My thoughts as a Sandman fan.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to having been a Gaiman fan. I greatly enjoyed Gaiman’s earlier work in comics, especially Sandman, which played a significant role in my life when I was in college and certainly did bring in a huge, untapped audience of diverse and interesting readers to comics.

I wasn’t as impressed by his novels; I thought Neverwhere and Good Omens were good, but not great, and I got a sense that he wasn’t doing a lot that was really new or different with his writing past that, so I largely tuned out after maybe ‘05 and moved on to other writers. I certainly had a lot of affection for the man until recently because his comics work enriched my undergraduate years, because I wrongly believed he was a morally decent guy, and because I like a lot of early Tori Amos.

In hindsight, were there clues that he didn’t live up to his clean image? Absolutely, but I didn’t follow his life closely enough to really parse them. I remember one person I know who’s done work in comics telling me “Gaiman’s got a reputation for being a slut”, but I didn’t think a lot about it, or really inquire into what that meant. Certainly, in hindsight, his politics now seem calculated and likely performative - I’m reminded of what one female writer once told me: “be wary of males who too loudly proclaim their feminism.”

I haven’t read any of his recent novels, so it won’t matter much to me if he stops publishing. Will I still enjoy Sandman? It will still be a key text in my life, and will continue to trigger meaningful personal associations when I think about it, but I’ll never be able to revisit it in the same way again. A lot of it certainly does seem much darker now; issue six, ‘24 Hours’, was the first Sandman issue I remember deeply moving me me - as a teenager I thought it was a pitch-dark commentary on humanity’s propensity to corruptly misuse power that could potentially heal or inspire, but now it seems more like an authorial confessional, with Gaiman subtly telling readers that while they may think of him as Morpheus, gothic king of stories, he’s actually the sadistic wretch Dee. I have yet to determine how much further I can stomach a Sandman reread, or whether I’ll be able to watch season 2 of the TV series. Part of me thinks about my rather neutral reaction to artists like Gauguin, a truly great talent who was a monster, and wonders if I can’t approach Gaiman the same way, and another part of me feels, perhaps not rationally, that an artist’s depravity hits harder when it’s one who’s work deeply informed my worldview and relative youth, and when I falsely believed the creator to be a decent human being, largely on the basis of a false, carefully crafted, mask of morality.