I keep thinking about how funny the New York cover with Neil Gaiman is (on the left). I felt compelled to make that version with the Master from Doctor Who last night. This is kind of separate from what I think of Neil Gaiman or any of his work but just my general compulsion to mock manipulation in media. They chose the picture showing he has bad posture, so they know how they want you to make up your mind.
I still think the evidence against him is extremely weak at best (I've gone over that already) but I do find it ominous that he's gone completely quiet this year and no-one seems willing to say anything in his defense, unless you count Tori Amos saying, "That's not the Neil I knew," when prompted in a Guardian interview. Amanda Palmer, his estranged wife who's also had allegations levelled at her, has spoken publicly about how difficult it's been for her to be cancelled and has posted photos of herself with an assemblage of celebrities to show that she does have friends and a support base. Gaiman seems to be going it alone and I have to suspect that's at least partially his choice. I wonder if he'd gotten tired of being a celebrity and in some small way saw this as an opportunity to get away from it all.
Anyway, I still think his Sandman series from the '90s is among the best comics I ever read. I remember Fridays, pay day, going straight to the mall and buying the next collected volume and devouring the whole thing. His work in subsequent years has been a mixed bag for me and I felt the American Gods television series and the second season of Good Omens even more so seemed like they came from writers who were deeply out of touch. How much of that is his fault, I don't know. But I have Netflix again for the moment and over the weekend I finally started watching season 2 of Netflix's Sandman adaptation.
It's close enough to the original, and the performances are good enough, that I find it engrossing. All the divergences from the source material I've been able to spot have degraded it. I've watched three episodes so far which cover the Season of Mist collection, the story in which Lucifer gives Morpheus the key to Hell and he has to decide whom to pass it on to. He, meanwhile, is on a quest to save a woman he condemned to Hell for 10,000 years. A lot of people complained about this aspect of the story, which was introduced in season one, but one of the things I really liked about the comics is that it felt like Gaiman was writing the Endless, his pantheon of anthropomorphised concepts; Dream, Desire, Destiny, Delerium, Destruction, Despair, and Death; as they were throughout history, not merely as they are to-day. So when Morpheus, Dream, condemned Nada, he was operating from an infant form of human morality that is unimaginably different and more primitive than we have to-day. That's how gods behaved back then. Think of the Old Testament or Zeus. But a failing of the show is its fundamental shying away from that. A flashback to Nada's country in the past was changed from an early agrarian culture to what one article called "steampunk"--though to me it looked more like simply a standard, cheap, high fantasy rig, one that doesn't differ much fundamentally from modern culture. Yes, it's probably impossible to imagine the past with complete accuracy but the attempt can be much more interesting than what the show manages to offer.
When Morpheus does finally reunite with her, she certainly doesn't seem anything like someone who's been tormented for 10,000 years and, in that scene, he does not seem like an anthropomorphised version of human dreams. He stumbles through his apology and she indignantly chastises him for his wording. The tone of the conversation is more like he bailed on the speakeasy when the cops were raiding it and she had to spend the night in jail. Think of articles or documentaries you've read or seen about people who spent two years locked in a basement or people who were held captive for ten years. They undergo profound physical and psychological changes. If you're not going to attempt to show something like that, there's no reason to introduce the concept of 10,000 years of torment in the first place.
Some viewers complained about Death being played by a black woman when she was a white woman in the comic. What bugged me is that the white actor plays Dream in all his dialogue with Nada. There are brief flashes of Dream as a black man, but they're so brief that they're confusing more than successful in conveying the idea from the comic that the Endless appear to be beings from whatever community the beholder belongs to. Which makes sense. When Nada sees Dream take the form of a human, she's never even seen a white man before. He's not really a man, he's a concept, so I always liked how he and his siblings were reflections of the people and animals they interacted with. Outside of those interactions, depictions of the Endless as goth white people frankly seemed to me an intentional reflection of the author.
But enough of the dialogue is close to the original that enjoyed it. The fun of reading the comic was in looking at it two ways at once, as both a fantasy story about these powerful characters in negotiation over a realm, but also as a complex metaphor for how these concepts were operating in the real world. I look forward to seeing the rest.
Sandman is available on Netflix.
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