A Retrospective on Neil Gaiman's Sandman

Upon hearing of a Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" comic books or graphics novels or what you will, I would be remiss in my duties as a critic to not reread them for a review.

But that is what I am doing. My apologies.

I forgot who recommended "Sandman". Unfortunately for me, I acquired information as a teenager largely through the internet. It would have been some geek culture site. I picked it up some time during my junior or senior year of high school, that period of time when I hungered for material that was more complicated than "Harry Potter" or "Eragon". Those were the awkward years of Joseph Heller, Vonnegut, "Fences", Alan Moore and Radiohead. I got into "One Piece" and "Naruto" during this period of time, eugh. Once I had, on Harold Bloom's commendation, gotten around to William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" - a book he claimed is the language's best, which claim, as much as Anse Bundren's music still haunts me, makes the language and Bloom look poorer - at the tip end of my senior year, I would become obsessed with new things: not with the quest for a supposed human darkness, but with the quest for artistic greatness. Several soul-searching years later, it would turn out to be the path in error, though it all worked out as it was the right direction. Not so much that greatness doesn't exist, but the greatness that society appraises and prizes is not the greatness that art demands, which demands furthermore are, well, quite a lot to ask for and perhaps improper for many people to accept the yoke for. All to say, it is embarrassing to recount how much this 18 year old salivered over the Nobel Prize in Literature, which is really just a collector's item on par with the Sacagawea coin. Bloom lapsed into William Gass who had quite a troublesome project with this pupil.

That is to say I have rejected almost everything from my youth: Heller, August Wilson, "Inherit the Wind" and Alan Moore. And I have, more or less, rejected Neil Gaiman. But only half.

On reflecting on the series and revisiting some of the books - of which I have all of the volumes - I can safely conclude that Neil Gaiman is not a good writer per se. I understand he has won Hugo and Eisner awards and the British National Book of the Year, as well as his most profound prize, a MasterClass course in storytelling, because any YouTube video guaranteeing you greatness is surely not a scam. When I say Gaiman is not a good writer, I mean he's not very particular about how he constructs sentences and paragraphs. I get the sense he "feels them out". He is no Charles Dickens or Henry James. He is certainly not Shakespeare, who appears frequently, with delight, as a character in "Sandman".

Take, for example, this piece of dialogue from Volume 2, "The Doll's House", in which Rose and her mother are traveling to England to meet an unknown benefactor. They are attended by a solicitor, Holdaway.

Rose (awaking): Mph. Gotta be this traveling. 'nother weird dream. Ooh.

Rose: Like a fairy tale. Weird people. Kings n' goblins...

Rose: Looking at me...

Mother: Come on, hon. You're still half asleep. We're here.

Mother: Say! Your client - does she own all of this?

Holdaway: No, Mrs. Walker. This is a private nursing home for the elderly. My client is merely a resident.

Holdaway: Shall we go in?

Rose: ...What's an "annulet"?

Mother: A what?

Holdaway: It's a kind of ring, I believe. Old word. An unusual thing to want to know.

Holdaway: Where did you run across a word like that, girlie?

Rose (thinking): I was right. Holdaway was a total bozo.

Rose: I don't know... I think it was something in my dream.

Rose: And - please don't call me "girlie".

Rose: I'm twenty-one, and I wouldn't have liked it when I was ten.

His dialogue tends to be very wordy without reaching the point, which in itself would not be a problem if he did not pad it out with verbal tics and neurotic musings.

Furthermore, the one subject he always returns to is: sex, sex, sex. I have no objection with sexuality of course, but his characters are ruled more by their passions than by any sense of logic, which Neil would assert is the case for most human beings, though it is not. All of his characters are centered on either side of the immeasurable gulf of pleasure and duty; there can be no in-between, unless having sex is your duty. It's very odd how simplistic his - and his mentor, Alan Moore's - characters are; they are only one step above Eiichiro Oda's pirates playing wuxia in that they actually explore the darker aspects of human nature, though evidently so irredeemably dark as to be positively kohl-tinged gothic.

I tend to skim chapters as a result. But I open the book. And not simply for studying; where Neil Gaiman may not succeed - he certainly does not fail - at specific details, he gets the big picture right.

The big takeaway is, "Sandman" is weird.

The whole concept is weird, and it only gets weirder. Its origin is anachronistic: Morpheus, our protagonist, began as a superhero in the same universe as Mister Miracle, Martian Manhunter and Scarecrow. He eventually transforms into an anthropomorphic representation of "dreams" (whatever dreams are; in the first volume Neil claims hopes and desires are dreams, and not, well, hopes and desires, and the claims over time get somewhat more outlandish). This is not important. What's important is that, given this transition of the character, "Sandman" enters a worthy episodic format.

Morpheus becomes the lynchpin for all of these stories that revolve around the theme of... well, stories. As mentioned, he hangs out with Shakespeare, seeing him through "Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest", his last. He attends serial killer conventions. In the longer stories, he traverses the fantasy world created by a child now a woman living in a less-than-ideal real world and, most memorably, receives the key to Hell, which has a horde of buyers.

The range of his ideas is enormous, even though their execution is not precise. Unlike other short story writers, who can't see beyond the passions of day to day, Neil's subject matter includes the issue of creation and identity. He may paint these delicate subjects with a broad brushstroke, but he arrives to something that is interesting and worth analyzing by itself, though it may be obscured.

His stories are meta and yet still operate as stories. Clearly, he has read Campbell's "A Hero With A Thousand Faces" at least once - his mythological characters are well aware of what role they play in their stories, and yet that self awareness gives them power within their predestined roles. This works beautifully for the last two volumes, where every character senses they are heading towards an unavoidable tragedy but are unable to defy the machinations of nature around them.

And if Neil Gaiman is a master at anything, it is plotting stories. In literature, plot is not as important as raw expression; in popular fiction, as depicted on television and on film, plotting is everything. Again, a clear student of "A Hero With A Thousand Faces", he understands a character's role extremely well, enough to know how to subvert it and bring the story to an unexpected but sensible conclusion. Sometimes his story still astounds. He is a master at the maxim of "The audience can't have everything they want, but they get what they need." Some characters face downfall and redemption - none truer than for the Corinthian's arc - and some just face downfall - his son Orpheus being the obvious one (which is really not a spoiler for anyone familiar with the myth).

The weakness of the Netflix adaptation is that it doesn't have Gaiman's mess - though the episodes are long, an hour each being too long honestly, they don't have Neil's rambling, fumbling dialogue, and they don't have his formless philosophy and therefore pessimism. They are, as expected from Netflix, tame. They advantage almost solely from Neil's airtight plot structure. For me, who had once been obsessed with the series, it's my first "'member?" adaptation; having experienced this, I can safely say I will never understand the starry-eyed nostalgia for "Star Wars" and other properties. I have the comics. It's fine.

I have moved on from those writers of my teenage years: Alan Moore's sexual deviancy; Radiohead's angst; Heller's absurd humor, though only partially, for I love me the Jew's self-deprecation. Gaiman is the only one, for the qualities above, who really stuck to me. Perhaps I should not make fun of his MasterClass after all. The lessons are simple yet surprisingly nuanced: fail early, fail often, better to fail than to succeed (though it doesn't hurt to win once in a while to show that you can), try and try again, be weird, be daring, be you.