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Case Study of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Introduction
The Sandman is a comic book series, originally published monthly from January 1989 until March 1996 by DC comics, authored by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a number of different artists. It has since been collected into ten trade paperbacks and several anthologies. It has been highly successful and has been called “the greatest epic in comic book history” (Los Angeles Times)
The main protagonist of The Sandman is Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream, who rules over the realm of dreams known as the Dreaming. At the beginning of the series Dream is imprisoned for seventy years in a magic sigil and in 1989 escapes; towards the end of the series Dream chooses to let himself die and the series ends with his funeral and his replacement by another incarnation. The Sandman contains a mix of extended stories and one-off stories. Sometimes Morpheus is the main character but often he is a peripheral figure and occasionally doesn’t feature at all. Morpheus is part of a family known as the Endless, the others being Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (who was once known a Delight) and these siblings often feature in the comic.
Norman Mailer described The Sandman as “a comic book for intellectuals” (Anderson, Porter (July 30, 2001). It has won more than 26 Eisner awards, the World Fantasy Award (for the issue “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) and in 2005 IGN declared it the best Vertigo comic ever. The Sandman was one of the first graphic novels to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, others being Maus, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. The Sandman is a significant text in Popular Culture which has influenced not only the comic book medium since but many other Pop Culture works.
Trends and Fads
The term ‘comic book’ is very broad encompassing, as it does, texts as diverse as Garfield, Maus Tintin and American Splendour. Conventions include the the use of sequence of frames or panels that represent chronologically ordered scenes and the employment of speech bubbles. The Sandman can be most closely related to, and grew out of, a sub-genre of comic books, superhero comics. In fact, Morpheus is a re-imagining of a superhero that first appeared in comics in 1939, a masked vigilante bearing a ‘gas gun’ that could impel criminals to tell the truth.
Fans of superhero comics can be considered a sub-culture. However this sub-culture has had a significant influence on mainstream popular culture, in the form of television and film, almost from its inception. The first of many Superman feature films, Superman and the Mole Men, was released in 1951 and a camp television series based around Batman was produced in the 1960s. Developments in comic books have influenced more widely popular media: for instance, beginning in the 1980s a much darker view of Batman in the comics, most closely associated with the four issue comic book series The Dark Knight Returns written by Frank Miler and published in 1986, influenced Tim Burton’s 1989 film Batman. In the last several decades, the two main comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, have worked closely with film companies to produce very many films set in respectively the DC and Marvel universes. Although comic book readers constitute a sub-culture, developments in this sub-culture often impact on mainstream culture.
The Sandman, together with other seminal works of the 1980s such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen, were at the vanguard of a trend in comic books towards much greater sophistication. They were innovative – and by ‘innovative ‘ I do not mean that they improved comic books but rather that they performed something new, something novel. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, history and literature. For example, the issue "August", which concerns the Roman emperor Augustus, stays remarkably close to historical ‘facts’ about him, including rumours existing during his rule that he had been sexually abused or raped by his uncle Julius Caesar when young (see The Annotated Sandman, Klinger, 2012, p. 251). The sophistication of The Sandman and other works broadened the appeal of comic books, expanding an audience that had once comprised only pre-adolescent and adolescent boy to include women and mature readers. The success of The Sandman can principally be attributed to word-of-mouth recommendations; it was, to begin with, a true underground sensation.
The impact that The Sandman has had on mainstream popular culture is exampled by the fact that a television series Lucifer has recently been produced featuring a character invented by Gaiman. Lucifer features in the Sandman story "Season of Mists" in which he abdicates his position as ruler of Hell; likewise in the TV series Lucifer, Lucifer abdicates his throne and moves to Earth. The screenplay for Lucifer sometimes directly quotes passages from The Sandman. In 2013, reports that The Sandman itself was to be adapted into a film directed by Joseph Gordon–Levitt were floated but in 2016 Gordon-Levitt dropped out citing ‘creative differences’. It does not seem the series will be made into a film anytime soon.
The Sandman heralded a trend in comic books and graphic novels towards greater sophistication and widened the audience for comic books by appealing to girls, women and adults. This was a trend, not a fad – it is still evident today. It paved the way for other comics that tell supernatural, fantastical stories that are not simply battles between good and evil but are rather complex and nuanced graphic literature, examples including The Invisibles, Preacher and Transmetropolitan. The Sandman is not a superhero comic but it is important to remember that it evolved out of the superhero genre – characters from the DC Universe such as Batman villain Dr Destiny, and Superman and Batman themselves, occasionally appear in it. It was part of a revolution in comic books that forced cultural commentators to take comic books seriously.
Popular Icons
In popular culture studies, a distinction is drawn between icons and symbols. An icon is a visual representation of a real person or thing while a symbol is a sign that designates an abstract concept – for example, an image of the statue of liberty stands for the promise of American freedom. An icon resembles in key ways the person or thing it represents but a symbol’s relationship to what it signifies is arbitrary, and based on consensus convention. Icons are often but not always celebrities.
Neil Gaiman can himself be considered an icon, and the internet contain numerous images of him. Gaiman acquired his celebrity status not only for his authorship of The Sandman but also for other comics he has worked on and for the fantastical novels, such as American Gods and Stardust, that he has written since. It is rare for an author to acquire iconic status – although Joe Moran has discussed literary celebrity with respect to authors John Updike, Philip Roth and Kathy Acker (Turner, 2004). Iconic status requires some pubic familiarity with the icon’s appearance and authors can be shy. Another author apart from Gaiman who may, perhaps, have iconic status is Stephen King. James Joyce can also be considered an icon although, if we wish to draw a distinction between high culture and popular culture, Joyce would probably be regarded as a high culture icon rather than a popular culture icon.
However, the imagery most associated with The Sandman is not pictures of its author but rather pictures of characters from the comic. It is not uncommon for fans to put up posters of Dream, Death or Delirium on their bedroom walls. Can these characters perhaps be considered iconic? This question raises a problem, a long standing issue in analytic philosophy, the issue of whether it is possible to make true statements about fictional entities. Is the proposition “Othello is a Moor” (or the proposition “Dream kills his son Orpheus”) true or false? This problem bedevils literary criticism. One partial-solution is Meongiansm, the doctrine that existence is a property that objects can either have or not have. Just because Dream does not literally exist, and has never existed, does not mean that we cannot accord him, in a way, iconic status, that he cannot be represented through imagery. Most people know Marilyn Monroe solely from representations of her and the same can be said for Morpheus. And many of The Sandman’s most passionate fans probably relate to characters like Dream and Death as though they are real people.
If we allow that the central characters in The Sandman can be in a way iconic we can discuss meanings associated with their images. There is considerable variation in the way the characters are represented depending on the artist who is depicting them – Delirium in particular varies wildly. However there is some continuity in how other major characters are presented. Mopheus is always pale and skinny, almost always wears black and has an unruly shock of black hair. He closely resembles Robert Smith from The Cure as Smith appeared in the 1980s. Death, represented as a foxy young woman, is also presented solely in black and white, is first represented (in “The Sound of her Wings”) in a black singlet and black jeans and wears an ankh around her neck. Representations of Dream and Death align them closely with the Goth subculture. The relationship between The Sandman and this subculture is not just iconographical but thematic, a shared focus on death, romance and the supernatural or mystical. The Sandman can be considered a a cultural point-of-reference for this subculture.
If we can allow not only Gaiman but the characters he invented iconic status, it is permissible to wonder if we can perhaps not also grant them celebrity status. In Understanding Celebrity (Turner, 2012), Turner proposes that although celebrity is often perceived as a natural quality certain individuals posses, a kind of charism or aura perceptible when these individuals are physically present, it is in fact manufactured by the mass media. In today’s world, in particular, people can be famous simply for being famous. Turner summarises his introductory discussion of celebrity in the following way. “Celebrity, then, is a genre of representation and a discursive effect; it is a commodity traded by promotions, publicity, and media industries that produce these representations and their effects; and it is a cultural formation that has a social function we can better understand.” (p.9) Hollywood stars are known not only for the roles they play in films but for their privates lives, lives made public by mass media such as women’s magazines and newspapers. The discourse of celebrity is based on the assumption that there is a simple, unproblematic relationship between representations of a person and that person’s true self, between what is said about a person and who that person is; critics of celebrity, such as Turner, show that this relationship is neither simple nor unproblematic. We can apply this theoretical perspective to The Sandman. The characters Dream and Death are famous, to be sure, but they exist only in the form of representations, only as a discursive effect. There is no reality behind the images. It is perhaps to stretch the meaning of the terms ‘icon’ and ‘celebrity’ to say that these terms apply to the characters Gaiman invented, but it is surely true to say that fans of The Sandman often relate to them a little as though they were real people.
Gender
The issue of gender, along with issues of sexuality, feature strongly in The Sandman. Not only does the series often incorporate gay, lesbian and trans-gender characters, many of the stories feature female protagonists. Gaiman evidently believes that there are male and female stories and tried to alternate between one and the other. In an interview, Gaiman has said, “Sandman was always designed to move from male stories to female stories.” The idea that stories themselves are gendered appears explicitly, for instance, towards the end of the series "World’s End". In this collection, a group of travellers stranded in an magical Inn tell stories to each other to pass the time. A women, Charlene Mooney, comments after hearing the others’ stories, “I’ll tell you something else I noticed. There aren’t any women in these stories. Did anyone else notice that?” Jim, a girl who has cross-dressed as a boy to work on a merchant vessel, says “But, well. What about me, missie? There’s me. There was my story. That was a woman’s story.” Charlene replies, “Oh, please. Look, girl, the whole point of your story is that there wasn’t a woman in it. Just a ship full of sailors, and a giant dick thrusting out of the ocean.”
Gender seems to be of significant interest to Gaiman and this has not gone unrecognised. In “The Sand/wo/man: The Unstable Worlds of Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman Series” (Brisbin and Booth, 2013) the authors relate The Sandman to Judith Butler’s theory that gender is performative.
"Of particular interest in Sandman is the way that Gaiman renegotiates the traditional notions of gender in society and presents a practical representation of the same type of theoretical gender fluidity developed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. Although it’s doubtful that Gaiman deliberately referenced Butlerian theory in his graphic novel, both authors do seem to have a similar agenda in terms of queer theory revisionism. Indeed, Gaiman’s work, written around the same time as Butler published her influential treatise on gender performativity, illustrates the notion that sex and gender are social constructs which inherently lead to ideological oppression. To overcome this oppression, society must examine and tear down these constructs, which have become basic to our identities and seem innate to the human condition. But, as both Gaiman and Butler argue, gender appearances are little more than artificial constructs." (p.21)
Towards the end of the essay, the authors make this bold claim. “Throughout Sandman, Gaiman offers a number of well-illustrated critiques of gender roles and sexual norms, and becomes an advocate for a queer lifestyle.” (p. 32) This conclusion is highly questionable.
It seems plausible to believe that Gaiman includes queer and transexual people not to present positive representations of the ‘queer lifestyle’ but for the same reason he presents serial killers and scenes of graphic horror and rape – because it disturbs and titillates, because it is edgy. Comic books of the superhero and post-superhero variety, even ones as sophisticated as The Sandman, trade on binary dualisms, on violence and sex, and representations of queer and transgender people constitute another kind of violence. It seems that the maintenance of gender and sexual boundaries require violence and The Sandman is often violent.
An important story-arc that involves gender, one that Brisbin and Booth discuss, is "A Game of You". In this story, Barbie is a girl who, in her dreams, was once the princess of a fantasy world known as the Land, but has been cut off from it for a long time. Since then she has suffered a crisis of identity. The Land, though, has continued to exist without her and has been taken over by an evil being known as the Cuckoo. One of her dream friends travels to the waking world to find Barbie and, shortly after, she returns to the Land and she and her dream companions journey to the “shining sea” where they confront the Cuckoo. This series is the closest The Sandman ever comes to a traditional fantasy story, involving as it does a quest, but is highly unusual, even disturbing, because all Barbie's companions are killed one by one and at the end the Cuckoo, the arch-enemy, actually wins, destroying the Land and flying away to lay eggs in other children’s minds.
In "A Game of You", it Gaiman suggests that not only are stories gendered but so are dream-worlds. Towards the end the Cuckoo delivers the following speech to Barbie: “Boys and girls are different, you know that? Little boys have fantasies in which they’re faster, or smarter, or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities, and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectacled, rejected Perry Porter is secretly the Amazing Spider. Gawky, bespectacled, unloved Clint Clark is really Hyperman. Yes? […] Now little girls, on the other hand, have different fantasies. Much less convoluted. Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen, their real parents, will take them back to their land, and then they’ll be happy for ever and ever. Little Cuckoos.” This passage is fascinating not only because it refers metatextually to comic book history, a history of superhero stories enjoyed solely by boys, that occurs in what is evidently a ‘girls’ story’, but also because it implies an absolute gender distinction. This is very far removed from Butler’s idea that gender is performative
Barbie has friends in the real world who live in the same apartment building as her, a lesbian couple, an immortal witch called Thessaly and pre-operative transexual who goes by the name Wanda. The three women harness the magic of the moon to travel into Barbie’s dream world to try to rescue her but Wanda, although he identities as a woman, is unable to accompany them because Thessaly’s gods do not recognise her as a female, instead seeing him as a man. Gaiman has received significant criticism in the years since for this narrative decision and replied to it in the following way:
Lots of readers assumed that that was my position too, because who
could argue with an opinion shared by an ancient witch and a
lunar god? In fact, my feeling was always that that’s an opinion
the gods can take up their sacred recta. I feel the story makes clear
that Wanda considers herself a woman; and that, at the end, Death
does too. To my mind, that’s all that matters. (Bender, 126)
Gaiman’s response requires some comment. Even while defending himself from charges of bigotry, Gaiman makes a homophobic slur, saying, in effect, that the gods can ‘take it up their arses’. Gaiman’s real position is probably more ambivalent than either his detractors or his exponents appreciate.
Those who have criticised Gaiman for this decision misunderstand what story-tellers do. In a story, a story teller presents two contradictory ideas at once and this is what Gaiman is doing. On the one hand, Gaiman is arguing for an essentialist perspective on gender; on the other he is presenting a Butlerian view that gender is performative. The first position is represented by the Cuckoo and the second is represented by Wanda. It is significant that, at the end of the story, the Cuckoo wins and Wanda dies. It is significant also that when Wanda dreams, his dreams are inspired by superhero comics not fantasy realms. Perhaps what we would like to believe about the world is not the world’s truth. However, after Barbie attends Wanda’s funeral, she crosses out the name ‘Alvin’, his/her birth name written on the tombstone and writes Wanda instead in red lipstick. Later she has a dream in which she sees Wanda, accompanied by Death, as a genuine woman. Perhaps Gaiman is saying that Wanda couldn't be a woman when alive but only when she is dead.
Brisbin and Booth discuss two of the Endless, Desire and Destruction. Desire is interesting from a gender perspective because he/she is literally androgynous, sometimes appearing as a man, sometimes as a woman. Brisbin and Booth say of Desire: “He/she is an authority, not a subordinate. When this masculine perspective is coupled with a feminine fixation on love and romance, the reader is presented not just with the physicality of an amorphous sexuality,
but also with fluid cultural characteristics of a queer gender. Desire is nothing if not a Butlerian ideal.” Brisbin and Booth imply that Desire is a kind of role model for queer or transgender people, but this misses the point entirely because, throughout the entire run of the Sandman, Desire is presented unsympathetically. S/he is not fixated on love and romance, rather s/he is spiteful, vindictive and capricious, and is continually plotting to destroy Dream. Brisbane and Booth also discuss Destruction, perhaps because he is the most masculine of the Endless, but I would like instead to focus on Death, and compare her to Desire. Death is also an authority, is older and has more power than either Dream or Desire and is even given to teasing her younger siblings, yet she is unmistakably and essentially always feminine. Death is always presented sympathetically. Through Death, Gaiman is not presenting the idea that gender is performative; rather he is broadening or redefining the term ‘female’ to make it more inclusive, to show that women can have power and remain feminine.
Then there is the Sandman himself. Morpheus takes on many guises – he can be African or even a cat– yet he is always male and always heterosexual. Early issues present him as someone quite frightening and someone absolutely committed to his responsibilities as Dream King but as the series goes on, we find he has some human qualities. Over the course of his existence, he has had a number of relationships with women. He will fall for a woman, be with her for a while, be jilted and have his heart broken and then decades or centuries later try again. In "Brief Lives", after Thessaly leaves him, Morpheus makes it rain in the dream kingdom for weeks. This quality in Dream – his need to be loved, his capacity to love and his grief when love ends – is often seen as a female quality, “a feminine fixation on love and romance” (to quote Brisbin and Boon again) but by making Dream a romantic, Gaiman is not trying to feminise Dream. Rather, just as he sought to broaden the term ‘feminine’ to show that women could be powerful, he is attempting to expand the term ‘masculine’ to show that it can encompass weakness.
The Sandman is very much concerned with gender but it does not present gender as performative, not does it subvert or deconstruct gender roles. To say that Gaiman is “an advocate for the queer lifestyle” seems patently silly. Rather Gaiman maintains and even strengthens the binary opposition while subtly redefining the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Gaiman does not espouse the idea that gender is biological or anatomical. The Sandman is steeped in mythology, magic and fantasy, and seems to present an almost Jungian conception that gender is a quality of the soul.
Conclusion
The Sandman is at once a work of high literature and an important popular culture text, leading the way in a trend in comic books towards greater sophistication. Images of Gaiman and the characters he created circulate widely and are often instantly recognisable. Thematic concerns in The Sandman have received much scholarly analysis and some of its deeper meanings are still unrecognised.. It is a truly a benchmark work.
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