The Schalter

Written by: Louise Morgan

I should preface this with a warning. I tend to get a little absorbed in a good comic. It’s a bad habit, I know, but it’s one I’ve had all my life. When Eoin Black, the resident bad boy of the second year turned round and wrote his phone number on the cover of my exercise book at the start of Maths class, my twelve-year-old self somehow failed to grasp the monumental significance of the moment. Why? I was reading a Batman comic under my desk. You can decide for yourself if that drops me into the ‘geek’ (or I guess, in my case, ‘femmegeek’) box. Probably.

That all out of the way, we’ll move on.

I went to a signing at the central London Forbidden Planet last year - not admittedly my favourite place in the world: the kind of place where you can smell the ink, the hormones and the lingering aroma of one-too-many Star Trek repeats. Now, being a girl, I tend to get a smidge uncomfortable in places like Forbidden Planet: there’s usually a few stares, and occasionally there’s pointing. As a rule, I’d rather stick to a smaller comic shop (or at the very least, one with decent ventilation) but in all likelihood, I would have crossed the fiery rivers of Hell itself to make it to this event. As it was, I had to tangle with South West trains and the Tube which you might say was a close enough thing, and then pass a few hours standing around in the cold, intermittent rain in an alley off Shaftesbury Avenue. What on earth, you might ask, is worth it?

Two words: Neil Gaiman. So, more correctly, it’s a case of ‘who’ is worth it. Well, he is. Author of assorted fictions and All-Round Good Egg, he is a master of the “What if..?” His particular talent lies in taking the everyday, twisting it to reveal something hidden and suddenly making it so blindingly obvious that you wonder why no-one’s ever thought of it before. In Neverwhere, the idea of another world beneath London became real, making you ask “What if Angel Islington and Blackfriars were, well, an angel and a bunch of monks?” while you’ll never look at immigration the same way once you’ve read American Gods with its notion that deities are as portable as suitcases. When it comes to signings, he has a reputation for being friendly and approachable, something that contributes immensely to the fearsome reputation he has amongst his fans. It shows, too: try plugging “Neil” into Google. Who do you think the first result hit is? Neil Armstrong, Neil Young, Neil Kinnock? Nope. It’s Mr Gaiman. So what about those fans themselves? Given that he’s arguably most famous for his comic-book creation, The Sandman, we must be talking geeks a-g0-go, right? We’ll see.

You can never tell what kind of crowd you’re going to be in when you have to queue for something. At best, you hope that somebody on one side of you is friendly, and you can at least chat to pass the time. Which means that you also hope they’re interesting - and this crowd was nothing if not that. Of the front 10 of the queue (yes, I was there that early. Stop smirking) seven were women. All were particular fans of The Sandman, and nobody even vaguely resembled Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Now, that’s not necessarily what you’d expect, given the general image of the comic book audience. But Sandman is no ordinary comic. Launched as a ‘mature’ (as opposed to ‘adult’, you understand) comic, it’s a mass of allusions and references - and above all words. It’s a comic to read, one which asks you to give it a bit of consideration, not simply to flip the pages while you look at the pretty pictures.

Conversations in the queue (of which there were many - it started about four hours before the signing was due to begin) ranged from the use of Classical myth in the story arcs to the number of Shakespeare references to whether anyone had actually tried to read the Hell sequence while listening to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which Gaiman has mentioned on his blog as being the auditory background to his ‘Hell’ writing (OK, maybe that one’s just a tad on the geeky side). Several art students were earnestly discussing ‘The Comic As Art Form’ or something similar.

And yes, there was quite a lot of attention paid to Morpheus himself - why wouldn’t there be? He’s a lord and lives in a big castle, which is never a bad thing. He’s not afraid of responsibility and knows how to take care of his business. He gets on well with his older sister, although there’s a few issues with the rest of his family. He’s hung out with Shakespeare, an Egyptian goddess and a talking raven called Matthew. He could do with a bit of colour in his wardrobe, granted, but nobody’s perfect.

When you get right down to it, the truth is that Morpheus is really a bit of a flake. He’s noble, but a guy who confines his lover to imprisonment in Hell sounds like a bit of a liability if you ask me. As for his relationship with his son, Orpheus, well, we won’t even start on that one. Looking at him, you just know he writes poetry (actually, that’s a little unfair. As it turns out, he gets Shakespeare to write his poetry for him).

But the real clincher, the absolute “You had me at ‘Hello’” factor comes in the form of a comment made about him by another character: “He’s gotta be the tragic figure standing out in the rain, mournin’ the loss of his beloved. So down comes the rain, right on cue. In the meantime everybody gets dreams fulla existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet.”

Yeah. You had me at ‘”existential angst”, I’m afraid. I do like a bit of tortured melodrama on a man. And I’m not alone. The internet is crawling with essays on Morpheus as a symbol for this, that or the other, and that’s not even considering The Sandman Papers, 280 pages of scholarly papers on the social and cultural concerns and conceits of the series.

He’s a fascinating character, aloof and yet familiar, which is exactly what makes Gaiman’s Lord of Dreams so perfect a creation. Frankly, it doesn’t hurt that as fictional characters go, he’s not a bad looker, either. As for his world, well, you know what it’s like: you wake up in the morning with the vague recollection of something you dreamt the night before, full of images and places that are familiar and yet strange. That’s what you get in The Sandman, a sense of the mundane and the fantastic. Take Morpheus’s family, for instance: Dream may be one of the Endless, a group of seven anthropomorphic personifications (the others being Death, Destiny, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. Nothing like the smell of alliteration in the morning, is there?) but they still have all the same alliances, arguments and problems as any group of siblings.

The appeal of this particular comic is its depth: the world of The Sandman is so rich that it’s entirely possible to fall into it. Certainly, it’s the most erudite comic I’ve ever read which may well be why it attracts such a range of fans, and why so many of them know it so well - like the best books, it stands up to repeat readings and in fact benefits from them (which may explain why, when I asked the friend who introduced me to The Sandman in the first place to double-check a passage, he knew not only which volume it would be in but which chapter).

Based on that signing queue, the people who really love this comic are not the ones living in their parents’ basements: if they were, they’d be missing half the point of it. Maybe you’d package them all up and drop them neatly into the geek box along with me, but you’d be wrong. This is a comic apart - something this well conceived and written doesn’t deserve to be seen as somehow inferior. Sandman 19 remains the only comic to have won a World Fantasy Award - quite an achievement, you’ll agree. So if you’ve never read it and you think comics are just for kids, next time you’re passing a bookshop pick it up and give it a try. You might be in for a surprise.

As for me, I’ll go back to daydreaming about the Sandman. Even if he does wear a little too much black.

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This post is tagged Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Sandman