The Books Of Magic, Book Two

The DC Comics character, Deadman, is a ghost who acts in the world by temporarily possessing living bodies. During Neil Gaiman's The Books Of Magic, Book Two, Deadman addresses Tim Hunter several times from different bodies, under his original name of Boston Brand.

John Constantine to Tim:

"I said I'd be introducing you to a few people, didn't I? Well, most of them live in America, so that's where we're going."
- Neil Gaiman, The Shadow World (New York, 1990), p. 2.

In other words, DC Comics are published in the US so most of their characters live there! British writers, Moore and Gaiman, created the British characters, Constantine and Hunter.

Constantine elaborates:

"...when I was a kid, I thought America was a magic land...They had all this incredible stuff, you know, pizzas, and fire hydrants, and Hollywood, and the Empire State Building. And they had superheroes, and magic, and aliens, and, I dunno, all we had was Supercar." (p. 4)

"Supercar" was before Tim's time. Constantine must be referring to the TV series, produced in the UK, not to any real Supercar, because the series was set in the US.

In Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion, Neil Gaiman says:

"...there was a generation in the UK who'd grown up reading DC Comics from a bizarre perspective...The idea of a place that looked like New York, the idea of fire hydrants and pizzerias, was as strange to us as the idea that anyone would wear a cape and fly over them."
-The Sandman Companion (New York, 1999), p. 20.

Reality, Gaiman's experience, and fiction, Constantine's experience, overlap.

The two Brits visit the stage magician, Zatanna, daughter of Zatarra, seen in Book One. Tim had seen Zatanna on Jonathan Ross, "...that guy who does Letterman in England."  (The Shadow World, p. 34) Ross reads comics, knows Gaiman and would certainly interview Zatanna if she visited the UK so that, here again, reality and fiction come very close.

Describing the DC character, the Spectre, Constantine tells Tim:

"...sometimes it's practically the most powerful thing in the universe. Sometimes it's little more than a bloke in white tights and a green hood. It's been up and down the occult league tables faster than a whore's drawers." (p. 11)

Please, Constantine, this is a comic book about magic and Tim is twelve. What he is describing here is the ways that different writers have treated the Spectre.

In the US, they meet or at least see:

Boston Brand;
Madame Xanadu;
the Spectre;
Doctor Fate;
Baron Winter (in fact, they visit Winter's house where Zatarra and Sargon died in a seance);
Jason Blood (Constantine had consulted Blood about the Lupus affair which, according to The Sandman, took him to Alaska for six months);
Doctor Thirteen, the debunker;
Zatanna;
Tala, a queen of evil working as a waitress between engagements;
Tannarak, owner of the Bewitched Club where Tim suddenly realizes that even the animal-headed people are not wearing masks;
the Wizard, Zatarra's former opponent;
Felix Faust, a Justice League of America villain;
Hyacinth and Leander, a two-headed guy who may or may not have appeared before.

Continuity

In the introduction to his Swamp Thing Annual story, Neil Gaiman writes:

"Firestorm the Nuclear Man was Captain Atom until the day when I sat down to write the story. Continuity had changed. Some of the Firestorm word balloons were rewritten by other people a day or so before it was printed. Continuity had changed.

"The idea of writing something which owed nothing to anyone else's continuity became increasingly enticing."

- Neil Gaiman, Midnight Days (New York, 1999), p. 16.

Sure, but I think it worked this time. Captain Atom and Firestorm are two nuclear-powered superheroes. It does not affect Gaiman's story if someone else rewrote a few parts of Firework's dialogue to keep them in continuity.

I am mainly impressed by the fact the story succeeds on both levels. It fits perfectly into the DC Comics continuity of the time and it also is a memorable work whose quality transcends and outlasts that continuity. Gaiman, like Alan Moore, simply writes on a different level. Instead of "In the Batcave...," he gives us, "There was a man who lived in darkness..." (quoted in the previous post).

Another brilliant fusion of Gaiman's own story-telling with continuity occurs when Mr E tells Tim Hunter:

"I met the Superman once. He had a firm handshake."
- Neil Gaiman, The Books Of Magic: The Road To Nowhere (New York, 1991), p. 15.

I should think he would have. That single reference would have sufficed. However, E, conscious of his own blindness, adds:

"He was a good man and powerful. I was not jealous of him. I did not envy his eyes, though they can see the very nuclei of atoms." (ibid.)

Can they? I am not sure that photonic sight works sub-atomically.

"Death Is Like This Cute Gothette"

Death is the best of the Endless. In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, the Endless are anthropomorphic personifications of aspects of consciousness:

the elder three (Destiny, Death, Dream);
the twins (Desire and Despair);
Delirium that was Delight;
the prodigal, Destruction.

My second favorite is Destiny. Death and Destiny are like the Silk Spectre II and the Dr Manhattan of the Endless. (Reference: Alan Moore's Watchmen.)

Because John Milton believed that sin caused death, he personified Death as a shapeless monster begotten on personified Sin by her single parent, Satan. Because Neil Gaiman believes that death defines life, he personifies Death as a beautiful young woman created by the universe. Like John Keats, we are "...half in love with easeful Death..." but with better reason. We have seen her. Anthropomorphic personifications make more sense in Gaiman's eclectic cosmology than in Milton's Biblical cosmology.

Despite being Death, she is cheerful, once or twice addressed as "Little Miss Sunshine." She lightens the mood of gloomy Dream. Because Dream is male and dark, "His Darkness, Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming," a darker Death, also male, would have been a bad idea.

One of the people collected by Death is a comedienne who makes a joke about the Batman. Because the DC Universe is a very big place, it is easy to forget that for them the Batman is not a fictitional character but a real person, although not quite a public figure because his identity is unknown. Like everyone else, Bruce Wayne attends Morpheus' Wake in the Dreaming.

This comic book dialogue is literature -

Death: Mostly, they aren't too keen to see me. They fear the sunless lands. But they enter your realm each night without fear.
Dream: And I am far more terrible than you, my sister.
-Neil Gaiman, Preludes And Nocturnes, New York, 1995, p. 227.

"...And There Is Death"

Superman began in 1938, Sandman in 1939, both during the Golden Age of Comics. That original Sandman was a vigilante like the Batman but was also part of the new superheroes genre initiated by Superman. Over that many decades, comic book characters appear in several versions.

Superman's comic book versions have been those associated with, in this order:

Earth 2;
Earth 1;
Earth DC/ "Man of Steel" miniseries;
"Birthright" miniseries;
the 52 multiverse;
the New 52 multiverse.

I think. I may have got it slightly wrong towards the end but you might detect my lack of interest in too many continuity changes happening too quickly for any sort of narrative continuity or plausibility.

The Sandman versions have been:

the Golden Age version;
Jack Kirby's different version of the 1970's;
Neil Gaiman's re-creation of the Kirby version in which the title, The Sandman, and the central character's names, Morpheus, Dream etc, diverge.

The Superman of Earth DC indirectly influenced Morpheus because that Superman's powers had been scaled down for plausibility whereas Gaiman, disagreeing with this, decided to make his Endless, including Dream, virtually omnipotent. I agree with DC that it was inappropriate that Superman, a physical being, had become infinitely fast, strong etc but I also fully accept Gaiman's different treatment of his metaphysical Endless.

A fact of life is that we all die permanently. A fact of comic book life is that central characters die temporarily. Monthly comic books overdo and cheapen everything, even the death and resurrection myth. In one Green Arrow comic, the regular return of the deceased had become such a routine occurrence that they even asked the embarrassing question, "How many of you were at my funeral?"

The Superman of the DC universe died in 1993 and Neil Gaiman's Morpheus/Dream died in 1995 but what a difference! Superman stayed dead or, later, presumed dead for most of '94 but then was back to normal with a complete loss of story direction whereas Morpheus stayed dead and his series ended but is permanently in print in collected editions. Thus, he is of much more enduring significance than any character who merely recurs in different versions in ephemeral monthly periodicals. There was a new Dream at the end of The Sandman but this was a new aspect, a different personality, with no memory of having been Morpheus who had permanently and irrevocably entered his sister's realm.

Imagine a version of Superman treated as seriously as Gaiman treated Morpheus. See my earlier post "Getting Superman Right."

Aeneas And Morpheus

I hope to learn enough Latin to read Virgil's Aeneid in the original. At present, I have read part of the Penguin Classics translation by WF Jackson Knight (Harmondsworth, 1982). The Introduction says that Virgil knew Augustus and foresaw that he would establish peace and order, which we see in Neil Gaiman's Sandman story, "August." It is possible that the poets Virgil and Horace influenced Augustus to rule more mildly in later life - in "August," he says that he has forgotten how many men he has had killed.

The Introduction also tells us that Jupiter and Destiny cooperated to help the Trojans.The early text refers directly to one of Gaiman's Endless and indirectly to a second. Juno hoped:

"...that Destiny might consent to her desire." (p. 27)

the word "...desire...," when written with a capital initial, is the name of another of the Endless as Gaiman told us in issue no 1 of The Sandman. The magician who has imprisoned Morpheus says:

"He had to be one of the Endless...so which one? Not Death. We knew that. Destiny, then? Desire? Dream was the only one that fitted the bill." (Neil Gaiman, Preludes And Nocturnes, New York, 1995, p. 27)

Sandman readers are bound to be interested to see Destiny in the Aeneid. In fact, Destiny is the one of the Endless who was shown to be in the DC Universe before Gaiman started writing The Sandman. He appeared in The History Of The DC Universe just after The Crisis On Infinite Earths and that appearance must have reflected some earlier participation in the then recently collapsed multiverse. DC Comics history assumes that the Greek myths were literally true.

Poul Anderson And Neil Gaiman

In Poul Anderson's "The Only Game In Town," the Time Patrol must prevent the Mongol invasion of North America. Kublai Khan and Marco Polo are mentioned. Rereading that reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman story about Marco Polo.

There are other parallels. In The Sandman, Shakespeare writes A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest for Morpheus. Anderson wrote A Midsummer Tempest about a parallel Earth where Shakespeare was the Great Historian, not a great dramatist, thus his characters really existed. That novel features Anderson's inn between the worlds where characters from different universes and fictions meet, as in Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End.

Anderson imagines a Roman in the reign of Augustus who speculates that the Empire might either conquer the whole world or, as then current policy suggested, stay approximately as it was. Gaiman shows us Augustus formulating the latter policy and tells us why he did it.

Both quote James Elroy Flecker, including "...the Golden road to Samarkand." Anderson refers to and quotes Kipling. Gaiman described his Sandman story, "Hob's Leviathan," as "...me doing Kipling..." Kipling has an Indian Prime Minister who becomes a mendicant. "Hob's Leviathan" has an Indian king who becomes a mendicant.

Fiction On Fiction

Neil Gaiman writes fictitious characters who speak about fiction:

Arion of Atlantis to Tim Hunter:

"...where humanity gets it wrong, by your time, is in imagining Atlantis as having any kind of quantifiable existence.
"Which of course it hasn't; not in the way they imagine, anyway.
"There have been an awful lot of Atlantises, will be quite a few more.
"It's just a symbol. A symbol of the art.
"The true Atlantis is inside you, just as it's inside all of us. The sunken land is lost beneath the dark sea, lost beneath the waves of wet, black stories and myths that break upon the shores of our minds.
"Atlantis is the shadow-land, the birth-place of civilization. The fair land in the West that is forever lost to us, but remains forever, true birth-place and true goal.
"It is Lyonesse, and Avalon, and Hy-Brasail."
- Neil Gaiman, The Invisible Labyrinth (New York, 1990), p. 27, panel 2.

There have been many Atlantises because every author imagines the lost island differently. Arion inhabits one DC Comics Atlantis but other versions have been visited, for example, by Doctor Who and a companion and by time travelers in Poul Anderson's The Dancer From Atlantis.

Titania to Tim Hunter:

"You wish to see the distant realms? Very well.
"But know this first: the places you will visit, the places that you will see, do not exist.
 "For there are only two worlds...your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy.
"Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there.
"These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain.
"They give your world meaning.
"They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?"

Tim: "No."

- Neil Gaiman, The Land Of Summer's Twilight (New York, 1991), p. 34, panels 2-5; p. 35, panel 1.

It is harder for Tim to understand because, although Titania says that his world is the real world, he also is a fictitious character visiting fictitious realms - so how is he to see the difference? Titania spells out that our real world would be meaningless if it contained no non-existent fictions.

Between Worlds

When a character moves between worlds, how does the author describe the transition? Sometimes, the character imagines another world, then enters it - and later wonders whether it was real - but usually the other world is unequivocally real. I will mention only a few examples from the works of three fantasy writers, CS Lewis, Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman.

Lewis' most famous entrance to another world is a wardrobe but there is a better example in a later book. The characters look at a painting of the ship the Dawn Treader until it seems that the waves are moving, then they fall into the sea and are rescued by the ship's crew. Lewis never explains how a painting of a contemporary Narnian ship came to hang in an English house.

The hero of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, fighting Nazis on a Danish beach, finds himself in the Carolingian mythological universe. Later, mission accomplished in that universe, he returns to the Danish beach with no loss of time, like a returned ruler of Narnia.

In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Puck tells Prince Rupert of the Rhine's companion, Will Fairweather:

"'...to speak of inns and such - My friend, if sorely pressed for shelter, think of this. There is a tavern known as the old Phoenix, which none may see nor enter who're not touched by magic in some way. It flits about, but maybe you can use his ring to find it, or even draw a door towards yourselves...'" (pp. 55-56) (Oberon and Titania have given Rupert a magic ring.)

Sure enough, the ring lights the way to the inn which appears before Rupert and Will although it remains invisible to their Puritan pursuers. A regular of the Old Phoenix tells us:

"Look for it anywhere, anytime, by day, by dusk, by night, up an ancient alley or in a forest where hunters whose eyes no spoor can escape nonetheless pass it by unseeing...you must be alert for its fleeting presence..." (Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), p. 9).

This regular finds it many times, once unbelievably on ship at sea, another time more reasonably on a country road after dark where he knows that:

"The inn might waver from sight at any instant." (Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1996), p. 107)

It sounds like Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End:

"Up the lane aways is the Inn. You just have to be SURE it's there, though. If you AREN'T sure, then fizzlywinks, it's only goin to be fireflies and treeses" (Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 22.

One Worlds' End guest enters it in stages. Brant Tucker is driving to Chicago at night on the interstate. So far then he is travelling though not as yet between worlds. (However, his Earth is that of the DC Universe where anything not only can happen but routinely does happen.) Then:

he was very tired, so did he dream everything that followed?;
he didn't think it was weird when it started to snow in June;
a large, strange animal ran in front of the car (we see this because we are reading graphic fiction);
the car went off the road, across a field, down a hill and into an oak tree;
"Everything was dreamlike; everything felt unreal..." (p. 21);
Brant, carrying his unconscious co-driver, Charlene Mooney, could not find the road;
he wondered when the hallucinations began (p. 22);
he was directed to the Inn by an apparently disembodied voice (see above - the reader realises that the speaker is a hedgehog; regular readers recognize the speaking hedgehog from Gaiman's The Books of Magic);
Brant finds a country road;
at the end of the road, is a light;
first it is fireflies in a hedge, then it is the Inn.

I think that the transition between realities began with the apparent snow storm which, we learn, was a reality storm, stranding travellers from many realms in the Inn. A sailor's account is different:

"Y'see, there was a storm, come up out of nowhere at midnight - - we were swept onto the rocks where there shouldn't've been rocks neither, nohow." (p. 67)

Brant and the sailor then disagree about whether the date is June, 1993, or September, 1914.

And a Necropolitan says:

" 'A dark thunderstorm arose suddenly, and the brougham in which my companions and I were travelling was washed into a river.' " (p. 42)

Making an ordinary journey seems to be the beginning of the process. 

The landlady explains:

"This place is the Inn at the end of all worlds. None of you were BROUGHT here. Each of you was travelling, and was caught in an unseasonable storm of some kind. You made your way here by luck, and took refuge and advantage of the hospitality offered. And you WILL leave here, when the storm is over." (p. 139)

However, Charlene is allowed to stay to work in the Inn and we see her there in a later series, The Furies by Mike Carey. The characters offer different theories about what causes a reality storm. A common feature of the Old Phoenix and the Worlds' End is the telling of stories and some of these stories offer other routes between worlds:

"...the silver road...glittered and glimmered away beyond a street market." (Gaiman, p. 29)

The man who sees the silver road works in an office in a modern city where gravestones can have "...letters from forgotten alphabets..." (p. 28). That odd touch, if taken literally, means that the modern city is certainly not on any Earth like ours. The narrator of this story asks:

"Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?" (p. 28)

And that is where the other worlds are.

Graphic Intertextuality

I compared James Blish's prose fantasies, Black Easter and The Day after Judgement, with the Justice Society, Justice League, Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Sandman and Lucifer graphic fantasies by, variously, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, Mark Millar, Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman and Mike Carey (see here). All these works share the fantasy premise of the literal existence of supernatural beings. Such beings may be gods, angels, demons or new fictitious characters, in particular Gaiman's "Endless," who are anthropomorphic personifications of aspects of consciousness. Some of the Endless - Destiny, Death and Dream - have been personified before but never as well as here.

The graphic series listed are of two kinds: superheroes - the Justice titles; dark fantasy - the rest. Further, Hellblazer is not only dark fantasy but fantasy horror. Superheroes is a composite genre incorporating fantasy:

the origin stories of Wonder Woman and of Captain Marvel refer to classical gods;
Superman's origin is extraterrestrial, therefore science fictional, but he coexists with WW, Cap and other characters whose powers are magical, not scientific;
the earlier Hawkman's origin was not extraterrestrial but reincarnational;
the Spectre and Deadman are ghosts. 

In addition, Thomas' Last Days of the Justice Society of America features the Aesir and Millar's Justice League: Paradise Lost features the angelic host which is why these two works are listed here.

In Black Easter, we are told that the demons are winning Armageddon because God is dead. In The Day After Judgement, Satan has become God but offers Godhood to mankind. In Gaiman's Sandman, Lucifer Morningstar retires as Lord of Hell. Thus, both Blish and Gaiman show us the Devil after he has ceased to be the Adversary, although they are different versions of the Devil. Blish shows us the Dantean Satan, albeit in a changed context, whereas Gaiman's Lucifer, especially as developed in the sequel by Carey, is dedicated to self-will, not to malice.

Blish's two fantasies refer to the Bible, Dante, Milton and CS Lewis. Moore and Gaiman also make scriptural and literary references. Additionally, the publishing schedule of comic books generates an indefinitely prolonged narrative that can become merely self-referential. A single company publishes several interconnected monthly titles for many years or, in some cases, decades. In the few works mentioned here, a continuous narrative stretches from the Spear of Destiny, which pierced Christ's side on the Cross, to a new universe with no Hell. Hitler uses the Spear to conjure Ragnarok. The Justice Society, merging with the Aesir, endlessly re-fights Ragnarok, thus indefinitely postponing its expected outcome, the destruction of this universe. Or so they think. That is where writer Roy Thomas leaves them.

Gaiman reveals that the endlessly re-fought Ragnarok, with its versions of Odin and the other Aesir, is a simulation in a transparent sphere held in the hand of the Odin who co-exists with the title character of Sandman, Dream of the Endless. Lucifer has retired, expelled the damned from Hell and given the Key of this now empty realm to Dream. Odin and others want the Key. Odin hopes that Dream will exchange the Key for the miniature Ragnarok. He is puzzled by the intrusion of human heroes into the sphere but hopes that Dream will be interested because one of these heroes is the earlier, very different, version of Sandman.

In Lucifer, the retired Lucifer must cope when God also retires and is succeeded, after some confusion, by his granddaughter who abolishes Hell. Thus, a fictional continuity with three authors - Thomas, Gaiman and Carey - indirectly links the Spear to the new universe. However, it is not necessary that anyone notice this. The reader of Lucifer need not remember or even have read Thomas' story. Events of comparable magnitude, like an attempt to destroy Heaven in Moore's Swamp Thing or the Swamp Thing becoming God in Millar's Swamp Thing, have occurred between the Second World War and Carey's Second War in Heaven but these also need not be remembered. 

Each story is worth reading in its own right and they present an interesting sequence if read successively but that sequence is very much in the background and for immediate story purposes might as well not be there. I have summarised some interconnected narratives that I have valued but they have been left behind by subsequent events that I have not read. Lucifer has gone but there is a new Dream and something else is happening with Swamp Thing. Comics continue and I might revisit them in future but for now I am re-reading Moore, Gaiman and Carey whose stories at least are of lasting value. 

Arthur And Merlin

I am reading JRR Tolkien's unfinished alliterative poem, The Fall Of Arthur (London, 2013), and reflecting on the continuation of the Arthurian legend into novels, films and TV series. Neil Gaiman's time traveling Tim Hunter meets the young Merlin in the past whereas CS Lewis' space traveling Elwin Ransom meets the revived Merlinus Ambrosius on Earth, then joins the undying Arthur on Venus. Gaiman's Neverwhere refers to Merlin's master, Blaise.

Tolkien wrote not a novel incorporating Arthur or Merlin but a poem in modern English though in ancient style:

                             "Time is changing;
"the West waning,  a wind rising
"in the waxing East. The world falters.
"New tides are running  in the narrow waters." (p. 32)

This rhythm recalled to my mind Gaiman's competition between Dream and Choronzon (although I am now less sure of the similarity):

Dream: I am a hunter, horse-mounted, wolf-stabbing.
Choronzon: I am a horsefly, horse-stinging, hunter-throwing. (etc)
- Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Preludes And Nocturnes (New York, 1991), p. 123.

Destruction And Mortality

(i) I said earlier that I thought that Destruction of the Endless was first named in Volume 7 of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series. This is not quite true. He appears and is introduced by his Greek name of Olethros in Volume 6, Fables And Reflections. However, we are not told what "Olethros" means and thus are not told which aspect of consciousness he personifies. We do not yet know who he is - although I do not remember noticing this on originally reading Volume 6.

(ii) Morpheus tells his son Orpheus, "You are mortal..." (p. 165). Is he? In this retelling of the myth, Orpheus' father is one of the seven Endless, who live longer than gods, and his mother is one of the nine Muses, who are goddesses of inspiration. So how can two immortals have a mortal son?

(iii) In "Orpheus," script writer Neil Gaiman and artists Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham beautifully retell the Orpheus myth and seamlessly incorporate it into Gaiman's new myth of the Endless. The seven Endless attend the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice. Does the presiding priest of a local deity know what beings are standing behind him?

Death debunks a myth:

"...Herakles was full of it. He just got dead drunk for a couple of weeks in Phrygia and told everyone he'd been to the land of the dead." (p. 173)

"Dead drunk"! Of course! Now we know! He could not really have gone to the land of the dead.

But Orpheus does, of course. Dream refuses to help but Olethros sends him to Teleute (Death) who tells him how to enter the underworld via Charon and Cerberus. When he is there, Persephone tells him that, although he has entered from Taenarum, Thrace is not hundred of leagues away because "All lands lie above the underworld." (p. 186) In other words, people die everywhere. Good fantasy writers, certainly including Gaiman, can express abstract truths, for example about death, as if they were concrete facts about places, in this case Hades.

The Greek myth of death expresses two truths (I think) about death. The dead are "Cold and pale immobile..." (p. 167). Thus, death is the absence of life. And they "...drink the waters of Lethe, that bring forgetfulness." (ibid.) Death is the loss of all faculties, including memory.

Dust Covers IV

The ten volumes of The Sandman by Neil Gaiman tell a long story in sequential graphic art. The one volume of Dust Covers by Dave McKean tells the parallel story of how McKean created fine art covers for all seventy five monthly issues of The Sandman and one Special. Each cover is displayed, often with comments by McKean, Gaiman or both. The book also includes other art, including covers of some of the ten collections.

With all this art plus the comments and the introductory comic strip written by Gaiman and drawn by McKean, Dust Covers is a substantial volume, guiding its readers through the history of a creative process.

A comic book cover usually shows the hero in action in the same kind of graphic art that is to be found within the book whereas McKean quickly dispensed with images of the central character and even with merely representational art. Not really reflecting on the covers, I had not realized that some of them had had to be constructed physically before being reproduced as cover illustrations. On the sides of the cover of no 1, ten shelves hold miscellaneous items, including a book entitled The Gates of Dawn, which is both an evocative verbal image and appropriate for a beginning. However, we could not have known, until Gaiman tells us in his first note for Dust Covers, that McKean had scrupulously erased the name of the publisher, Mills and Boon, in case it was taken to imply that The Sandman was a romance.

I took for granted that the figure on the cover of no 3 was the guest star of that issue, John Constantine, but had not known that it was also McKean's friend, Neil Jones, who had already modelled for McKean's Hellblazer covers. It is obvious that nos 14 and 16 show the Corinthian and Morpheus respectively but not, until McKean tells us, that both were modelled by Gaiman.

Good Omens

Good Omens is a TV series by Neil Gaiman based on a prose novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman so it is not comic-related except that Gaiman wrote comics. However, the cartoon credits and even the visuals with live actors generate a comics feel.

A former Doctor Who acts so well as a hip demon that he is scarcely recognizable.

Is the Antichrist necessary for Armageddon? Demons can break the rules. See "James Blish And The Antichrist," here.

Seventy Two Years

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, how long was Morpheus imprisoned? Gaiman gives a precise answer:

"...seventy-two years - ending in late 1988, when the series debuted."

- Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 1999), p. 235.

There is a hint of meta-fiction here. December 1988 is both when Gaiman's monthly Sandman comic book began publication and also when Morpheus resumed his activity in the world after a long, enforced absence. That absence is said to have begun in 1916 because Gaiman had decided that it was Morpheus' imprisonment that had caused the otherwise unexplained "sleepy sickness" that began in that year. It is strange, when reading about the unquestionably fantasy event of Morpheus' imprisonment, to be told that it is having observable effects in the public world of the Great War but it turns out that these "effects" are real, recorded events.

Morpheus' long absence explains why readers of DC universe continuity stories, which began to be recounted in 1935, have not heard of him before although they have encountered those inhabitants of his realm who previously hosted various horror titles. Thus, Gaiman retroactively makes his new series compatible with all the others, importantly including Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, which had recently revived Cain and Abel of the Houses of Mystery and Secrets.

Cain and Abel had hosted their Houses;
the Three Witches had hosted The Witching Hour;
Lucien had hosted Tales Of Ghost Castle;
a woman with a raven hosted Dark Mansion Of Forbidden Love;
Eve with a raven had appeared in Secrets Of Sinister House and Secrets Of Haunted House.

Thus, there were altogether four Houses (Mystery, Secrets, Sinister and Haunted, the latter two also with Secrets), one Castle (Ghost) and one Mansion (Dark). The Castle became Morpheus' while the women with ravens merged and retired to a cave. The Mystery and Secrets Houses remained in the Dreaming as way stations to Nightmare.

Having just reread the entire series, I am sure, without looking them all up, that I came across dialogue references to Morpheus having been imprisoned for sixty, seventy and eighty years, but this makes sense. People in conversation do not remember precise details and think in terms of round numbers. It would be very inauthentic dialogue in which every single person who referred to the lengthy imprisonment exactly remembered the precise figure of "seventy two years."

Probably many apparent inconsistencies in works of fiction can be ironed out if it is remembered that, even when they are not placed between inverted commas or inside speech balloons, most statements express a single character's point of view which is bound to differ from other povs. Thus, a medieval character in a historical novel by James Blish is said to "know" that comets are phenomena in the upper atmosphere. However, a contemporary novel and a futuristic sf novel complete the trilogy but their characters would not be said to "know" that about comets.

I am confident that Gaiman would deliberately write inconsistencies in his dialogues. In Worlds' End, he has the handsome cabin boy misquote a poem.

Gaiman's Sandman

I used to visit a nearby household regularly. I lent them all my Sandman collected volumes. Those copies stayed there and I bought new copies to have at home. I could thus read The Sandman either when visiting or at home. I said on facebook that, because I had reread the volumes so often, I owed Neil Gaiman another set of royalties. That was ticked "like" by Neil Gaiman.

The single story that I have reread most often is "August" in Fables And Relections but my favourite entire volume is Worlds' End. (Bryan Talbot art in both.) When I told a fellow sf fan that characters are stranded in the Inn of the Worlds' End by a reality storm, he commented, "That sounds like something out of Star Trek," and I then told him that one of the characters says, "That sounds like something out of Star Trek."

Thus, his response to the text was already incorporated into the text because our reality was one of those represented in the Inn.

The Books Of Magic, Book One

Warner Brothers publishes Harry Potter films and Tim Hunter comics. Potter and Hunter are British schoolboys with glasses and powerful magicians with owls. Neil Gaiman created Hunter for a four issue Prestige Format mini-series, The Books Of Magic, to define the place of magic in the DC Universe under the categories of past, present, future and the far lands, although this excludes extraterrestrial magic which had existed in the earlier, pre-Crisis, DC multiverse.

Hunter's mentors are the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, John Constantine and Mister E, three well-established characters and one who, at about the same time, appeared in his own miniseries. Constantine tells Tim:

"...don't try to bite me. There are things in my blood stream you really don't want in your mouth."
- Neil Gaiman, The Invisible Labyrinth (New York, 1990), p. 10.

In his own title, John Constantine: Hellblazer, Constantine received a blood transfusion from the demon Nergal and prevented a cult's divine incarnation by contaminating their Mary.

Tim tells the four-man "Trenchcoat Brigade" (p. 5) that he believed in magic when he was a kid and sometimes wishes "...there was magic..." (p. 11). Gaiman tells us elsewhere that he believed in the Sandman when he was a child and swore that he would always remember.

The Stranger shows Tim the past by time traveling invisibly, mostly without interacting. They see:

the void;
the beginning;
the silver city, which the Stranger cannot approach (in Alan Moore's Secret Origins story, the Stranger was a neutral angel, cast out by both sides after the War in Heaven);
Lucifer falling;
six archangels;
the molten Earth;
demons;
dinosaurs;
Arion of Atlantis, who addresses Tim without seeing or hearing him because he knows by spells that he is there;
cave magic;
the Nile;
the Yellow River;
a werewolf;
Pan;
the witch-queen;
Merlin, canny enough to see them;
Jason Blood;
medieval witchcraft;
the old religion in the forests and high places and beside the great stones;
Faerie leaving as science rises - a parallel with Poul Anderson's The Merman's Children;
Doctor Fate;
Zatara, who first appeared in Action Comics no 1, the same issue as Superman, and died at a seance led by Constantine in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing no 50;
Sargon the Sorcerer, who died at the same seance.

Listing the contents shows me that there is more in this one Book than I had realized.

Scripts And Strips

Comic book scripts, or excerpts from them, make for fascinating reading on the rare occasions when they are published. The script and the strip are two material stages in the transmission of images from the writer's mind to the readers' minds. The other stages are the writer's preliminary notes and sketched mini-comic, if any, then the penciled, inked, lettered and colored art. Maybe to appreciate the creative process fully, we should sometimes see all these stages. The words for captions and speech balloons are identical between script and strip whereas the visuals can differ in detail.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country (New York, 1995) collects four stories and the script for the first, "Calliope". Page 1, panel 2, shows Richard Madoc's study which, according to the script, contains bookshelves, desk, word processor, encyclopedias, maybe paintings, occasional small statues, an exterior door and "...a slim telephone on a table in one corner..." (p. 119 of the book; p. 2 of the script).

Since a comics script is also a letter of instruction to the artist, in this case Kelley Jones, Gaiman adds that all these details need not appear in this one panel:

"...DROP IT IN AS WE MOVE AROUND THE ROOM, LOOKING AT THESE PEOPLE." (ibid.)

Thus, here is an imaginary space, Madoc's study, initially existing only in Gaiman's mind. Gaiman not only describes this space to Jones but also advises him how to introduce it to Sandman readers. This introductory panel shows bookshelves, desk and word processor. The door and the telephone, not particularly "slim," appear in panel 4 of page 2. The study location is in several panels but many of these are close-ups on the characters not showing any background details.

A single comparatively minor space requires this amount of attention to detail although, of course, it is just one of many imaginary spaces, also including the interiors of Morpheus' castle, the Inn of the Worlds' End and a sailing ship.

The first exterior shot in "Calliope" is page 3, panel 4. Gaiman describes a London street, says that he will send photoreference and adds:

"I DOUBT THAT WE CAN SILHOUETTE HIM AGAINST THE SKYLINE, UNLESS HE'S ACTUALLY WALKING BESIDE THE THAMES HERE..." (p. 122/5)

In the comic, he is walking beside the Thames. It is extremely instructive to look back and forth between script and strip, checking for differences, but we would not be able to do this or to benefit from it on every occasion of reading a comic.

Midnight Days

Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days (New York, 1999), like Alan Moore's Across The Universe, collects its author's DC Universe short fiction. In Gaiman's case, these comprise:

a never before drawn or published Swamp Thing short story;
a Swamp Thing annual about what Swampy's friends did while he was time traveling in the monthly comic written by Rick Veitch;
a short story that completed the annual;
one issue of John Constantine: Hellblazer (thus, Gaiman wrote two comics about Constantine because this Alan Moore-created character also starred in The Sandman no 3);
Sandman Midnight Theatre, about the Golden Age Sandman meeting the imprisoned Dream of the Endless in 1939.

Thus, these five items represent only three previously published comics. The three issue Black Orchid mini-series would perhaps have been too long to include and also maybe was still in print at the time whereas Gaiman's Poison Ivy Secret Origins story, which tied into Black Orchid, should have been collected in Midnight Days. Gaiman had, at that time, developed a "...vegetable theology..." (p. 16) that would have linked Poison Ivy, Black Orchid and Swamp Thing had he, as intended, become a regular writer of Swamp Thing. Some of the connections are discernible in the works that he did write.

Also:
Wesley Dodds met Dream during his imprisonment;
Constantine met Dream shortly after his escape;
Constantine mentored Swampy;
Black Orchid consulted Swampy.

Thus, there is considerable connectivity between these characters.

The Last Sandman Story

"Don't judge a book by its cover."

My copy of Dave McKean's Dust Covers (New York, 1997) has a copy of Dust Covers on its cover.

Although a good cover draws us into a book, we soon learn that the interior art of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comic book series is not by the cover artist, McKean, but by diverse other excellent comic book artists. However, Dust Covers not only collects all of McKean's Sandman covers but also begins with "The Last Sandman Story," a new eight page comic strip written by Gaiman and drawn by McKean. Thus, in this case at least, the cover artist's recognizable style does continue beyond the cover and indeed throughout the volume.

Gaiman and McKean had agreed that this story should be "Something that had the kind of look that was of a piece with the covers." (p. 6) So, for once, we stay with the style of the cover art instead of leaving it behind as soon as we open the book.

They had also agreed to have "More prose than comics - one or two illustrations to a page." (ibid.)

pp. 6-8 and 12-13 each have two large non-sequential illustrations accompanied by substantial prose by Gaiman, not relating a new Sandman story but recounting childhood and adult experiences that had influenced the writing of The Sandman.The strip is "...anecdotal...," not "...something that extends any part of the story..." (ibid.)

I love the dust on the empty wine bottles in panel 2 of p. 6.

p. 9 shows a folded over page of an imaginary comic book with nine panels in which Gaiman, during a Hallowe'en parade in the Village, New York, converses with a man claiming to be the demon Choronzon. This is the only page with speech balloons. The meeting with Choronzon was one of the times, during the writing of The Sandman, "...when reality frayed and thinned." (p. 8)

Make of that what you can. 

Poison Ivy

Poison Ivy is a DC Comics super-villain attracted to the Batman. She also fought Thorn and Wonder Woman and joined the Secret Society of Super-Villains in various periodicals.

Secret Origins was a monthly comic book retelling the origins of DC characters. Very often the "retelling" was simply a present day story during which the origin was recalled or recounted. Neil Gaiman wrote the Poison Ivy origin, making it consistent with concurrent events in the DC Universe.

In another monthly title, Suicide Squad, imprisoned super-criminals like the Penguin and Captain Boomerang were given the opportunity to redeem themselves by accepting a mission for the US government. Thus, in Gaiman's story, an intelligence agent arrives to interview the imprisoned Pamela Isley, and of course learns her origin, without, at this preliminary stage, mentioning the Suicide Squad.

We are led to believe that Pamela will seduce the agent into helping her to escape whereas, instead, he recommends her transfer to Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Gotham City, where, shortly afterwards, she is due to be visited by Gaiman's own revised version of another plant-related feminine character, Black Orchid, in the three issue Prestige Format Black Orchid.

Thus, Gaiman's Secret Origins story fits between Suicide Squad and Black Orchid and is one part of his DC Universe canon which also features Alan Moore's plant elemental but, principally, Gaiman's own version of the Lord of Dreams in The Sandman.