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.

OAM II

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman series, we are definitely told by no less an authority than Destiny of the Endless that Roderick Burgess founded the Order of Ancient Mysteries at the turn of the twentieth century and yet in Sandman Midnight Theatre (New York, 1995), someone speaking for the Order announces that, seventeen hundred and eleven years previously, the mage Anilin had fled from Constaninople "...to Albion, where he became the Order's first magus." (p. 41)

Does the Order claim to have records of an unbroken line of maguses from Anilin to Burgess? Gaiman here parodies those who claim ancient credentials for current practices. Someone in a local moot claimed that her family had preserved a Book of Shadows for forty generations but Pagan scholars ridiculed such a claim. We were surprised when a Traveler woman recounted how she had been brought up in a polytheist community but that community had dispersed by the time she was telling us about it.

The OAM is a fictitious organization and Gaiman makes clear that its leaders are dishonest, even compromising and blackmailing wealthy supporters. He invented the Order as background for the imprisonment of Dream in The Sandman comic but, fortunately, was given the opportunity to expand on it further in the Sandman crossover special, Midnight Theatre.