The new book Endless Nights is not a sequel to Bruce Brown’s classic documentary The Endless Summer, in which Morpheus, lord of dreams, leads his siblings through the Dreaming in a quest to find the perfect wave. No, it is actually DC/Vertigo’s new collection of stories written by Neil Gaiman about Morpheus, the title character of his renowned comics series, sandman, and his six brothers and sisters, who comprise the Endless. Each of them embodies an aspect of existence: Morpheus is Dream, and his siblings are Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (formerly known as Delight), Destruction and Destiny. Writing of Destiny in the collection’s final story, Gaiman says, “You will spend time in the realm of each of his siblings – you will dream, despair, desire, destroy, delight and otherwise, and, eventually, die. . . .”
In his introduction Gaiman states that “the Endless are not gods, for when people cease to believe in gods, they” – the gods – “cease to exist, But as long as there are people to live and dream and destroy, to desire, to despair, to delight or go mad, to live lives and affect each other, then the Endless will be there, performing their functions. They do not care a jot whether or not you believe in them.”
Well, first, as the “Dream” story in Endless Nights demonstrates, the Endless existed before there were human beings on Earth; presumably Destiny has existed since the beginning of the cosmos. When and if human beings become extinct, as long as there are other sentient beings in the cosmos, the Endless would all go on.
As for whether or not they are gods, this seems a matter of semantics. Theologians would say that God existed before humans or the universe and depends on neither for His existence. Gaiman prefers not to call his Endless gods, but by most people’s definitions, they are.
Gaiman is also careful to have it pointed out in the “Dream” story that Death of the Endless is not “the goddess of death” or the “incarnation” of Death, but Death itself/herself; similarly, Morpheus, the Sandman, is not “the king of dreams” but is Dream itself. The Endless are the concepts their names signify: what over in the Marvel Universe have been called conceptual beings.
I find myself confused by some of the implications of this idea. The initial issue of Sandman established that Morpheus was held prisoner by a human sorcerer for many decades; as a result, numerous people around the world suffered severe sleep disorders. But people did not cease to dream over that long period. Similarly, as Gaiman reminds us in his introduction, Destruction “walked away from his family over four hundred years ago,” abandoning his post within the Endless. And yet destruction continues on Earth; indeed, the “Dream” story in this collection states that without the ongoing destruction in the hearts of stars – fusion reactions, in scientific terms – the stars would go out.
Nonetheless, Gaiman has crafted fascinating, sophisticated stories around these seven siblings in his Sandman series, creating a rich mythology through which to address contemporary readers and their concerns. Most of the tales in this new collection center on a perennial theme of myth: the relationship between the gods (even if Gaiman does not call them that) and the forces they personify and humankind.
Those who value spoiler warnings, beware. In discussing the themes of the Gaiman stories in this column, I am going to be giving away many of the endings. If you haven’t read the stories first, you may wish to do so before reading further in this column.
DEATH
In certain cases Gaiman’s Endless fit one’s expectations: Despair is in despair, Desire does embody amoral desire, and Destiny (the sole member of the Endless he did not create, who was a preexisting DC character) is a variant on the familiar figure of Father Time. In other cases Gaiman seems to intended to turn the readers’ expectations upside down. Thus, Destruction proves to be quite an amiable figure, even before he gave up his post. Gaiman’s Death is far from the hooded, skeletal figure with the scythe, or even the archetypal femme fatale. She is, or can be, friendly, sweet, empathetic, even joyful. She can be the spritely figure portrayed on the cover of Jill Thompson’s recent Death: At Death’s Door for Vertigo.
This version of Death certainly provides a pleasant wish fulfillment fantasy for us mortals. Meeting her would be not terrifying, but pleasant. Certainly she fits the idea of death as a peaceful release from suffering, or perhaps even of death as a helpful guide to the hereafter, a latter day version of the Greeks’ Hermes or Dante’s Beatrice. I can think of more recent pop culture versions of death as a benign, or at least courteous figure: a Twilight Zone episode in which Death comes to an old woman in the form of a handsome, kind young man (played by Robert Redford), or the politely bureaucratic Mr. Best on Dark Shadows. (Gaiman says in his introduction that his Death “loves you,” and, indeed, the Death in these two shows loved the victims they came for, too.)
But dying can also be painful, excruciating and horrific. In his introduction Gaiman says the “Death” story came about when he found himself alone in Venice the week after September 11, 2001, “pondering the nature of time and death.” (This was the same trip on which Gaiman came up with the idea for his 1602 series for Marvel, so as that series progresses, perhaps we should be on the lookout for any parallels.) One would not find anything comforting about the manner of the deaths at Ground Zero on that day.
I wonder if contemplating September 11 led Gaiman not to a reconsideration of his death character, but to an emphasis of aspects of her that readers may underestimate.
The first story in this collection, concerning Death, is titled “Death and Venice,” its framing sequence is set in contemporary Venice, and, so, appropriately, it is drawn by Craig Russell, an apt choice for depicting the city’s legendary beauty. The title alludes to Death in Venice, a novella by Thomas Mann, adapted into an opera by Benjamin Britten and a film by Luchino Visconti. Like Gaiman’s tale here, the Mann story, in all its forms, is likewise a parable about pathetic efforts to maintain youth and sexual obsession, both of which end in self-destruction.
The story opens on a beautifully sunlit, colorful island off Venice proper, which, as we learn, is inhabited by a Count and his guests who exist in a kind of variant of the situation in the movie Groundhog Day. The Count is an alchemist, who, on the day before the Inquisition (a 1602 parallel!) was to bring about his arrest, cast a spell that ensured that tomorrow would never come. The Count and his guests live the same “perfect day” over and over, pursuing pleasure in different forms. We are also informed that the Count has forbidden the color black – associated with Death – to be used on his island. (Luckily he is not holding parties in contemporary Manhattan.)
While centuries have passed in the cosmos outside their little loop in time, it appears that the Count and his guests have gone to decadent lengths to find new thrills. They can and do subject themselves to physical suffering, and the Count even dies (crushed beneath an elephant!), knowing they will be back, good as new, when the same “perfect day” begins anew. This seems to be the Count’s perverse secular version of an earthly paradise, or of heaven itself. The torture and suffering, however temporary, imply that the Count and his guests have a literal death wish, a longing for what they consciously deny. And into their 18th century Garden of Eden must inevitably come the serpent bringing forbidden knowledge to wreck it all.
In sharp contrast to the Count’s sunlit Eden is the contemporary Venice wherein we find our protagonist, Sergei, who, like Gaiman himself, finds himself alone in the city on a trip. This Venice is dark, shadowed, gloomy, colored in grays even in seemingly sunlit areas. The count’s fantasy world is brilliantly lighted; reality is grim and dark. Sergei’s opening narration speaks of the age of the city and of the sound of church bells “striking the hour”: this is where time rules and progresses. “Times change,” Sergei will comment later, with seeming offhandedness. In the Count’s world time does not progress, and change is supplanted by stagnation.
Then Sergei sees a paper puppet of a rabbit floating in the air, although the expression on its face makes it look as if it is frightened of falling. The rabbit is mostly brown, but I suspect that it would be appropriate here to think of a White Rabbit and his role as herald to descents into enchanted underworlds.
A peddler is trying to sell the puppet to a naive tourist, but Sergei points out that the rabbit’s seeming ability to defy gravity (and defying falling to his death?) is merely a trick. “It’s just an illusion,” Sergei says, signaling his function in the story as a destroyer of illusions.
Sergei recalls how, as a child visiting an island off Venice, he encountered Death waiting outside a gate. He did not know who she was, though I note that it is from her that we readers first learn Sergei’s name, as if by naming him she gives him his role in life. She’s friendly as usual in Gaiman’s stories, but not in the jolly holiday mood in which we first met her in Sandman, quoting from Mary Poppins. Here she is simply calm and patient, waiting for her time to strike at the people on the other side of the gate. Sergei tries to open it and fails.
Back in the present, Sergei sets out in a boat for the island of his childhood. He comments on “the damage the rising water levels is [sic] doing to the city”: in this real world, Venice is sinking, inevitably dying beneath the water. “History, I thought, accretes in Venice like silt in a canal.” This is the world where time rules, and time brings decay and death.
It turns out that Sergei is a soldier, whose relationships with human women have never worked out because he cannot forget his longing for “the woman on the island.” He has a sexual obsession with an unattainable person just as Mann’s von Aschenbach did. He sees his career as that of a professional killer. I suppose one might say he kills people as sacrifices to Death.
But I wonder if here, as in other stories in this collection, Gaiman is suggesting that for a human to meet one of the Endless is to take on the aspect of that member of the Endless to some degree. Hence, Sergei, having met and fallen in love with Death, devotes himself to meting out death.
I also wonder – and here is a disturbing thought for Vertigo readers – if Gaiman is also making a comment about fans’ own love of the Death character. Perhaps they don’t entirely realize what she’s about beneath the outward cuteness.
The adult Sergei arrives at the island and meets Death again: she has a different hairstyle and different clothes, but is otherwise unchanged. (So, she herself is beyond change, but effects change in others.) Sergei recalls trying to open the gate, and she asks, “Would you like to try again?” and I wonder if she has been subtly manipulating him all along. (As I said, she’s not just cute.)
As an innocent boy Sergei could not kick the gate down, but now, as a mature adult with a history of killing, he can. He tells us that he is kicking out at his life: is he self-destructive? He says he is kicking at death and time: this is much like the Count figuratively does, and neither one of them realizes that he is serving Death, not mastering it/her. And Sergei says he is kicking out at lies, and himself evokes the image of the paper rabbit puppet, who represents illusion and, as we shall see, the idea of physical immortality, which is itself an illusion. As noted, Sergei is a destroyer of illusion, though he seems in the grip of illusion himself.
Death and Sergei find themselves within the Count’s time bubble. So here is a beautiful woman who draws a male protagonist into an enchanted realm, something you all should remember when I get to Neverwhere, in next week’s column. They enter his party, masked and garbed in black. Note that Sergei, wearing Death’s color, thereby further links himself to her. Masked revelers are associated with Venice’s famous Carnivale, which, of course, occurs just before the onset of Lent, a liturgical season that climaxes with Good Friday, a day memorializing death. This sequence of Gaiman’s story also puts me in mind of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, and of the Phantom of the Opera’s entrance into the Opera Ball in that same guise. Why Death wears a cat mask may just be Gaiman or Russell’s whim, but maybe there’s more to it than that. The association of cats and death in ancient Egypt, or of black cats and misfortune? (Don’t let Death cross your path?) Is there some archetype here connected with Batman’s Catwoman, as well?
Death passes through the party, singling out different guests, and naming the means by which they were destined to die. Russell depicts these various deaths, all horrific, and colored in blood red. Significantly, by naming the guests’ modes of death, Death actually kills them.
The Count learns of Death’s progress through his palace, but, oddly, he does not think of the uninvited guest as Death but as “Time, foul Time, who steals the gold from a maiden’s hair. . . .” This is an image of time reminiscent of Shakespeare’s. Perhaps Gaiman means us to see Time as an aspect of Death. (So maybe she should have an hourglass figure. Sorry.) Destiny would also represent Time, so presumably Death is Time in its aspect of inevitable decay, deterioration and destruction. (And so Death and Destruction must be linked as well.)
Oddly, when the Count finally confronts Death and Sergei, he thinks that Sergei is the menace and that he is Time. Is this simply sexism on the Count’s part, or evidence of the degree to which Sergei has taken on the aspect of Death along with her fashion sense? Or is it meant to signify the Count’s denial of Death’s subconscious allure for him? The Count extends his sword toward Sergei, as if he could overcome Death through a display of phallic symbols. In way over his head, Sergei does not understand what is happening.
Again, Death brings about the Count’s fate first by naming it. In his case, she names two aspects of death. One is an evocation of nonexistence: “You simply vanish.” The other is a particularly grotesque physical fate: his mutilated body will be found, missing its face (thereby its individuality), hands and feet. The Count will have thus been partially dismembered (and does this make anyone else recall Orpheus’s role in the Sandman mythos?). Death unmasks, consciously exerting her appeal (she stares at her victim as if to mesmerize him), and the Count falls in love with her: he says “I missed you,” confirming he had a semi-conscious death wish. Finally, as she takes his hand, Death calls him by his first name, Alain, the first time we learn the name in the story. And when she names him, his life is at an end.
Sergei wakes up: as in storytelling tradition, the journey to the enchanted world is likened to a dream. A stranger helps Sergei walk, “as if he is leading a very old man,” as if this weakness is the legacy of Sergei’s recent encounter with the figure of Death and All-Consuming Time.
Sergei returns to Venice, which is still dark and gray. He looks upon St. Mark’s Cathedral, captured by Russell in all its glory, but to him the city looks “thin and unreal.” Is that because he is dimly aware that it is transient, and will one day cease to be? Or is he developing a feeling that even great art matters little in the face of inevitable death?
The words and pictures of the story’s final page explicitly compare the people of the city to the paper puppets. “They believe they are dancing to the music of their lives. . .But, I think, like the puppets, each of us is pulled upon invisible strings, until the night comes, and we are out away.”
This is a very dark vision of existence, indeed. I have two academic heroes in outlining the workings of fantasy-adventure: the late Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye. In Campbell’s monomyth, the adventurer returns from the enchanted world with a prize with which he can redeem the community. Sergei has returned with this new, bleak vision of reality; he will wreak death himself, and he views the community of people in Venice as doomed. No one is redeemed. Frye wrote about the storytelling mode that he called irony, in which individuals are powerless to alter their fates and are ground down by more powerful forces. In Sergei’s vision of reality, people are no more than puppets on strings, and their free will and positive outlooks (“dancing to the music of their lives”) are no more than illusions, which Sergei, as noted, tends to expose
The final image is very explicit, indeed, as the rabbit puppet is swept into the canal as trash, and sinks beneath the water, as Sergei tells us that “the darkness of the city closes over me like canal water or the grave.”
This is not the first story in the Sandman canon to deal with a human who found immortality. There is Morpheus’s human friend Hob, who, it is true, sought to avoid dying, but did not try to cheat death as the Count did; Death freely granted him immortality. Despite the ups and downs of his life over the centuries, Hob turned out well.
So, do the stories with Hob indicate that Gaiman is not saying that immortality is necessarily a bad thing? Or does “Death and Venice” represent a sharp change in his thinking?
“Death and Venice” does set a very dark tone for this book. The world of comic books is traditionally associated with happy endings, celebrations of heroism, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. It shows how much the world of American comics has changed that Gaiman’s work is so popular, when beneath his wit and creative imagination lie such a bleak and ironic vision.
DESIRE
The second story, “What I’ve Tasted of Desire,” illustrated by the Italian artist Milo Manara, is quite strange. Set in what appears to be the Dark Ages, it concerns a woman, Kara, who is powerfully drawn to a young warrior. Note how Kara evades saying she loves this man. For example, she says, “I couldn’t tell you when I fell in love with him,” which is not to say that she actually ever did. Apart from his looks and prowess in battle, this youth seems to have nothing to recommend him. She twice refers to him as “cocksure,” a word with pretty blatant implications, and as “wolfish,” not a complimentary term (and you should keep this “wolfish” man in mind when I discuss other Gaimanian wolves next week). He is a promiscuous womanizer, and hence presumably a follower of amoral Desire himself. Here’s a big danger sign: Kara speaks well of how her mother was abducted by raiders when she was fifteen, as if rape is a good thing.
According to the Campbell monomyth, the protagonist often receives good advice from a mentor: nowadays Obi-Wan Kenobi is the example of choice for mentor figures. I think there are also Dark Mentor figures, who give advice that sends the protagonist in the wrong direction. Kara consults just such a Dark Mentor, a witch who sends her to Desire of the Endless. “Wait until you feel your heart being tugged with a longing that has nothing to do with your young man,” the witch tells her. What, nothing?
So, it would seem that desire has nothing to do with the individuality of the desired person, though love, presumably, would. Desire him/herself acts as a mentor figure, both light and dark: desire helps Kara along in the wrong direction, but does provide some good counsel. Desire warns Kara that “getting what you want and being happy are two quite different things.” Kara says she knows that and ignores the implications of the warning.
Once again, a human’s meeting with a member of the Endless leads to the human’s sharing in the concept that member embodies. I wonder if Kara’s adoption of male guise to seek out her intended is meant to allude to Desire’s own androgynous appearance.
Kara proceeds to follow an early medieval version of The Rules, playing hard to get to fire the warrior’s interest in her. Finally, in yet another ominous sign, she accepts his proposal of marriage when he presents her with an ornament he took from “the man who killed my father,” and whom, presumably he killed in turn.
After their marriage, the husband leaves for a meeting of chiefs, and the narration makes further references to wolves. Then strangers arrive, seeking hospitality, and prove to be the enemy. They display the severed head of Kara’s husband, and yet she does not react whatsoever. Instead she flirts with these intruders, makes comments on their knives (yes, yet another story with Freudian imagery), and manipulates them into competing with each other for her favors by wrestling. As I said, she has herself taken on the aspect of Desire: “At that moment I could play their desire like a harp,” she says, and she even literally plays a harp. The revelers exhaust themselves fighting among themselves, and when the men of the village return, they “slaughtered them like wolves.” It’s as if in the Odyssey, Penelope had brought about the slaughter of the unwanted suitors herself.
The intruders had lusted for her, but so had her husband, who was also a killer who was compared to a wolf. Were the intruders really that much different from him? (More reveling wolves await in the next column, I assure you.)
The intruders had pursued desire, and they ended up dead. With her husband dead, Kara no longer had her foremost object of desire, and her life is left empty. The path to fulfilling pure desire proved to be a dead end, figuratively or literally.
Gaiman’s Endless embody seven different aspects of existence. It’s interesting that one of the Endless is Desire, but there is no member of the Endless called Love. Similarly, the Endless has Despair but not Hope, Destruction but not Creation, and Death but not Life. It’s not simply that these excluded concepts don’t start with a “D”: even the names of the Endless suggest a dark vision of existence.
DREAM
“The Heart of a Star,” illustrated by Spain’s Miguelanxo Prado, is the only story in the collection to feature Morpheus, the title character of Gaiman’s Sandman series. (And how appropriate that a Spanish artist has the same name as the country’s leading art museum.) As Gaiman states, it is the earliest Sandman story he has yet written, set billions of years ago, before life first appeared on Earth. The Endless all exist, however, and, presumably because at least one humanoid race has arisen in the cosmos, appear in human-like form.
This is a story sure to be dear to the hearts of comics aficionados who take pleasure in the scope and history of comics’ fictional universes. Just as 1602 demonstrates Gaiman’s fondness for classic Marvel super heroes, this story pays tribute to DC comics’ own super heroes. There are clever links to the Green Lantern mythos, through the appearance of Kilkalla of the Glow, a forebear of the Guardians of the Universe, and the star Rao, which was the sun of Superman’s homeworld Krypton, and worshipped by Kryptonians (at least in one version of the continuity) as a god.
When I say that Rao appears, I mean that he is present in the story as a fiery, sentient being in humanoid form and size. According to this story, the DC Universe is an animist cosmos, wherein stars and their planets are living, intelligent entities. Marvel has experimented with this idea, with Lee and Kirby’s Ego the Living Planet, Steve Englehart’s Mother Earth, the living stars in Jim Starlin’s run on Doctor Strange, and even Lee and Ditko’s Eternity, who is the universe itself as a conscious, living entity, but this is an unfamiliar but interesting concept for DC.
Except for Destiny, the Endless all gather at a “parliament” of the living stars. (Is Gaiman hinting at a link to Alan Moore’s “Parliament of Trees” in Swamp Thing?) Some of the members of the Endless are different than they are today. Death, though still a cute Goth girl, has an ominous, threatening manner, more in keeping with the conventional image of personified Death; how she later became cheerful is not explained here.
The entity now known as Delirium appears in this story as Delight and is naive and childlike in manner. Still, if Delight is not clearly outright mad, as Delirium seems to be, Delight does not seem to be an exemplar of mental stability or rationality, either. So Delight is part of Gaiman’s pantheon of the Endless, but it seems he conceives of Delight as deteriorating into Delirium. Didn’t I tell you this is a dark and depressing vision of life? It’s as if, to turn to another set of seven in the world of cartoon art, Walt Disney had told us that Happy of the Seven Dwarfs was only happy because he was a manic depressive.
Morpheus certainly reverses my expectations of what Dream should be. He is so distant from caring about humanity, and yet presumably Dream has access to our sleeping minds and hence would know them thoroughly. For that matter, Gaiman’s Morpheus is also the creative imagination, as demonstrated by his bestowing artistic genius upon William Shakespeare, as several Sandman stories chronicle. I would think that a figure of Dream would embody subconscious urges and passions, creativity, emotions that can run free in dreams, ambitions and loves that fire the imagination. Morpheus, on the other hand, is a stiff. As Destruction notes in this story, Morpheus seems to have no sense of humor. He lacks friends. It is observed in this story that “They say Death is kinder than he [Dream] is.” One might think it would be the other way around, since Death only meets a person at the end of his life, when, shall we say, he isn’t usually at his best, whereas Dream presumably has intimate knowledge of a person’s psyche whenever that person sleeps.
Gaiman’s Morpheus is indeed an intriguing character, but he just seems so different from what I might expect of “Dream.” It’s the waking mind that represses emotions; the dreaming mind releases them! And yet Morpheus is Repression itself.
In this story Desire, as a prank, has arranged for Morpheus and Kilkalla to become lovers. But, as readers of the previous story know, desire and love are not the same. Perhaps Morpheus, though an adult, is still immature, since he has clearly confused the two. Kilkalla, unsure if she really loves Morpheus, falls passionately in love with the living sun of her home planet Oa. Seeing them kiss, Morpheus seems as impassive as Kara seeing her husband’s severed head, though he is inwardly enraged. Commenting on Morpheus’s feelings for Kilkalla, Desire observes, it was “Because he wanted you. Well, he wanted someone.” So, once again, desire seems to have nothing to do with the desired’s individual personality.
Nonetheless, this story ends on a very positive note. For one thing, the comically young and insecure Sol, Earth’s own sun, shows courtesy and respect towards Morpheus, winning Dream’s favor for Earth’s future living beings. Moreover, although we are told that Kilkalla eventually died (not having achieved the immortality that the Guardians would), her lover, the sun Sto-ar, transported her upon her death into his center, to “burn” and “comfort” him.
So this tale ends on Prado’s image of the two lovers, Sto-ar and Kilkalla, united if not eternally, than as close to it as is possible. If the first story ended in an omen of inevitable doom, then this story ends with the image of enduring love.
DESPAIR
“Fifteen Portraits of Despair” is not a story, but a series of fifteen vignettes written by Gaiman, and illustrated by Barron Storey in designs by longtime Sandman cover artist Dave McKean. Storey’s biography in the back of the book attests to his considerable reputation as an artist; I can’t say I get most of his artwork here at all. There are exceptions, though, such as the picture for the seventh vignette, with a ghostly outlined head rising above the anguished face of Despair, her hands pressed to her head: this is powerfully simple and evocative.
What is of interest to me here is the writing; in some cases it’s unclear to me what is happening, but most of the vignettes present an inventive variations on the theme of despair. In keeping with recent news, there is a priest, deep in denial, about his past as a child molester, and a man, fired from his job, who likewise takes refuge in denial as his world falls apart. There is a loner who compensates for isolation by the familiar means of getting a pet cat, and then another, and more and more, leading to a grotesque denouement. Another person, seeking justice, is ruined by a court case that turns against him. There is a writer with an extreme case of writer’s block, and an artist with the equivalent. Most disturbing of all is a woman whose soul continues on after death and yet still finds no solace. Here Gaiman’s vision turns its darkest yet again: what if an afterlife exists, and yet it still brings no relief from suffering?
Here again the idea that people can share in the concept embodied by one of Gaiman’s Endless recurs. This section begins by stating that Despair “is on the other side of every mirror.” It concludes by telling us, “To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.” All these people depicted in the vignettes are “portraits of Despair.” They are all somehow part of Despair, and, we are being told, potentially, so are we all.
DELIRIUM
What better choice of artist for Delirium’s story, “Going Inside,” could there be but Bill Sienkiewicz? Long ago, Bill established his skill and flair for ranging between naturalism and the surreal, and for succeeding in giving even realistically drawn people and settings an emotionally evocative, dreamlike feel. He’s created his own contemporary form of expressionism in comics art. It certainly suits Delirium’s world, which as presented here becomes nightmarish.
What is going on in the story is not always clear, either in the writing or art. As if to compensate for its dreamlike confusion and darkness, this story has one of the happier endings of the collection, with both Delirium and a catatonic girl being freed from kinds of mental captivity. Talking animals Barnabas and Matthew from the Sandman comics also provide a welcome lightening of the grim tone. This, by the way, is also the only tale in the book in which the “new” Dream, Daniel, appears.
DESTRUCTION
Rachel, the protagonist of “On the Peninsula,” illustrated by Glenn Fabry, starts out in her story in a state perhaps similar to the one that Sergei found himself at the end of his. She is haunted by dreams and even waking visions of death and destruction all about her. Perhaps these are meant as omens of a possible future that must be averted, but they might also be fantastic metaphors for a state of depression. “You need a change,” says Stanley, an archeologist who is the herald beckoning her to adventure, so this becomes the story of how Rachel moves to a more positive state of mind.
She starts out at the metaphorical bottom. Inviting her to join a secret government project, Stanley advises her, “You’ll have to sign your life away,” which sounds like a Faustian bargain and a symbolic death: “not a problem,” she replies. When she arrives at the peninsula that is the enchanted realm of this story, Stanley tells her, “Welcome to the end of the world,” and that “I guess I mean that in most ways you can mean it.”
How many ways would that be? Stanley himself says, “People who end up here aren’t going any further.” As the story’s ending shows, that proves to be literally true of most people. What they find there is the means by which the literal end of the world could be brought about. And if we assume that Rachel has reached a dead end in her life, its lowest point, then she can either stay mired there or move back upward. Gaiman notes in his introduction that in the Sandman series, “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die,” a lesson that is relevant to Rachel’s story. The Count in the first story resisted change; Rachel, though, agrees, “I really need a change.”
The story stacks the deck against Stanley, who is drawn to look like, shall we say, a real life version of Professor Frink from The Simpsons. He gets to have sex with Rachel, but she looks particularly unhappy about it, and keeps thinking of the more macho-looking Destruction, who is camping on the island along with Delirium. So, though Stanley started out as Rachel’s guide/mentor on this expedition, and even becomes her lover, she ends up dumping him in both capacities, and moving on. Destruction takes over as guide and love interest, and even Delirium serves as a mentor to her.
What makes the peninsula unusual is the presence of a burial mound of sorts, which contains artifacts not from the past but from the future.
Rachel and Destruction feel a mutual attraction, and she invites him to help excavate the mound. She finds what turns out to be a glowing, futuristic bullet in the mound; he identifies it and hurls it away before it detonates, saving her life.
Later, Delirium explains that the mound comes from an alternate future. This particular future, it seems, is one that leads to war, presumably utilizing futuristic weaponry like that glowing bullet.
The morbid mood of other stories in this collection briefly returns as Delirium explains that all the possible paths that the future may take will still end in “the same place,” “a nothing place,” where Death will be the only one left.
Rachel is unaware of Destruction and Delirium’s true identities, and when she asks Delirium what her brother’s name is, she says she doesn’t know if he still goes by his old name. This suggests that he may now be acting to prevent destruction, of certain kinds, anyway, as he proceeds to do.
Twice in the story Destruction “circles my [Rachel’s hands] with his giant hands,” an image that is at once romantic and protective. He saved her life from the bullet, and perhaps he is responsible for saving her life a second time.
U. S. government operatives, literally “men in black” arrive to take possession of isotopes discovered in the mound, which they intend to have made into weapons. Revolted by the idea, Rachel refuses to cooperate and declares she is returning to the mainland. The men in black are what Campbell would call threshold guardians and refuse to let her leave the figuratively “enchanted realm” of the Peninsula. Rachel asserts herself in a way that presumably the depressed woman of the story’s opening pages would not have done, and she calls their bluff and departs. Since Stanley sides with the men in black, she is clearly rejecting him as guide and ex-lover, as well. I wonder: since characters of previous stories seemed to take on qualities of members of the Endless they met, did Rachel take on this new assertiveness from encountering Destruction? This scene is also the point at which we first learn that Rachel is a “doctor,” presumably a Ph.D.: she is recognized as a person of authority.
So Rachel sails back from the peninsula, with its nexus to the future, back to the normal world of the mainland, and briefly sights Destruction and Delirium there. Moments after she has thus reached safety, the peninsula is destroyed. Returning home, Rachel thinks, “There’s a peninsula with the future on it that isn’t there any more.” That wartorn potential future, then, has likewise ceased to exist. And the story ends with Rachel returning to sleep and dreams, but this time she dreams not of universal destruction with a small “D” but of Destruction himself, in his role as protector, with “his hands, that wrapped around mine as surely and firmly as the future holds today.”
Is the implication that Destruction turned his prowess to a beneficent end, destroying weapons – and people – who could have brought about far greater destruction? And that he took care to spare Rachel, at least if she made the correct choice not to align herself with the wrong guides and allies?
Of all the stories this, the next to last, has the most positive denouement, with its concluding image of a benevolent godlike entity (even if Gaiman doesn’t use that term to describe the Endless) watching over the just.
DESTINY
The final chapter, which gives the entire collection its name, illustrated by Scots artist Frank Quitely, is not truly a story but a description of the eldest of the Endless, Destiny, and his function, as he walks through his garden, blind, but holding a book in which the destinies of everyone and everything are contained.
We are told here that “the movements of atoms and galaxies are in his book, and he sees little difference between them.” This reminds me of the speech that Gaiman gives Marvel’s Watcher on the first page of the third issue of 1602: the Watcher also watches everything, whether big or small. Neither Destiny nor (usually) the Watcher intervenes in the events they observe. They are like a God that watches creation but does not intervene.
“Inside the book is the universe,” Gaiman writes of Destiny, and I think again of Lee and Ditko’s eternity, who is the embodiment of the universe. Marvel’s Eternity is also the personification of Time: I suppose Eternity must be Einstein’s time-space continuum. And Destiny, too, is a figure of Time, as Death was in her story. But Death seems to personify Time in its role as inevitable decay, dissolution, and entropy. Through Destiny in this concluding chapter, Gaiman instead seems to be addressing the enormous number and variety of beings in the cosmos, and even the copious details and events in an individual’s life. This is a chapter about the richness of life and of creation, about infinity more than endings: “Inside the book is the Universe.”
Here in this last section, the book’s morbidity interacts with its sense of wonder and of possibility. In Death’s story Sergei concluded that we were all puppets without control over our lives. In Destiny’s section, though we are told that his book holds every detail of our future, “He did not create the path you walk.” The future is known to this godlike being, but it is not predestined: it is we who decide what that future will be. And though we are told “One day he will lay it down, when the book is done,” and Death claims everything, that may not be the absolute end, “because,” Gaiman adds, “What comes after that is still unwritten.”
Endless Nights is such a strong achievement that it is something of a surprise that it is only one of the prolific Gaiman’s projects to be released within the last few months. I’ll deal with three more of them in next week’s column.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
This panel was the setting for the world premiere of a trailer for Kill Bill that Weinstein did not like. Tarantino had designed the trailer to make Kill Bill look like the sort of pulpish B-movies that he loved (as indeed it did), but Weinstein, he said, felt this approach would not go over with general audiences. So they compromised, and this version of the trailer will only be shown in a limited number of art theaters, while a different trailer will go into mainstream theaters. There’s a paradox here that Tarantino did not mention: the general audiences will get the trailer that I assume will make Kill Bill look like an art movie, while the arthouses get the one that make it look like a low-rent action flick. What does that say about the tastes of cineastes?
Dushku turned to her producer, “Jon, can you add cheers to the show at some point to satisfy this gentleman?”
Someone asked what Gaiman thought of the similarity between J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Gaiman’s Books of Magic comics miniseries, which predates them. This, it seems, is a familiar question for Gaiman. In fact, I even got asked about it myself by a friend at dinner that evening. Tim Hunter, the central character in Books of Magic, was a young British boy with glasses who has tremendous potential as a sorcerer, and, in Gaiman’s original series, encounters various mystical characters from the DC Universe who teach him about magic. Sounds a lot like Harry Potter, doesn’t it? “And they both have owls!” exclaimed my friend over dinner.
Gaiman briefly described his new Sandman graphic novel, Endless Nights, which has seven different artists each illustrating a story about one of the seven members of the Sandman’s family of deities, the Endless.
With that, Whedon took the first question from the audience. It was about Spike, the popular vampire character from Buffy. Originally a villain, Spike mellowed over time, primarily because he realized he was in love with his nominal enemy, Buffy. They even had an affair, but, according to Whedon’s mythology, vampires lack souls. So Spike underwent a series of trials that restored his soul, and ended up heroically sacrificing his life in Buffy‘s last episode. Nevertheless, it was subsequently decided to bring Spike over to the Angel series, whose title character is the only other vampire who got his soul back. Fans have been wondering just how Spike will be resurrected.
Buffy‘s final episodes both used and diverged from continuity elements that Whedon had previously established in his Fray comics. Whedon noted that “There are now things in Fray, mythologically, that don’t match up, which I’m going to have to explore when I do the next series of Fray comics. Oops, did I say that?”
“The premise of 1602 is as follows,” Gaiman stated; “It’s 400 years ago, and the Marvel Universe, for reasons that we do not know when we begin, has started occurring 400 years early.” He cautioned, “It’s not an Elseworlds.’ It’s not a What If,” referring to DC and Marvel series that present counterparts of familiar characters in alternate realities. “It’s actually happening and it will have some spillover into the real Marvel Universe.” By this I would guess that Gaiman means that the course of time has been altered in the Marvel Universe, with a large number of familiar present-day characters being somehow transposed to Elizabethan England, but we shall see as the series proceeds. Gaiman also noted that “some things are put back the way they were at the end” of the series, but “some things aren’t.”
As for the worst experience, that was an attempt to make a movie of the aforementioned Good Omens. In 1989 or 1990 Gaiman and Pratchett flew to Los Angeles to meet with studio executives. Pratchett, Gaiman recalled, suggested they have a “code word”: if either one of them uttered it during the meeting, they would walk out and fly back to England. It had to be a word neither of them would use in ordinary conversation, so they chose the name “Biggles,” a flying ace in British children’s books.
I think one of The Simpsons‘ greatest achievements is that it has won a great battle for the cause of cartoon art. I never read or hear any condescending references to The Simpsons: because it is a cartoon show. Indeed, it seems universally acknowledged to be one of the best and most intelligently written shows for adults on television. Before The Simpsons went on the air, this was unheard of. The conventional wisdom was that any animated TV series was entirely or primarily for kids. Now it is not a surprise when, say, King of the Hill or South Park are reviewed as shows of interest for discerning adults, though the American adult audience still seems more willing to accept comedy in the cartoon medium than other genres.
After Schwartz told an introductory story about how he first met Ackerman and Bradbury, Evanier turned to Bradbury, who told us why coming to the Comic-Con was important to him. As a child he too was a comics collector, but what he collected was the “Buck Rogers” strip. As a result, Bradbury said, other kids made fun of him, even made him cry, and he threw his collection away. But afterwards, he changed his mind and started collecting “Buck Rogers” once more. He decided to “travel to the future,” Bradbury said, and he “never came back.” It was a simple story, movingly told, with a profound moral, to follow one’s own interests regardless of the ridicule and incomprehension of others. And the audience warmly applauded this tale of a man who had begun like all of them, had followed his passion for the fantastic, and had risen to become a major literary figure.
McKee plays not only Helena’s mother but also the Light Queen and the Dark Queen, obviously fantasy representations of the mother’s positive and negative aspects. Speaking of the Dark Queen, Gaiman said, “You think she’ll be evil in a Cruella DeVil way,” but “instead she’s like your mom, only worse,” whereupon Gaiman imitated a woman feigning sympathy for her child. More Wizard of Oz-style doubling goes on with actor Rob Brydon, who plays both Helena’s father and the mayor of the light city. Leonidas herself plays both Helena and the “Anti-Helena,” and, it would appear the film raises the question, as with the White King in “Through the Looking Glass,” as to whether Helena is dreaming the Anti-Helena, or whether the “real” Helena is merely part of the Anti-Helena’s dream.
The panelists discussed how they attempted to keep the look of the Clone Wars animated episodes as close as they could to the distinctive visual style of the live-action Star Wars films: for example, the use of “wipes” to indicate scene transitions.
Stan Lee was on the panel because he makes a cameo appearance in Comic Book: The Movie. But I suspect that for him being in this movie was basically just one more item in his crowded schedule of media appearances, and he knew little about it apart from that. “Have you ever had to talk about something you know nothing about?’ he asked the crowd.
“What they don’t know,” Harnell said, “is this guy is the most subversive fan of all,” who proceeds to sabotage the Codename: Courage movie, bringing about “the unmaking of a major motion picture.”
In the Civic Center days, the San Diego Con was already clearly the best of the big comics cons: spacious, well-lighted, clean, with a wide array of intelligently conceived panels and the largest and most stellar roster of guests from the worlds of comics and animation. When the Con moved to the new Convention Center, it now had something of an epic setting and scale, and seemed the equal of the other massively scaled events held there. (In 1996 the Con had to be held unusually early in the summer to make way for the Republican National Convention held at the Convention Center in August. I recall, watching the GOP’s convention on television, that Bob Dole was now standing more or less where a Vampirella model had posed only weeks before.) I suppose we might call this the beginning of the Platinum Age of the San Diego Comic-Con, its current period, when its scope and significance began to reach beyond comics fandom.
For some years now, there have been attempts to make a movie of Gaiman’s comics mini-series, Death: The High Cost of Living, that would be both written and directed by Gaiman himself. Now, it appears, it looks as if the film might actually happen. In his introduction, Gaiman recounted that his longtime friend and collaborator Dave McKean had suggested that Gaiman try directing a short movie of his own for practice. As Gaiman explained, McKean expected he would just shoot some simple short material. But instead, Gaiman found outside funding and conducted an elaborate experiment in documentary cinema, A Short Film about John Bolton, concerning the British comics artist and painter of the same name.
Thinking about these comedy shorts, I realized that these were not parodies that undercut or trivialized the characters or the Star Wars films. Rather, in an odd way, they demonstrate the strength of the mythos: the archetypal nature of the characters and situations are so strong that it functions effectively even in satiric and comedic contexts far removed from the tone of the original films. Yes, there is a considerable amount of comedy and wit in the Star Wars movies, but they are still basically adventure melodramas that verge at times on tragedy. These fan comedy shorts extend the Star Wars mythos by giving it a fully comedic side. In ancient Greece, a trilogy of tragedies would be followed by a bawdy “satyr-play,” that dealt with mythological material in a comedic way. These Star Wars shorts play a similar role in a pop culture context.
This exhibit is genuinely funny and a crowd-pleaser. While I was studying the exhibit, a young woman came up to me, her friends behind her, gestured at the statue of Reed Richards, and asked me who the character was. “Mr. Fantastic,” I replied, adding, “but how you knew I would know that is beyond me.” I know I have a professorial look, demeanor, and style of dressing, but I didn’t know I look like a comic book expert. (You see, I am recognized as an authority on the subject by everyone except those who could pay me for this expertise.)
And then sometimes one can find a surprising treatment of a serious issue in a very unexpected place. One of the earliest superhero comics I read was an old Superman Annual that reprinted “The Old Man of Metropolis!” first published in Action #270 (Nov. 1960). Superman editor Mort Weisinger became rather infamous for doing stories in which some horrible fate befell his characters that was revealed to be “a dream, a hoax, or an imaginary story,” as the slogan ran. The best of these stories, however, enabled Weisinger and his writers to create scenarios that enabled them to delve into their characters’ emotions for impressive dramatic effects without actually altering the ongoing status quo. This was, after all, a period before mainstream comics would throw Spider-Man’s leading lady Gwen Stacy to her death or slaughter high profile superheroes in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
There is one story element in these first two episodes that strikes me as deserving extended comment. The first episode, based on a story by comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, who is an executive producer on the series, was about the classic Spider-Man villain Electro, sort of. I would have thought that one of Marvel’s innovations was that the personalities of its characters were often as important or more important than their powers. Spider-Man is not just someone with spider-like abilities; writers could not kill Peter Parker off, give someone else the powers, and, voila, have a new Spider-Man. (This is, of course, what DC Comics has done with some of their classic characters, although I, and others, would argue that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, the deceased Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern, had more personality than the Powers That Be recognized.) No, what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man is the personality and backstory of Peter Parker.
(An article on Salon back in May showed a similar progression in Buffy the Vampire Slayer from “celebrating the uncool outcasts” as heroes, as it did in the first three seasons, to portraying them “as buffoons or villains” in its later years, concluding that the show had “no more room for a celebration of … the nobility of uncool people.” Perhaps the more successful writers become in a medium, whether comics or TV, the more they find themselves mocking or demonizing those who remind them of their formerly unsuccessful selves.)
As many of you know, I was one of the main writers of the late Mark Gruenwald’s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Aided in large part by the technological expertise of another Marvel staffer, Eliot Brown, Mark sought to make the Marvel characters’ super-powers as firm a basis in real science as possible. After the first version of the Handbook, Mark decided that some of the explanations had grown too complicated, and asked me to simplify them. There’s a lesson right there: less is more, and don’t make matters unnecessarily complex.
This apocalyptic vision is really an extension of some of the basic concepts underlying the Hulk: The Hulk of The End suffers for humanity’s sins (yes, a strange kind of sinister Christ figure), just as Banner suffers in large degree because of his role in creating the gamma bomb. Peter David skillfully dramatizes these themes into an affecting tragedy in The End, something at which the Hulk moviemakers fell short.
Fear not, Mr. Scott. I suspect that the disappointing box office performance of The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded (they’ve sold tons of tickets, but not as many tons as Hollywood’s powers perhaps unrealistically assumed that they would) will instead inspire Hollywood to dumb down future fantasy adventure movies. The real avatar of the future might be the dumbed-down The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, which critics hate because they see it as merely a loud, empty action flick with no ideas behind it.
In his New Yorker profile of Ang Lee (June 30, 2003), drama critic John Lahr writes that “in his comic-book incarnation, the Hulk had little in the way of motivation. Unlike other superheroes, who are agents for good, the Hulk was conceived as a mutant. Part Gargantua and part Green Man … he simply raged when provoked, smashing his world to smithereens.” Just how many things in these few lines are wrong? Let us leave aside the variant personalities that Peter David and other writers gave different comics incarnations of the Hulk. Even Stan Lee’s traditional version of the Hulk is more complex than simply a raging beast: for example, he is paradoxically driven by a need for peace of mind, forever longing for a solitude that his military pursuers refuse to grant him. Are all other superheroes forces for good? The Sub-Mariner, who effectively began as a one-man terrorist army, predated the Hulk by over two decades. What does Lahr mean that the Hulk was conceived as a “mutant”? Even apart from the question of whether the Hulk fits that definition, isn’t Lahr aware that the X-Men were “conceived as mutants”? And aren’t they forces for good?
Ebert quite reasonably wonders how the movie’s Daredevil executes all those superhuman leaps. On the Ebert & Roeper TV show, fellow critic Richard Roeper argued that it was simple: Daredevil can leap great heights because his sense of touch is superhumanly sensitive. (Now what possible sense does that make?) In his Chicago Sun-Times review (Feb. 14, 2003), though, Ebert says that the explanation did not really matter, then adding a sneer at comics readers: “Comics fans, however, study the mythology and methodology with the intensity of academics. It is reassuring, in this world of inexplicabilities, to master a limited subject within a self-contained universe. Understand, truly understand, why Daredevil defies gravity, and the location of the missing matter making up 80 percent of the universe can wait for another day.” And perhaps decades ago, someone might have used a similar tactic to castigate Ebert for studying the history of Hollywood studio films.
In his review of the second X-Men movie, (New York Observer, May 30,2003) rather than making sweeping declarations on a subject he has not investigated, Sarris displays a winning humility on the subject, admitting he knows nothing of adventure comic books or contemporary graphic novels. To his own apparent surprise, Sarris says, “But having seen and enjoyed X2, I am now determined to catch up with X-Men the comic book, as well as Mr. Singer’s previous movie, X-Men (2000) ““ which is to say, in the ancient words of Jerry Lewis, ‘I liked it! I liked it!'” Interestingly, though Sarris has never read Chris Claremont’s X-Men comics or, it seems, even heard of him, he zeroes in on one of Claremont’s major contributions to the X-Men mythos, being particularly struck by the female characters: “Considering the macho fantasizing that traditionally goes on in the genre, the women make up as rich and varied an assortment of female characters ““ heart and mind, body and soul ““ as has been assembled in any movie this year.” Sarris enumerates several of the film’s plotlines that Ebert somehow missed, and when Sarris notes that “Faithful Marvel readers can explain all the subtexts better than I can,” seems to be sincerely respectful of the material, rather than condescending towards aficionados who take the genre seriously.