marketed to older readers with a taste for something other than pulp formulas and percussive, four color fisticuffs. Vertigo, or something very much like it, probably would have occurred to the decision makers at DC, even without the example of The Sandman to work from. And it is difficult to see how the so-called alternative wing of the comics industry, exemplified by the prize-winning output of Fantagraphics, and Drawn and Quarterly, would be affected one way or the other by Gaiman's hypothetical absence, except insofar as The Sandman helped push readers to try out other, non-super hero titles that emphasize good writing and visuals rather than splash pages and witless score-settling. The Sandman, in other words, may have fostered a taste for good comics that worked and continues to work to the benefit of the independents, even if they mainly traffic in autobiography, comedy, politics, and deadpan irony rather than genre based entertainment.

In part, Neil Gaiman's special contribution lies in his deft rehabilitation of the fantasy genre. While there are not nearly as many fantasy titles on the market as superhero stories, the genre nevertheless received an enormous push by The Sandman and its various spin-offs. After all, fantasy offers a distinct set of problems and scenarios for artists and writers to grapple with, and it almost certainly holds greater appeal for many older readers, and female readers, than superheroes. To the extent that more women are now reading comics it is in large measure due to Gaiman's constructive influence. Ongoing efforts to rethink and transform comics presumably depend on appealing to new cohorts of readers with new kinds of stories. The Sandman, more than any other comic book of the 1990s, helped realize this goal.

The Gaiman-McKean collaborations, as reflected in Violent Cases, Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch, also constitute a major strand in Gaiman's comic book legacy. It is in these volumes, as much or more so than in The Sandman, that Gaiman realized the lofty ambitions that he and Dave McKean articulated when they first set out to turn the world of comics upside down. The fact that Gaiman walks with ease between two worlds—on the one hand, the world of serial, genre based fiction, and on the other, the world of edgy, experimental art—is an indication of his category-defying achievements. Gaiman and McKean have both accomplished more than they had any right to expect.

Bibliography

Collaborations with Dave McKean

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Black Orchid, books 1-3. New York: DC, 1988-1989.

———. Coraline. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

———. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. Clarkston, GA: White Wolf Publishing, 1997.

———. Mr. Punch. [The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance] New York: DC/Vertigo, 1994.

———. Signal to Noise. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 1992.

———. The Wolves in the Walls. HarperCollins, 2003.

The Sandman Library and Related Titles

The ten Sandman volumes:

I. Preludes and Nocturnes

II. The Doll's House

III. Dream Country

IV. Season of Mists

V. A Game of You

VI. Fables & Reflections

VII. Brief Lives

VIII. World's End

IX. The Kindly Ones

X. The Wake

Neil Gaiman. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics, 1991. Collecting The Sandman, issues 1-8. Art by Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg, and Malcolm Jones III.

———. The Sandman: The Doll's House. New York: DC Comics, 1990. Collecting The Sandman, issues 8-16. Art by Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III.

———. The Sandman: Dream Country. New York: DC Comics, 1991. Collecting The Sandman, issues 17-20. Art by Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Colleen Doran, and Malcolm Jones III.

———. The Sandman: Season of Mists. New York: DC Comics, 1992. Collecting The Sandman, issues 21-28. Art by Kelley Jones, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Matt Wagner, Dick Giordano, George Pratt, and P. Craig Russell.

———. The Sandman: A Game of You. New York: DC Comics, 1993. Collecting The Sandman, issues 32-37. Art by Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch, and Dick Giordano.

———. The Sandman: Brief Lives. New York: DC Comics, 1993. Collecting The Sandman, issues 41-49. Art by Jill Thompson and Vince Locke.

———. The Sandman: Fables and Recollections. New York DC Comics, 1993. Collecting The Sandman, issues 29-31, 38-40, 50, Sandman Special 1, and Vertigo Preview. Art by Bryan Talbot, Stan Woch, P. Craig Russell, Shawn McManus, John Watkiss, Jill Thompson, Duncan Eagleson, and Kent Williams.

———. The Sandman: World's End. New York: DC Comics, 1994. Collecting The Sandman, issues 51-56. Art by Michael Allred, Gary Amaro, Mark Buckingham, Dick Giordano, Tony Harris, Steve Leialoha, Vince Locke, Shea Anton Pensa, Alec Stevens, Bryan Talbot, John Watkiss, and Michael Zulli.

———. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones. New York: DC Comics, 1996. Collecting The Sandman, 57-69. Art by Marc Hempel, Richard Case, D'Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston, and Kevin Nowlan.

———. The Sandman: The Wake. New York: DC Comics, 1997. Collecting The Sandman, issues 70-75. Art by Michael Zulli, Jon J. Muth and Charles Vess.

———. Death: The High Cost of Living. New York: DC/Vertigo, 1994. Art by Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, and Dave McKean.

———. Death: The Time of Your Life. DC/Vertigo, 1997. Art by Chris Bachalo, Mark Buckingham, and Mark Pennington.

———. The Sandman: The Dream Hunters. New York: DC/Vertigo, 1999. Art by Yoshitaka Amano.

———. The Sandman: Endless Nights. New York: DC/Vertigo, 2003. Art by Glenn Fabry, Milo Manara, Miguelanxo Prado, Frank Quitely, P. Craig Russell, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Barron Storey.

Other Works by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman. American Gods. New York: William Morrow, 2001.

———. The Books of Magic, parts 1-4. New York: DC Comics, 1990-1991. Art by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess, and Paul Johnson.

———. Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame. New York: DC, 2000. Art by Michael D. Allred and Terry Austin, Mark Buckingham, John Totleben, Matt Wagner, Eric Shanower and Arthur Adams, Jim Aparo, Kevin Nowlan, and Jason Little.

———. Harlequin Valentine. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 2001. Art by John Bolton.

———. Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days. New York: DC/Vertigo, 1999. Art by Richard Piers Rayner, Dave McKean, Mike Hoffman, Mike Mignola, Steve Bissette, Kim DeMulder, and John Totleben.

———. Neverwhere. New York: Avon Books, 1998.

———. Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions. New York: Perennial, 2001.

———. Stardust. New York: Perennial, 2001.

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. New York: Ace Books, 1996.

Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell. Murder Mysteries. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 2002.

Secondary Works

Bender, Hy. The Sandman Companion. New York: DC/Vertigo, 1999.

Groth, Gary. “Interview with Neil Gaiman.” The Comics Journal 169 (July 1994): 54-108.

Lawley, Guy and Steve Whitaker. “Interview with Neil Gaiman, Part One.” Comics Forum 1:1 (spring 1992): 24-46.

———. “Interview with Neil Gaiman, Part Two.” Comics Forum 1:2 (summer 1992): 46-59.

Newsinger, John. The Dredd Phenomenon: Comics and Contemporary Society. Bristol: Libertarian Education, 1999.

Rauch, Stephen. Neil Gaiman's “The Sandman” and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth. Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2003.

Sanders, Joe. “Of Parents and Children and Dreams in Neil Gaiman's Mr. Punch and The Sandman.” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 71 (autumn 1997).

Thompson, Kim. “Interview with Neil Gaiman.” The Comics Journal 155 (January 1993): 64-83.