The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, which, for complicated reasons involving William S. Burroughs and the weak nuclear force, ended the Cold War and replaced it with a magical one with Grant Morrison. That story continues in Book Three. This, meanwhile, is a new epilogue to Book Two, which I hope to have out in print later this year. 

In terms of import, at least, the end of the Cold War and commencement of the Last War in Albion was by some margin Watchmen’s biggest consequence. It was not, however, its only significant one. Moore drew the magical theories that fueled Watchmen from William S. Burroughs, but Burroughs had drawn them from L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology, and there were debts to be paid.

And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.

Gaiman was born in November of 1960 in Hampshire, above his family’s grocery store. He was a third generation immigrant, his grandfather (who opened the grocery store) having been of Polish-Jewish descent. In 1965 his father David decided he wanted to go into business for himself, and moved to the town of East Grinstead in West Sussex, in part to open a vitamin shop, and in part to study at the Scientology Center in town. Both ventures would prove tremendously successful—the shop grew into a major vitamin manufacture company called G&G, while David Gaiman quickly rose through the ranks of Scientology, eventually becoming the the Church’s primary media spokesman in the UK.

In the official version of Gaiman’s biography—the one he offers to Hayley Campbell in her coffee table hagiography The Art of Neil Gaiman—he has what seems a largely happy childhood defined almost entirely in terms of his engagement with arts and language: dictating poetry to his mother before he even knew the alphabet, into Enid Blyton’s Noddy, British comics like Sooty and Pippin, watching the 1966 Adam West Batman series and Doctor Who at his grandparents, then reading Marvel reprints in Odham’s titles like Smash! and Pow!, getting The Penguin Charles Addams at age seven along with the Narnia books and Ray Bradbury, then Gilbert and Sullivan, proper American comics, Michael Moorcock, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Vonnegut, Burroughs, and then into proper literary fiction like Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and, as he finished school in the late 70s, finally into punk. It is a story that seeks, first and foremost, to explain how someone became a writer. Conspicuously absent from it, however, is any sense of texture to his childhood. The only story of his schooling is one of him nearly being expelled from school for repeating a joke with the word “fuck” in it, and even that is framed in terms of him learning about the vast and totemic power of words. Otherwise Gaiman’s early life would seem to consist entirely of media consumption.

 

Gaiman has repeatedly drawn from his childhood in his fiction, however, and this paints a far darker picture. His earliest work to engage with it was Violent Cases, a 1987 graphic novel that begins with its narrator, drawn by Dave McKean to look like Gaiman, lighting a cigarette and looking straight out of the panel to declare, “I would not want you to think that I was a battered child,” a declaration that undermines itself remarkably. Indeed, Gaiman’s accounts of childhood are all ominous and haunted affairs, unreliably narrated from the perspective of his childhood self  and filled with strange terrors that hover just on the edges of his awareness and understanding. He has intimated that these portrayals are based on his own childhood, but never really expanded on the implications of that. Ultimately, however, one needn’t have the gory details to draw conclusions. There is no plausible way that Gaiman, as the only son of the most prominent Scientologist in the UK, was not severely abused throughout his childhood for the simple reason that Scientology is one of the most comprehensively abusive organizations ever to exist, and David Gaiman devoted his life perpetuating that abuse.

The actual Church of Scientology was established by L. Ron Hubbard in 1953, but its roots go back the 1949 publication of “Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind” in John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, some three years after his time with Jack Parsons. Hubbard was a regular in the pages of Astounding, and indeed in the pulps in general, having been writing stories like “The Trail of the Red Diamonds” for Thrilling Adventures and “The Blow Torch Murder” for Detective Fiction Weekly since 1934. “Dianetics,” however, was a different sort of work—an essay purporting to offer a new model and theory of psychiatry that would not merely cure various ailments but bestow outright superpowers such as eidetic memory. The essay and subsequent book version Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health were enormously popular, in part because of the enthusiastic backing of Campbell, whose focus on publishing the sorts of overtly science-minded stories now referred to as “hard SF” had made Astounding Science Fiction the vanguard of science fiction’s golden age.

Unfortunately Dianetics was in practice one of the first major developments in a Campbell’s gradual slide into promoting outright pseudoscience. Mainstream scientific journals gave Hubbard’s theories a thorough drubbing, culminating in public humiliation when he held a demonstration in Los Angeles in which he presented a woman who had purportedly undergone his therapies and developed “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life” only to have her botch a subsequent memory test. This, however, can hardly be called a surprising development given that L. Ron Hubbard was a pathological liar of the first order. As early as his teenage years he was penning multiple contradictory accounts of his dropping out of high school in his own diary. In his early pulp days he would spin elaborate fictive tales of his supposed explorations of the world, claiming to have spent years spent exploring the Amazon basin or hunting in Africa—so many different tales that the pulp writer Frank Gruber eventually pointed out that if you added them up Hubbard would have to be eighty-four years old; in fact he was just twenty-three. He spent an inglorious naval career alternating between faking illnesses and being found unfit for command, then moved on to holing up with and ultimately defrauding Jack Parsons. And things were, to put it mildly, only going to get worse.

The Los Angeles humiliation was a significant setback, however, and Hubbard subsequently lost the rights to the word “Dianetics” in a bankruptcy proceeding. This was followed by his split with Parsons’s ex-girlfriend Sara Northrup, during which she sought medical advice that concluded Hubbard was a dangerous paranoid schizophrenic. Nevertheless, Hubbard regrouped, regaining the rights to Dianetics and incorporating the Church of Scientology in 1953, paying off a claim he’d been making ever since parting ways with Parsons, which was that starting a religion would be an excellent way to make money.

Much has been made of the occult roots of Scientology, not least because Hubbard’s estranged son Ronald DeWolf made extensive claims about Hubbard’s involvement in the occult, including that Hubbard viewed himself as assuming the mantle of the Great Beast after Aleister Crowley’s death.  But DeWolf’s account is dubious for many reasons, and upon examination it’s clear that many of Scientology’s ideas predated Hubbard’s acquaintance with Parsons—large swaths of it clearly originate in an unpublished 1938 manuscript called Excalibur, which Hubbard claimed emerged out of a near death experience following a bad reaction to anesthetic. (Although given that Hubbard also claimed that the manuscript drove many of those who read it insane, that should probably be taken with the usual compliment of salt.)

Equally, it’s clear that his time with Parsons and resultant familiarity with occultism shaped Hubbard’s subsequent thought. There are clear similarities between Scientology and Thelema’s teachings, and more to the point between Hubbard and Crowley’s respective cults of personality.  There are also plainly elements of gnosticism in Hubbard’s cosmology, which posits that humans are immortal souls fallen into material bodies. Perhaps most obvious is Scientology’s OT levels, a tiered secret society for devoted Scientologists whose similarity to the O.T.O. levels is evident. Hubbard even admitted to many of these connections in a series of 1952 lectures, albeit in a typically self-aggrandizing and exaggerated style that included referring to Crowley, who he’d never met, as a personal friend.

Perhaps the most important similarity comes in the basic concept of Dianetics, however. Hubbard’s main contention is that the human mind is divided into two parts, the analytic and reactive minds, the latter of which is plagued by engrams, which are recordings of pain and trauma that get stuck in the reactive mind. This is recognizable as a lightly reskinned account of Freudian psychology and its thoughts on trauma, but Hubbard makes the distinctive move of focusing on engrams as images or ideas. The central claim of Dianetics and Scientology is that engrams can be resolved through a process called auditing, in which a Scientologist asks a series of questions to someone while they hold the contacts of an E-meter, a Hubbard-designed device that functions as a crude measurement of the electrical resistance of the subject’s skin, but which Hubbard insisted revealed the responses of the reactive mind. Once this is completed the subject will attain “Clear” status (at which point they will be funneled towards the OT levels), and be declared free of haunting engrams.

Of particular note is the notion of “implants,” which are a series of harmful engrams planted within everyone’s reactive minds in order to render them susceptible to mind control. These consist of simple words and phrases—“to betray is to be faithful,” “seize no,” “invent an arriving universe to stop a departinged universe” and the like—which are logged over more than a hundred pages, in Hubbard’s own handwriting, all of which one has to audit their way through as part of attaining the OT II level. As William S. Burroughs notes, this amounts to a belief in magic words, as does the belief that talking through them via auditing will prove transformative. At base level, this is simply a restatement of the core magical contention that the way in which one talks about the world directly and materially shapes the world. Or, to quote one of Hubbard’s favorite aphorisms, that “what is true is what is true for you.”

It is not so much that this is an extremely convenient belief for a pathological liar as it is a cogent account—certainly more cogent than the OT II documents—of how pathological liars (and, for that matter, magicians) experience the world. This is born out by a series of documents typically known as the Affirmations, which Hubbard penned while working with Parsons. These amount to an effort at self-hypnosis via a series of short declarative statements. Some of these amount to simple validations—“I believe in myself and am poised and dignified whenever I wish to be,” for instance. Others reveal a startling megalomania, including the proclamation that “I am not susceptible to colds” and that “You will live to be 200 years old, both because you are calm and because of modern discoveries to be made in your lifetime.” In several one can see a belief that Hubbard had spoken things into being before, such as his declaration that “Your stomach trouble you used as an excuse to keep the Navy from punishing you. You are free of the Navy. You have no further reason to have a weak stomach. Your ulcers are all well and never bother you. You can eat anything.” Perhaps most interesting are the handful of Affirmations in which Hubbard is aware of his worst tendencies and endeavoring to push against them, telling himself that “You never illustrate your point with bogus stories. It is not necessary for you to lie to be amusing and witty,” and, perhaps most ominously and tragically, that “I only have friendship for Jack Parsons.” But they all demonstrate the same underlying belief that, as he puts it, “you can will a fact into being with ease.”

Certainly that was what happened with his frequent declaration that the best way to get rich is to start a religion. The Church of Scientology charged hefty fees for the auditing services that comprised its bread and butter, with fees increasing the deeper one got—the OT levels eventually ballooned into requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars, with Hubbard taking a 10% cut of all of it. In the earliest days, at least, all of this was further tax exempt—which Hubbard openly admitted was the primary purpose of pivoting from offering Dianetics as a psychiatric treatment into Scientology as a religion. In 1958. However, the US Government made the understandable conclusion that the operation was in fact set up to funnel money towards Hubbard and rescinded the Church’s tax-exempt status; the next year Hubbard purchased the Saint Hill Manor in East Grinstead, and relocated to the UK.

By the time David Gaiman arrived in East Grinstead six years later Hubbard’s operation had grown increasingly paranoid and authoritarian, utilizing a bevy of abusive tactics to assert deep control over members’ lives and ensure that they could continue to be fleeced for money. In 1960 Hubbard introduced the practice of security checks—an interrogation-based audit in which subjects would be probed about criminal and sexual activity. Like all auditing this was conducted with an E-meter, which would inevitably provide arbitrary responses that were then treated as incontrovertible proof of secrets buried in the reactive mind, giving the auditor license to probe and bully confessions out of people regardless of their truth. The practical effect of this was that the Church amassed substantial blackmail files on its members that could be leveraged against them if they eventually turned on Scientology. And Hubbard’s policy on such people—deemed within Scientology jargon as ‘suppressive persons“—was one of brutal and wholesale hostility; as one expression of the so-called “fair game” policy put it, such people could be “deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.” In the event that a Scientologist’s friends or family were deemed suppressive persons they would be ordered to cease all contact with them, a practice called “disconnection.”

Gaiman and Hubbard only overlapped briefly in East Grinstead, with Hubbard departing in 1966, eventually establishing the Sea Org—a fleet of Scientology ships with pseudo-military structure that Hubbard ran with increasingly abusive and despotic control. Punishments for misbehavior included being locked in ships’ bilge tanks for days or weeks, or simply being thrown overboard. Hubbard lived at sea for a decade before returning to the United States in 1975 following a heart attack, and lived out his final decade in hiding with increasingly ill health until his death in 1986. But Saint Hill Manor remained an important hub of Scientology, both in the UK and globally, and David Gaiman soon became one of the most important figures within it.

Most notably, East Grinstead was the headquarters of the Guardian’s Office, which Hubbard established around the time of his departure as  the Church’s own intelligence agency, responsible for enforcing the fair game policy against Scientology critics. Gaiman became a significant figure in this office. In 1969 he was a major figure in Scientology’s attempted entryist coup against the National Institute for Mental Health, intended to legitimize Scientology’s hostility to mainstream psychiatry, and in 1975 he was involved in “Operation Cat,” an attempt “to plant grossly false information in governmental agencies, especially security services files,” with the idea that they would subsequently file Freedom of Information requests to uncover the information and humiliate the agencies in question. He was also among the Scientologists to wade into a battle of letters with William S. Burroughs after he turned on the organization, penning a 1970 essay in which he defended Scientology from Burroughs’s accusations of racism by declaring that “I am a Scientologist, a member of the Church of Scientology. I am also a Jew by race, religious practice, and cultural background. I am equally proud of my membership in both groups.”

Gaiman was in no way above using his son in the course of this public advocacy. When, in 1968, the younger Gaiman was blocked from enrolling at Fonthill School by the headmaster, who noted that “the family belongs to an organization described as socially harmful. Once their name is cleared I would accept the boy,” David Gaiman arranged for his son to do a BBC Radio interview in order to attract sympathy and attempt to paint the Church as non-threatening. The resulting interview paints an unsettling picture, with the seven-year old Neil Gaiman dutifully reciting Scientology talking points describing it as “an applied philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge,” although he rather cutely admits that he’s forgotten what philosophy is. When asked where he learned that meaning of Scientology he offers a similarly coached non-sequitur: “In clearer words, it’s a way to make the able person more able.” Subsequently he offers a definition  of engrams as “a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness,” and rattles off a strangely complicated story about walking down the street and tripping while a car horn blares and a dog barks. It looks and sounds like it is: a child who’s spent the last several years being indoctrinated into a cult.

1968 was also the year of a rather more dramatic series of events stemming from the Gaimans’ involvement in Scientology. During this period the family periodically hosted lodgers who came to East Grinstead to study Scientology. One of these was Johannes Scheepers, a South African man who, in August 1968, died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the family’s Mini in what was ruled a suicide. Although his alien registration card said he had come to the UK to study Scientology, David Gaiman testified on oath that he was uninvolved in Scientology, claiming that he came to the UK to gamble. This was hardly the only eyebrow raising detail about the incident either—Scheepers had, rather inexplicably, taken the time to cancel his return flight to South Africa before his death, and wrote no fewer than two suicide notes that went out of their way to insist that Scientology had nothing to do with his decision. Neil Gaiman was unaware of this at the time—as he put it, “all we knew was that the Mini had gone away—and here’s another car”—although he would eventually use the incident as the inciting incident for his novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane, maintaining his father’s claim that the suicide was motivated by gambling debts.

Gaiman has said little to nothing about his experiences growing up in Scientology. When pressed on the topic in an interview, he demurred that “the easiest way for me to answer your question is that I don’t have a control version of me who did not have Scientology growing up.” Nevertheless, it formed the backdrop of virtually his entire life prior to his meeting with Berger and Giordano. He moved away from East Grinstead for a brief period at the beginning of the 1980s, although he remained active in Scientology, at one point traveling to Clearwater, Florida for auditing, by which point he had already achieved OT III within the Church’s hierarchy. In 1983—the same year as the birth of his first child with his future wife and fellow Scientologist Mary McGrath—both he and his father were declared Suppressive Persons. In David Gaiman’s case this was part of the power struggles going on in Scientology at the time—Hubbard was ill and in hiding, and a variety of underlings were vying for power in a minor orgy of backstabbing. The reasons for Neil Gaiman’s excommunication, however, seem unrelated to this (nobody else in the family was ousted), and remain unclear. But while his father worked to get back into the Church’s good graces, Gaiman settled into a more liminal relationship. He repaired relations enough to have moved back to East Grinstead in 1984 and married McGrath in 1985 (they divorced in 2007, but McGrath remains active in the Church), but largely settled into a polite distance where he avoided upsetting the Church to the point where his family would have to disconnect from him, but declined to rejoin himself, instead focusing on establishing himself as a writer.

He began in journalism, moving from the fanzine scene to writing for British skin magazine Knave, which suffered massive financial problems almost immediately after he started working for them. It was ultimately bought out by its printer, who were desperate not to lose a major account, but who had no real experience with the editorial side of magazine making. Accordingly, they leaned heavily on existing staff, which meant that Gaiman was largely left alone to fill the articles section of the magazine however he pleased—a brief he fulfilled by just interviewing a bunch of people he found interesting.

This was not mere self-indulgence; Gaiman was, from the first days of his career, an extraordinarily career savvy man. It is not quite that he was ruthless about it so much as it is that it is clear he learned about the world from ruthless people. He had career goals, and he made sure that his actions advanced them beyond simply providing a paycheck. He made sure both to establish himself as a clear presence within the interviews—the same trick Moore and Morrison had both used within the British scene to build their public personae. More importantly, he used the interviews in order to network and befriend a myriad of figures who he would later turn to in order to establish his career at key moments. His first book, a compendium of endearingly awful prose in sci-fi novels called Ghastly Beyond Belief, came after he befriended journalist and major fandom figure Kim Newman, while he parlayed a friendship with Douglas Adams into writing Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion in 1988. But it was the friendship he struck up with Alan Moore on the back of sending him a copy of Ghastly Beyond Belief that would prove most decisive in launching his career.

During a 1985 convention that provided his first opportunity to meet Moore in person, Gaiman asked him if he could show him how to write a comics script. Moore obliged, and Gaiman proceeded to write a short John Constantine story about horrible things growing in his fridge while he was away. Moore read it and broadly liked it, though objected to the ending. Gaiman attempted another, “Jack in the Green,” featuring a 17^th century incarnation of Swamp Thing. That script—eventually drawn by Bissette and Totleben for the Midnight Days anthology—won Moore’s approval, and is in fact a perfectly competent imitation of his style. (Indeed, Gaiman is one of the few writers whose scripts approach Moore’s in verbosity.) Armed with the crucial knowledge of how to be an Alan Moore clone, Gaiman began breaking into the industry, starting with the supposedly obligatory run of Tharg’s Future Shocks in 1986. His first, “You’re Never Alone With a Phone,” was the most notable, as it was also the debut for the astonishing John Hicklenton, but what is in some ways more remarkable is that he quickly bailed on Fleetway, writing only four Future Shocks. There were several reasons for this. For one, Gaiman found their editorial practices frustrating, especially after they removed all the jokes from his Future Shock “I’m a Believer,” which he’d originally written as a Douglas Adams pastiche. But he also, with his gimlet eye for career advancement, took issue with the fact that Fleetway didn’t pay royalties on things like American reprints, reasoning that “writing something that you were never going to get royalties on, no matter what happened or what success it had, was not betting on yourself, was not investing yourself. That’s one-off. That seemed wrong.” On one level this was similar to the logic of his mentor, who also stopped writing for Fleetway over issues of creator’s rights. But for Moore this had been at heart a moral position rooted in his larger beliefs about art and creative freedom. For Gaiman, the reason was more prosaic, implicit in the words “bet” and “investment”: it simply didn’t make financial sense.

A more fruitful early effort came when he hooked up with a comics magazine called Borderline, although this had little to do with the magazine itself, which was a debacle that never published a single issue, and everything to do with one of his colleagues, an artist named Dave McKean. The real opportunity arose when, in the course of the venture’s slow collapse Paul Gravett of Escape sought to write an article on Borderline. Meeting both Gaiman and McKean and, impressed with both of their work, he offered them the opportunity to do a short story for Escape. In a characteristic bit of hubris, Gaiman responded by pitching a forty-eight page graphic novel, which Gravett accepted. (“To his credit,” Gaiman recalls, “he didn’t even blink.”)

The result was Violent Cases, although its basic story predated Gravett’s offer. It began life at a writer’s workshop that Gaiman attended, in which his story went over poorly. Despite the bad reception, however, Gaiman learned a lot from the experience, particularly by listening to the comments of John Clute and Gwyneth Jones, who both had significant careers as critics, and who taught him “how to read, which really changed things when I started to write fiction after that. I was starting to learn and understand the use of subtext, the use of metaphor, he use of allusion—the tools of fiction. Because I’d seen how these guys did it. I started to understand something that only crystalized about eight months later when I started writing Violent Cases. That honesty is important. All of my fiction had been using other people’s voices. And there was a point around then that I started to realize that all one has to offer as a writer is oneself. All that makes me different from all the writers out there is me. Violent Cases was the first thing that did that.”

Gaiman’s story is at its heart about childhood memory: a self-professedly hazy recounting of incidents that occurred when he was four, presented in a way that maintains his childhood naïveté while providing enough puzzle pieces for readers to reassemble the picture. From the narrator’s perspective it is the story about the time his father injured his shoulder trying to drag him up the stairs to bed and he went to an osteopath who had previously worked for Al Capone. After a couple of visits in which Gaiman learns a few scattered things about gangsters, including that they “had tommy guns, which they kept in violent cases,” Gaiman encounters the osteopath again while hiding at an unpleasant children’s party. They talk more, and Gaiman is told a disturbing story of Capone tying a bunch of men to chairs and beating them to death with a baseball bat, and then some other men, including the magician who’d been performing at the party, come and take the osteopath away in what the reader surmises is a hit.

The story exists in a liminal space between truth and fiction; as Gaiman puts it, “I’d compare it to a mosaic; all the little red tiles are my memories, but a red tile may be half a sentence, the other half is fiction… The story, as you go through, drifts further and further away from the truth, so for example the first gangster story you get is the story of Legs Diamond, it’s a true story. The next stuff about being buried in silver coffins, has elements of truth in it, but I’ve exaggerated and played around with it. Then you get the stuff about the party; it’s not true at all. It’s a sort of folk memory version of what actually happened.” Gaiman compares it to the autobiographical comics of Eddie Campbell, particularly his Alec work, noting that “You couldn’t have had Violent Cases without Alec. What I learned from Eddie was the value of minute incidents in the building up of fraudulent biographical narrative. I wouldn’t say it was influenced by Eddie, but the only place in comics that Violent Cases plugs into from a story viewpoint is to Eddie. Which you don’t see because the visuals are Dave.” And this is, broadly, true. The narrative similarities to Campbell are existent, although Gaiman is clearly right to describe them as similarities rather than influences. And this similarity is indeed obscured by the extremely un-Campbell like visuals that Dave McKean’s relentlessly abstract style offers. But this rather deflects from the other significant difference, which is that Campbell’s work is generally wry slice of life autobiography, while Violent Cases, from its magnificently self-undermining opening assertion to its landscape of gruesome and inexplicable adult violence, is a story about what it’s like to be horribly abused as a child.

Violent Cases was still in progress when Berger and Berger and Giordano came calling in 1987, and Gaiman’s portfolio consisted of nothing more than the extant pages and those four Future Shocks. But he had something far better than mere experience: the personal recommendation of Alan Moore. Following the scriptwriting tutorial, Gaiman had served as a minor research assistant on Watchmen starting with issue #3, when he was able to identify for Moore where the line “shall not the judge of all the Earth do right” originated so that it could be used as the issue’s epigraph. (It was the Book of Genesis) He subsequently contributed quotes for issues #7 (“I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat,” from the Book of Job) and #8 (“On Hallowe’en the old ghosts come about us, and they speak to some; to others they are dumb,” from a poem by Eleanor Farjeon, just to prove he’d read something other than the Bible) along with the Rameses quote used by Ozymandias in the text of issue #12. For this Gaiman was gifted the original art for one of the pages of Dan’s nuclear sex dream in issue #7 and given a thanks credit in the trade paperback alongside Pat Mills, Joe Orlando, and Mike Lake.

And so, with McKean in tow, Gaiman met with Berger and Giordano. Gaiman recalls that McKean was dubious about this, saying that “I practically put a gun to his back, forced him to bring his portfolio up,” and that “Poor Dave was just walking around behind me going ‘They don’t mean it.’ I’m going, ‘Sshhhh. Don’t look down. We’re okay.’ He went through that entire first meeting with DC Comics just baffled. ‘I think they’re just saying this to be polite.’ No, they think we’re great. We’re doing this. I was very good at it.” Gaiman recalls the meeting in some detail: “So I did my pitch for Phantom Stranger and they said, ‘Weirdly enough, Grant Morrison was in this morning, he did a pitch for Phantom Stranger too. Yours is really good, his is really good—unfortunately we’ve got this Paul Kupperberg piece, which is not very good but it is what he is. So you can’t do that.’” So Gaiman proceeded to pitch more characters, both relatively mainstream ones like Green Arrow and Black Canary and deep cut obscurities like Nightmaster, Klarion the Witch Boy, and Cain and Abel before finally getting to Black Orchid, a character sufficiently obscure that Karen Berger hadn’t even heard of her, mishearing Gaiman as pitching the Black Hawk Kid. Dick Giordano, meanwhile, noted that he liked her costume and invited Gaiman and McKean to write up a proposal.

Gaiman plotted the story on the train back to Sussex, connecting the character to Moore’s Swamp Thing mythology, then called McKean on the payphone at McKean’s art school dorm to run him through the pitch. (Gaiman recalls that “It was about forty-five minutes… thirty people were lining up behind him in the hallway waiting to use the phone. And he didn’t say a word,” leading McKean’s classmates to assume this was some bewildering piece of performance art. Eventually, McKean simply said “Alright,” hung up, and two days later had six paintings of sample art that Gaiman delivered to Berger and Giordano as they were departing for the US alongside his full pitch—a speed of turnaround that proved the pair’s professionalism sufficiently for them to get the job despite their slender portfolio.

Even by the standards of British creators imitating Alan Moore to get a job at DC, Black Orchid feels derivative. It is not simply that Black Orchid is another plant-themed character—the entire structure and approach of the comic is plainly a Swamp Thing riff. Gaiman opens by having the character in the midst of infiltrating a corporate meeting for some sort of criminal enterprise that she’s trying to get to the heart of. Four pages in, however, she’s abruptly exposed and captured; by page ten, she’s been killed. This, of course, is not the end of the line—a new version of her appears in a greenhouse some distance away (a pair of them, in fact), and the story follows this new protagonist as she makes sense of her life and fragmented, unclear memories of her past incarnation. But everything here, from the corporate setting to the immediate killing of the main character, is beat for beat what Alan Moore had done on Swamp Thing five years earlier.

The book does not shy from the comparison—Swamp Thing himself even appears in the story to give the new Black Orchid some needed explanation. But it doesn’t really make any effort to transcend it either. Its central innovation—giving Black Orchid a younger, child version to care for—is nifty, but it’s not especially expanded on, not least because the book is a three issue miniseries (albeit one with double-sized issues) and there’s simply not room. Beyond that, it is content to play its core beats with relatively few flourishes, at least in its writing. The art, however, is another matter; McKean is one of the most visually distinctive artists in comics, with an abstract and painterly style that leaps off the page. This can at times be hard to follow—he’s fond of murky and low-contrast images—but this is is less of a problem in a book that’s so unabashedly willing to be an Alan Moore covers act, as it means everything McKean is selling is fundamentally familiar and recognizable. The result is an unremarkable comic in most regards—Gaiman admits that that he “rather liked a few pages, and that was about all,” but an extremely effective way to kickstart a career.

Initially DC saw Black Orchid as an experimental, artsy book focused more on respectability than profit, but as pages came in they grew convinced they had a potential hit on their hands, and sought to bolster the profile of both creators. For McKean this meant quickly pairing him with Grant Morrison for Arkham Asylum. Gaiman, meanwhile, was offered an ongoing series based on another one of his pitches from the February 1987 meeting—a revamp of the Golden Age character of The Sandman, a gasmask wearing vigilante who used his gas gun to put villains to sleep. Gaiman had wanted to use him for a story that would be set mostly in dreams, which Berger liked, but felt that he should create a new character for it. Gaiman began with a simple image: “a man, young, pale, and naked, imprisoned in a tiny cell, waiting until his captors passed away, willing to wait until the room he was in crumbled to dust; deathly thin, with long dark hair, and strange eyes: Dream. That was what he was. That was who he was.” A year later, and just four weeks after the debut of Black Orchid, DC released the first issue of Sandman.

Back in November of 1988, this must have looked like the less significant event. Black Orchid, after all, was a lushly painted prestige format book priced at $3.50. Sandman—properly The Sandman, although nobody actually uses the definite article—was just a staple-bound book priced at $2 (and falling to $1.50 with subsequent issues, as the first one was oversized) with a conventional penciler/inker/colorist art team. Its most obviously striking feature was once again Dave McKean, who did the cover–a physical construction for which he built a pair of shelves, filled them with knicknacks he and Gaiman scrounged in Covent garden, and used them to frame a scratchy, fuzzed out drawing of the title character before photographing it. The use of material objects like an hourglass, flowers, and books gave the cover a strange and vertiginous sense of scale, and ensured that it looked like nothing else on the shelves. But this was McKean’s only contribution to the issue, while Black Orchid had forty pages of his lushly iconoclastic style.

As for the interior, while there are plenty of comics whose first issues were incendiary and world-changing revelations, Sandman is not one of them. Its first issue is competent, but nobody mistakes it for the reason the book would eventually catch fire. Gaiman has suggested that the early issues of Sandman consisted of him “exploring genres,” with the first being his riff on Dennis Wheatley’s classic occult exploitation novel The Devil Rides Out. But this is far from the most interesting thing about it. The core plot of the issue hinges on the relationship between the occultist Roderick Burgess—an Aleister Crowley pastiche in the same vein as Wheatley’s villainous Mocata—and his son Alex. Roderick is a cruel and capricious man, while Alex is appreciably more timid, clearly afraid of his father. The plot spans decades, from 1916 when Burgess summons and imprisons Dream, also known as Morpheus, to when he finally escapes in 1988, and Alex is the only consistent character over that stretch, going from a young child to an old man who has inherited his father’s occult order.

It would be a bridge too far to suggest that any of this is intended as a direct commentary on Scientology—although DeWolf’s claims about his Hubbard’s relationship with Crowley had come to prominence just a few years earlier, and so were plausibly on Gaiman’s mind. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to notice that Gaiman begins the comic by depicting an abusive father/son relationship within the context of a cult. Indeed, he even situates Burgess in Wych Cross—a location undoubtedly chosen primarily for its ominous name, but that nevertheless lies just five miles down the road from East Grinstead.

But while the issue is an interesting lens on Gaiman as he began to extricate himself from his abusive upbringing, it’s still just not an especially strong debut. At forty pages its pacing is baggy—it’s structured as an ever-winding spring of tension, but this means that fairly little actually happens over the bulk of it. It is not until the three quarter mark that Dream finally mounts his escape, and he offers only eighteen words of comment (all directed to the reader) over the decades of his captivity. And in the absence of what will eventually become the main character there’s relatively little to hold onto. Even after Dream escapes, the issue merely resolves the issue of his revenge, with him trapping Alex in an unceasing nightmare of eternal waking. Not only is this somewhat underwhelming as a horror, it fails to give the issue any real forward momentum—all the characters the first issue focused on are dead or incapacitated, and there’s nothing pointing towards the actual plot of the series.

Stylistically, Gaiman shows himself to be the deft student of Moore that he is, though not nearly to the extent of Black Orchid. He employs a narrator so that he can occasionally cut from the main story to a couple of panels giving fragmentary descriptions of the wider ramifications of events that emphasize the mythic scale of the story. But where Moore’s captions leaned into a sort of grandiose excess such as his famous “clouds like bloodied plugs of cotton wool dab ineffectually at the slashed wrists of the sky,” Gaiman remains in a more prosaic register with descriptions of how “Unity Kinkaid finds it harder and harder to stay awake. She now sleeps for almost twenty hours a day. She used to dream; to shift in her sleep, muttering and sighing, locked in half-remembered fantasies.” But while his language is simpler, he retains the heavily iambic rhythm that pulls the reader along through the captions. The effect is to take Moore’s already popular signature techniques and streamline them into an even more populist version.

Indeed, Moore’s looms large over the first seven issues of Sandman. This is scarcely a surprise; Swamp Thing homages were what British writers headhunted by Karen Berger were supposed to do; Morrison had done it on their early issues of Animal Man, and Gaiman had done it in Black Orchid. But there, of course, Gaiman played directly in Moore’s sandbox, whike in Sandman he takes a more cautious approach. There are occasional moments in the first seven issues of Sandman that directly abut material that Moore did—the second, for instance, heavily features Cain and Abel, who were originally the hosts of DC’s House of Mystery and House of Secrets series. The latter of these was where the first Swamp Thing story was published, and Moore had both characters cameo in his run. The third, meanwhile, features John Constantine. And there are smaller moments too—a sequence in the fifth issue in which a villain contemplates letting a young woman live before deciding to kill her anyway owes clear debt to Kid Miracleman’s killing of the nurse in Miracleman #14.

But these are exceptions, and more to the point, they are exceptions in which Gaiman can avoid being compared too heavily to his mentor. Yes, Cain and Abel appeared in Swamp Thing, but as throwaway characters. Constantine may have been a Moore creation, but Sandman #3 is blatantly a riff on Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer, not Moore’s work. The one place where Gaiman actually feels like he’s nicking something from Moore saw him drawing from outside Moore’s DC work. Instead, Gaiman spent the early portions of Sandman doing something subtler: finding horror stories that could be told in the same broad style that Moore used for Swamp Thing, but that are in subgenres that Moore never attempted—Dennis Wheatley, the aesthetic of DC’s 70s horror aesthetics, or slasher films. This allowed Gaiman to avoid overly direct comparison to Moore while he worked to develop his own voice and style.

His first major success comes in the fourth issue, “A Hope in Hell,” which sees Dream journey to Hell in order to retrieve one of the three artifacts Burgess stole from him—a quest that forms the backbone of the first arc. Moore wandered by Hell, most obviously in the Swamp Thing Annual where he does that great scene of Arcane asking how long he’d been there, but Gaiman lingers there in order to offer an extended John Milton riff. The issue’s climax sees him battle the demon Choronzon (a name first attested by John Dee and Edward Kelley, but more prominently associated with Crowley), who engages him in the Game of Reality. This involves a sort of back and forth poetry battle in which Dream and Choronzon each declare themselves to be various entities while trying to one up eachother. They start as animals—a wolf, a hunter, a fly to throw the hunter off his horse, a spider to eat the fly. But soon they escalate upwards, with Dream declaring himself an entire world while Choronzon proclaims himself a nova. Eventually Choronzon escalates to declaring himself “anti-life, the beast of judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds… of everything,” a move he clearly expects to bring him victory. Instead, however, Dream calmly retorts, “I am hope,” to which Choronzon has no answer.

It’s a phenomenal sequence—enough so that Gaiman repeats it almost verbatima few pages later as Lucifer attempts to prevent Dream from leaving Hell with his prize, pointing to the host of demons between him and the exit and asking “what power have dreams in Hell,” to which Dream replies that Hell is powerless without the dream of heaven, stunning all the demons into silence as he walks off, leaving a furious Lucifer sets up a sequel by vowing future revenge (one of two conspicuous bits of setup in the issue, which also has Morpheus encounter a woman named Nada, who begs him to free her from hell and asks whether he loves her, to which he icily responds that “It has been ten thousand years, nada. Yes. I still love you. But I have not yet forgiven you.”) The reason the beat works so well is that Gaiman manages to occupy the mythic register in an accessible, human way. The reality game, for all its cosmic implications, unfolds in a grotty demonic nightclub called the Hellfire Club, which Dream even notes “feels like a bad joke,” and consists of little more than an easy to follow conversation. Lucifer’s subsequent challenge, meanwhile, hinges on what is in effect a riddle, with a page turn reveal to ensure its eminently guessable answer hits with sufficient impact.

The fourth issue was also designed, in part, as a gift for Sandman’s initial penciler, Sam Kieth. Unfortunately, by the time they got to the issue Kieth’s working relationship with the rest of the team was in tatters. The decision to hire Kieth—at this point an up and comer mostly known for his inking—had initially been suggested by Karen Berger, to whom he’d previously reached out hoping to get work on Swamp Thing. Kieth was incredulous upon being offered the job—Gaiman recalls him “doing that thing where he’s going ‘Well, who turned it down before? Did lots of people say no? Is that why you’re calling me? We had to convince him that we knew who who we was, and we had seen his stuff.”

Kieth brought an expressive quality to Sandman—one clearly inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s inventive grotesqueness. This at times gives his issues of Sandman a strange quality compared to the later series. Sandman #2, for instance, has a beat in which Dream comes upon the decayed ruins of his castle, and what’s clearly supposed to be a beat of tragedy instead takes on a strangely comedic bent purely due to the way that Kieth’s depiction of Dream—tiny pupils set in deep black eyes, long face, and gaping expression—is faintly cartoonish. Elsewhere, however, he excels, most obviously in issue #4, where he spent weeks on a double page spread showing the assembled demons of Hell, to the point of insisting on inking it himself instead of letting the usual inker, Mike Dringenberg, do it.

This was one of many contentious points between Kieth and Dringenberg, who were friends (Kieth in fact suggested him for the role), but who struggled to work together due to the fact that, in reality, Kieth was the better inker and Dringenberg the better penciller. And this tension is visible in Keith’s issues, which seem at times to veer wildly from his more expressive style to something that’s much more recognizably in line with the subsequent issues of Sandman penciled by Dringenberg. As Kieth details it, “I said, ‘This is not working, Mike.’ And Mike said, ‘Why don’t you let me pencil?’ I said, “I’m not gonna let you pencil it. I want to pencil it. I don’t know how yet, but I gotta learn on this book. So I’m gonna try to learn how to pencil on this book.’”

Kieth’s relationship with Gaiman was similarly fraught. The issues are perhaps best summarized by Kieth’s recounting that he looked at the script for Sandman #1 and told Gaiman, “‘It’s a P. Craig Russell story. You should get Craig.’ He said, ‘Yeah… I know.’” Worse, however, was Kieth’s relationship with Berger, which began to sour a few pages in, when he wanted to add an extra panel into the storytelling, a move that “became me facing off with Karen about whether my storytelling was competent, whether I had a right to try to challenge this. She was like, ‘No. This is the way it is.’ I had an enormous power struggle with Karen, and Neil sided with her. I felt really betrayed, but the reality was: that was the way. I didn’t get it until then.” The situation deteriorated further when Berger had Kieth redraw the bulk of the first issue with no additional payment, by the end of the first issue Berger and Kieth were barely on speaking terms, with Gaiman stuck trying to play peacemaker between them. As Kieth described it later, “everybody was trying to get me to quit, and I was trying to get myself fired.”

Ultimately, quitting won, and Kieth decided to depart the book after the fifth issue, a breakup most often related with Kieth’s description of himself as feeling “like Jimi Hendrix in The Beatles” (though Kieth notes That was not my line. That was Neil’s”). Gaiman ensured, however, that Kieth and Dringenberg both received co-creator credits on Sandman along with an ongoing stream of royalties. Kieth moved on to Marvel, and in 1993 Kieth migrated to Image where he created The Maxx, which proved a smash hit in its own right even though Kieth described the title character as “pretty much an excuse to draw a circle and a triangle and add some arms,”) going on to be adapted as an animated series by MTV and to attract Alan Moore to pen dialogue for an issue. And while the Hendrix line may have been an invention, there were at least no lasting hard feelings,, with Kieth reuniting briefly with Gaiman and Dringenberg in 2011 on a benefit book for the Hero Initiative, with the two illustrating Gaiman’s poem “My Last Landlady” (later released as part of An Evening with Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer) with a series of abstract and moody images.

Kieth was replaced by Dringenberg, who immediately found himself pencilling one of the most singular issues not only of Sandman but of Gaiman’s entire career, “24 Hours.” The first arc of Sandman is steeped in horror, but even in that context “24 Hours” stands out. The setup sees Doctor Destiny, a minor supervillain that Gaiman retconned to be the owner of Dream’s final relic, sitting in a diner over the course of a day and slowly driving the patrons mad before killing them. It is not quite that this is unusually extreme or gruesome. Sure, it features a scene of someone hammering nails into his own hand, and another of someone gouging her eyes out, but even the latter is pointedly framed to avoid actual visuals of the injury to the eye motif. Similarly, the most straightforwardly violent beat, in which a character who’s descended into being an animalistic alpha male rips the throat of another out with his teeth, is given a muted, surreal tone by Robbie Busch’s constrained color palette. (Busch’s coloring, much maligned, including by Gaiman, shows its virtues more clearly when contrasted with Daniel Vozzo’s lifeless and overlit reworkings in later editions.) It’s unquestionably a violent and gory comic, but no more so than plenty of other comics in the War both before and after.

No, the true horror of “24 Hours” comes from its vivid sense of emotional sadism. The most upsetting part of the scene in which a man is hammering nails through his hands, for instance, is the man’s monologue telling the waitress at the diner about how his late wife knew about their affair, that this began her fatal alcoholic spiral, and that he had in fact deliberately left her with a crate of vodka and skipped town so that she’d drink herself to death. “I’ll tell you something else,” he says immediately after. “When I was in the pen, I saw your son. Little Bernie. He’d been hustling his ass in Gotham, got picked up for knifing his pimp. You could have him for a packet of cigarettes,” he says, taunting the distraught waitress with this information about her estranged son as she holds the next nail for him. “Bette…” he finishes. “I did.” It’s absolutely brutal material—a level of cruelty that largely eclipses the physical mutilation.

Once again it is impossible not to think of Gaiman’s time in Scientology. This is not because of the emotional sadism itself; at the end of the day Scientology’s cruelty was a far blunter instrument than this—the first of many times the student would outdo the master in this regard. But the most basic currency of Scientology’s abuse was always the use of people’s confessions extracted via auditing as blackmail material, and the key beats of “24 Hours,” over and over again, come when characters have their worst secrets and fantasies revealed. The initially sympathetic lesbian Judy is revealed to be physically abusive to her partner.  Garry, initially introduced as one of a pair of “lovebirds,” dreams of “having a $20 hooker in the convertible. Then he’ll beat her up, throw her out of the car, drive off. He gets such a kick out of doing that.” His wife Kate, meanwhile, in a particularly disturbing sequence, describes her necrophilic experience and fantasies.

It’s visceral and unsettling—a shot across the bow that established a conceptual limit point in much the same way that Miracleman #15 had just a few months earlier. “24 Hours” goes as far in the direction of cruel, cynical emotional torture as it is possible to go. As with Miracleman #15, it would not be recognized as such, and the world would instead be subject to a myriad of ill-advised imitations (often written by Mark Millar, for whom the two comics seem almost to provide an origin story). But also like Miracleman #15, the original stands largely unharmed by its imitators, a work of shocking and brutal elegance.

The issue also marks a transition in how Gaiman thought about the series; he describes it as “the first time I realized on a gut level, not just an intellectual one, that I was writing a story about stories,” as opposed to one that is simply about dreams. The comic opens with five pages devoted to the first of its twenty-four hours, which serve both to introduce all of its characters and to spend some extended time fleshing out the interiority Bette, the waitress at the diner, who is described as spending her spare time filling pads of paper with stories about the people around her. She imagines how “One day she knows she’ll package the pads up, bind them in brown paper, send them to Dear Abby, or Earl Wilson, or Jackie Collins. They’ll read them, and they’ll publish them and everyone will marvel at her depiction of happy, happy small-town life.” The key part, however, comes when she reflects that on how she makes sure to give all her characters happy endings. “That’s because she knows where to stop. She’s realized the real problem with stories—if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.”

It’s a good line, and Gaiman is predictably proud of it, remarking that it’s “the nearest I came early on to giving away the overall plot of Sandman… That’s a major theme of Sandman—you get happy endings only by stopping at a certain point.” In the postscript to the trade, meanwhile, Gaiman goes further, describing “24 Hours” as “an essay on stories and authors.” This overplays his hand dramatically but strategically, repositioning the issue away from its poison legacy of edginess and towards Gaiman’s eventual play for literary respectability—a concept that simply did not enter the equation back in 1989 when his main—indeed only—concern was making sure DC didn’t cancel his comic and leave him unemployed.

But while “24 Hours,” like “A Hope in Hell” before it, was a major milestone in Gaiman’s development, neither holds a candle to Sandman #8, a postscript to the first arc entitled “The Sound of Her Wings.” All of the major figures in the War have comics like this—moments in which they announced themselves as major figures. For Moore it was the one-two punch of Marvelman and V for Vendetta in Warrior #1, at least in the UK, and then “The Anatomy Lesson” to establish himself anew in the US. For Morrison it came in “The Coyote Gospel”; for Ennis, Dangerous Habits. These are comics that forced the world to sit up and take notice of their creators. They are not merely good, nor even great; they are instant classics—comics that signified the arrival of a creator seemingly fully formed, already a giant.

None, however, come close to the seismic blast that is “The Sound of Her Wings.” Much of War’s corpus consists of works with significant but fundamentally niche appeal, even if those niches varied between literary comics readers with subscriptions to The Comics Journal and convention-going superhero fans. Even Watchmen was, in the end, more important than popular, its crossover appeal rooted more in an argument about the artistic value of comics as a medium than in people just being head over heels for Night Owl. “The Sound of Her Wings” is different. Sure, arguments have been made about Sandman’s literary worth, and Gaiman at times openly courted those claims, but “The Sound of Her Wings” is not important because of its philosophical heft or technical adeptness. It is important because literally millions of people have read it, many of whom weren’t even regular comics readers. It is loved not with mere fandom or appreciation but with the incandescent passion unique to teenagers looking at a work of art and seeing a vision of who they want to be.

The issue has precisely one goal: to introduce Death. Anything that does not serve that purpose is sidelined. Dream is present purely as a lens through which Death is seen—a familiar perspective with which to reveal the new. It opens with him sitting by the fountain in Washington Square morosely tossing bread to the pigeons as a young boy plays with a soccer ball, nearly hitting him with it before he catches it with unearthly speed.  A young woman with a similar stark white skin/jet black clothing look walks up and sits beside him before launching into a two page monologue describing the film Mary Poppins in a level of enthused, slightly manic detail. “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” she exclaims, and then, when Dream expresses confusion, explains, “Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious. Utterly fantabulous word, huh? It means, y’know, great. Wonderful. Ginchy. Gnarly. Peachy keen!”, this final definition of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious offered as she puts on a pair of sunglasses she’s been fidgeting with.

Through this scene—done primarily with open bordered panels over a white background—Dream sits politely, a bit confused but mostly non-responsive—he has six words over two pages, compared to a hundred and twenty for her. There are as of yet no real clues who this character is—she’s clearly being visually paralleled with Dream, but her speech bubbles lack his iconic white-on-black effect, so even that’s inconclusive. But the level of focus—the fact that two pages are spent on this woman nattering on about Mary Poppins—speaks volumes about her importance.

A page turn; the panels are still open, but the background has shifted from white to a soft purple. A silent, wide shot of the two of them extends the pause, clearing the deck from her previous monologue. And then Dringenberg offers a large quarter-page panel—a full body shot of her, cross-legged, running her hand through her Siouxsie Sioux explosion of jet black hair, the simple ankh necklace she wears positioned front and center as she asks “OK. So, what’s the matter?” A matching panel of Morpheus clearly establishes them as equals, as she prompts him to explain why, exactly, he’s moping in the park with a bunch of pigeons.

What follows is another two pages of monologue, this time from Dream: a gloomy and self-obsessed recounting of the preceding seven issues. But Dringenberg’s art largely keeps the focus on the still unidentified woman through this, making it clear that even as it sketches the series’ protagonist in all his broodingly Byronic glory the focus, for the moment, is on her. After two dialogue laden pages to the effect of “I’m very depressed,” the woman asks if he’s finished, then inquires as to why he didn’t call her, to which he responds, “I didn’t want to worry you.”

At this point, the comic cuts to a close-up panel on the woman’s face, immaculate eyeliner wings and black lipstick on full display. “I. Don’t. Believe. It.”, she says, and then, grabbing the baguette that Dream was feeding to the birds, she proceeds to berate him, telling him that he is “utterly the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane! An infantile, adolescent, pathetic specimen! Feeling all sorry for yourself because your little game is over, and you haven’t got the—the balls to go and find a new one!” as she hurls the bread at his head, a panel for which Dringenberg reverts from his far scratchier and impressionistic style into something much more cartoony as Dream, eyes wide-open and white-irised, cowers and covers his face while the loaf of bread bounces off his head with Todd Klein’s impeccably rendered “BIP!”

It’s a bracingly effective contrast—a wholesale turning over of narrative authority from the title character to a goth girl whose identity is still very much unclear, although a page later she finally identifies Dream as her brother. But she has, by that point, pulled off a narrative coup: she is the most interesting, charming, funny, and delightful character in the book, and the entire audience is completely in love with her. A few pages later, it finally becomes clear that she’s Death.

The next few pages see Gaiman at his lyrical best—a series of tiny vignettes of the pair attending the passing of various people: an old Jewish man, a standup comedian literally dying on stage, an infant, a sick woman in a hospital, a shooting victim, and more. Gaiman is poetic, touching, full of sad ironies and moments of grace, while Death is kind, gentle, and loving. It’s exceptionally well done, but it serves mostly to reveal the depth behind what has already been established—a justification for why this exuberant goth girl could possibly have the narrative weight she’s already blatantly been granted.

The result was immediate and decisive: Death instantly became the signature character of Sandman. And Gaiman made sure she stayed that way. After her triumphant debut, she appears in only twenty further issues of Sandman, and many of those are fleeting cameos (though Gaiman makes sure she has at least one appearance per trade). Gaiman has talked about how “I wanted her to always leave readers craving more. Whenever I considered using Death, I thought of Marlon Brando getting paid $4 million to appear in just ten minutes of Superman: The Movie. So I would bring Death on only when I really needed her, and I mentally paid her $4 million for each appearance—and made sure that she used the money.”

It’s also clear that everyone at DC knew exactly how good Sandman #8 was, as they gave it a nearly unprecedented marketing push, opening the issue with three pages of blurbs from names like Ramsey Campbell, Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Bryan Talbot, Emma Bull, Rick Veitch, and Clive Barker. These were followed by a four page illustrated text summary of the preceding seven issues. It is one of the most lavish and substantive efforts to create a jumping on point for a comic, and a clear sign that DC understood that this was a comic that would be getting profound amounts of word of mouth.

Gaiman’s approach to creating the character was straightforward—he wanted to create “a Death who I personally wouldn’t mind encountering when my time comes—who would come up to me one day and say pleasantly. ‘You know, you really should have had that mole checked out.’ Or, more probably, ‘Now, next time try and remember—it’s left pedal to go faster, right pedal to stop.’” But he was also driven by more strategic concerns, recognizing that his lead character was already “pale, tall, brooding, dark, relatively humorless, and Byronic in a late adolescent way,” and so pointedly playing against expectations with Death.

Death’s actual design, however, was purely down to Mike Dringenberg. Gaiman’s suggestions for her appearance were, depending on who you ask, based on Nico from the cover of her Chelsea Girl album or on silent film legend Louise Brooks. Dringenberg, however, had his own ideas. As he put it, “I saw her walking down the street knowing she’s it. And I knew it in the pit of my gut. Every bell rang as loud as you could possibly say it, from the haircut to that perfectly sculpted face to the little speck of glitter she stuck to her teeth with superglue. Little things like that, you know? That was it, she was it.”

The “she” in this anecdote was Dringenberg’s friend Cinnamon Hadley, a dancer and fixture of the Salt Lake City goth scene who he viewed as having “real star quality in her presence and bearing. She was an ex-ballet dancer with an amazing body, a beautiful heart-shaped face, and a memorable haircut, and was prone to wandering around with a little black umbrella. I felt Cinnamon had the visual qualities we were looking for, so I drew Death to look pretty much like her.” Indeed, the resemblance is so pronounced that one panel of “The Sound of Her Wings” is simply a reworking of a photo of her. As Hadley recalls it, “Mike Dringenberg, the original artist for the Sandman, was a good friend of mine. He asked me one day if he could use me as a character for a comic book. I said sure. I didn’t know anything about comics and I didn’t know it was even anything special. I certainly had no idea it would be what it is now. Funny story—About three years after Mike asked me if he could use my likeness, I was living in Houston, having moved from Salt Lake City, and I was at a friend’s house. My friend told me his favorite comic was the Sandman and showed me an issue. When I opened it I saw a picture of myself staring back at me. (It was one of the 2 photographs actually used and just inked over). I said, ‘oh my God, that’s me.’ I had no idea I was in the Sandman, and I had even forgotten about being asked by Mike to use me as the model.”

Gaiman was compelled by Dringenberg’s drawing, a sense that only deepened when, the same day that he saw it, he went out to dinner with Dave McKean “at the My Old Dutch Pancake House and the waitress who served us was a kind of vision. She was American, had very long black hair, was dressed entirely in black—black jeans, T-shirt, etc.—and wore a big silver ankh on a silver necklace. And she looked exactly like Mike Dringenberg’s drawing of Death… I took that incident as an omen, and I silently replied to the powers that be, ‘Oh, okay. This is what Death looks like walking around. Cool. Thank you.’”

But more than being another case of fictional characters bleeding into the world like John Constantine periodically did for Alan Moore, this highlights the key brilliance of Death as a character above and beyond her immaculate presentation in “The Sound of Her Wings.” It’s not simply that Death is an immediately compelling presence that steals any scene she’s in. An oft-observed truism is that Sandman had wildly more women reading it than comics at large did. When one talks about Sandman being foundational to millions of people, one is talking not exclusively but substantially about teenage girls of the 90s and 00s who were into goth subculture. And a fundamental part of its appeal is that its best character—the one who gets all the good lines and who the reader is all but forced to love—looks like them. In contrast to Cinnamon Hadley, who was a bold fashion and makeup experimentalist, at the end of the day dressing up like Death required little more than a black tank top, black jeans, some boots, a cheap piece of jewelry, and a bit of practice with an eyeliner pen. It is difficult to think of another iconic character in comics that was routinely first encountered by people who were already cosplaying her. It’s no surprise that many of those young goth girls passionately identified with her, nor that they became adoringly loyal fans of her creator—fans that he would spend the rest of his career both catering to and preying upon.

The effect of “The Sound of Her Wings” was, in fundamental ways, unlike anything else that occurred in the War. It is not simply that Gaiman had entered his imperial phase. He had, and would remain in it for just over a decade, but that was nothing new. Moore had a similar phase in the 1984-86 period, when Swamp Thing was already established as a hit and he was simultaneously working on Marvelman, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, and Watchmen, but at no point did he achieve the kind of  white-hot stardom that characterized Gaiman—a stardom that was, in key ways, no longer straightforwardly about the work. Sandman was no longer functioning primarily as a comic, but as a cultural event. Neil Gaiman wasn’t competing with Moore or Morrison, or even with his influences and contemporaries in his genre like Diana Wynne Jones or Emma Bull; he was competing with Donnie Wahlberg and Kurt Cobain, as a pop idol. Sandman was was no longer merely a thing to experience on its own artistic terms, nor even merely a thing to be a fan of; it was a tool with which to define yourself.

This was fortuitous in many ways, as in artistic terms the second arc of Sandman, entitled The Doll’s House, was a rather dodgy affair. As with much of the first arc, the problem is not that it was bad. But little within it approached the thrilling highs of “A Hope in Hell” or “24 Hours,” never mind the lightning in a bottle charge of “The Sound of Her Wings.” For all that it introduces a number of important and memorable parts of Sandman, most obviously two more of Dream’s siblings, the malevolent Desire and their quietly unsettling twin Despair, there’s an obvious tentativeness and lack of confidence to it. This is most obvious in its narrative structure, which, after a prologue giving the backstory on Dream’s relationship with Nada (he fell in love with her, she spurned him, he decided she should rot in hell for all eternity), once again becomes a three-item quest narrative, this time with Dream hunting down a trio of escaped dreams. Gaiman’s approach is slightly more elegant than the sheer linearity of his first arc, however—instead of seeking out the items one by one, Morpheus declares that he will simply allow events to unfold because the existence of a “dream vortex” means that the errant dreams will be naturally be drawn towards it.

Or, rather, towards her; the vortex is a young girl named Rose Walker, who, in the arc’s most interesting decision, is its main character, with Dream appearing considerably more sporadically—he only shows up in a single four-page scene in the first issue, for instance. Indeed, Gaiman has said that he “saw the Doll’s House as an opportunity to begin training my audience to accept a broader range of material than they may have been used to seeing in comics. The Doll’s House isn’t focused on the Sandman at all but on a girl named Rose Walker. Dream pops up periodically in the story, but his participation is scaled way back.” This also allows Gaiman the space to engage in some worldbuilding—the story is bookended by a pair of scenes introducing Desire and Despair, the former of whom will prove to be the closest thing Sandman has to a primary antagonist. Similarly, issue #13 in the middle of the arc, “Men of Good Fortune,” is a self-contained issue illustrated by Michael Zulli so as to allow Dringenberg time to handle the double-sized issue that followed. That issue puts the entire present-day plot of The Doll’s House on hold to begin in the 14th century, where it introduces one of Sandman’s most memorable recurring characters, Hob Gadling, a man who declares that he will simply refuse to die. Amused, Dream and Death contrive to make him immortal, and the issue depicts his centenary meetings with Dream until it reaches the present day.

This serves, in practice, as the hinge that The Doll’s House ’s structure pivots on, with the rest dividing into what are essentially two three-issue arcs on either side. The first of these sees Rose locating her brother Jed while Dream simultaneously rescues him from one of the escaped dreams. The second, meanwhile, serves to resolve the whole “dream vortex” thing. But while this is reasonably elegant and allows Gaiman to ensure every issue has a relatively clear focus, the arc remains a bit of a hot mess. Gaiman, for his part, has attempted to suggest that the moment in “Men of Good Fortune” where Dream acknowledges that Hob is his friend “is thematically the heart of The Doll’s House,” while also clarifying that “I liked that Rose gives away her heart to her grandmother; and then, when she’s reunited with her mother and brother, kind of gets her heart back again. I also like that the ending takes us back to the beginning, with Desire in Desire’s heart. If you leaf through the series, you’ll find either an image of a heart or the word heart in virtually every issue. Hearts are a major part of what Sandman is about.” Charitably, this is twee and a bit superficial. It is not that he’s wrong about all the hearts, but to suggest that The Doll’s House is primarily about this, or indeed primarily about anything at all is a stretch. For the most part the arc is about getting the somewhat fearsome amount of narrative work it has to do accomplished. Nothing intrinsically unites its Little Nemo in Slumberland pastiche, riffs on old DC superheroes, invocation of G.K. Chesterton, queer themes, introduction of Desire, backstory on Nada, or focus issue on Hob Gadling other than a sort of sheer force of will and a trade paperback cover.

That is not to say that the arc is a failure, although there are key ways in which it comes closer than almost any other point in Sandman. It’s just that it works largely as a collection of moments, few of which rank among the series’ highlights. The biggest exception comes in the double-length issue #14, titled “Collectors,” which features one of the most giddily macabre ideas of Gaiman’s career: the Cereal Convention, which, rather than being a collection of breakfast aficionados, is actually a get-together of serial killers. Hijinks, of course, ensue.

Gaiman describes the origins of this idea as coming during the 1988 World Fantasy Convention. “WFC isn’t a fan gathering,” he explains. “It’s mostly attended by writers and editors. So at 2 a.m., I looked around the bar and—in a strange, glistening moment of clarity—realized a convention is just a bunch of disparate people getting together for a long weekend to feel special. These people have nothing in common except for the one shared interest that unites them—be it Barbie dolls, or a 1960s TV show, or comic books. And I thought, ‘What if serial killers had conventions too?’” The central joke that animates this, after the initial pun at least, is the aggressive demystification of serial killers. The banality of the convention setting turns them from fascinating monsters to little more than generic nerds nattering on at panels like “Making it Pay” and “Women in Serial Killing.” This tone is established from the start, when Nimrod, the convention’s organizer, suffering from stage fright, gives an opening speech in which he offers a faltering joke about a woman who calls the police pleading, “Help, I’ve been reaped!” “Don’t you mean raped,” asks the officer. “No,” she clarifies. “He used a scythe.” The deliciously unfunny joke is augmented by a caption box in which he frantically thinks, “Laugh you bastards laugh at my joke laugh or I’ll…” before the crowd erupts into a polite chuckle. And Gaiman ends the issue by highlighting this banality, with Dream stripping away the attendees’ illusions, forcing them to confront their abject patheticness.

A subplot of the issue involves the ill-fated journalist Philip Sitz, who attends the convention under the assumed identity of the Bogeyman (who was in reality killed off in an issue of Moore’s Swamp Thing), and who is of course found out and brutally murdered. Explaining this subplot, Gaiman wryly notes that “I felt every convention should have at least one fan.” This gestures at the other central joke behind the Cereal Convention: although neither it nor the World Fantasy Convention at which Gaiman came up with the idea were fan conventions, within the larger context of the American comics industry that’s absolutely what the word “convention” evokes. And there is something very funny and very dark about a convention in which the celebrity guests are literally preying on the one fan character.

As Alan Moore would realize with increasing horror over his career, there are many ways in which fandom culture exists to prey on fans. The comics convention is, by its nature, centered on the parasocial relationship between fans and celebrities. More than that, it is focused on minor celebrities. Gaiman’s observation that conventions exist to make people feel special was apt. In day to day life Gaiman was a recently married freelance writer who’d just half-escaped a cult, but at a convention he was a veritable star—the creator of Death, decked out in leather jacket, sunglasses, and a shock of black hair almost as moody as his protagonist’s.

It is not clear when, exactly, Gaiman began taking advantage of this position, but it was plainly an early and frequent activity. In September of 1994 Dave Sim, in the course of the infamous Cerebus #186, makes passing mention of Neil Gaiman’s convention affair being the “best-known secret” of the 1993 WonderCon. In a 2011 interview, meanwhile, Grant Morrison, explained their personal policy of not sleeping with fans, and went out of their way to bring up Sandman, noting that “I love the little girl-ness and the whole idea that they were really bright and they read Batman and Robin or they read Death from the Endless. It meant something to them and you don’t want to ruin that and make them think that the guys that do this stuff are sleaze bags and mess up their lives”—a choice of examples that speaks volumes about Gaiman’s behind the scenes reputation even before the full scope of horrors emerged into the public view. There is reason to think that the behavior grew over time from the merely sleazy into the sorts of horror stories that would eventually come to define him, but it is clear that this development followed the overall course of his career.

The idea of a convention of serial killers necessarily foregrounds the theme of sexual predation. The issue’s climax comes when one of the serial killers, Fun Land, attempts to rape and murder Rose Walker, precipitating Morpheus’s involvement. Gaiman depicts this with a sharp effectiveness, capturing the cognitive dissonance of a pedophilic serial killer as he veers from saying things like fretting about how the convention organizer “said that dirty stuff at the beginning about what we don’t do where we eat. Wash his mouth out with soap, momma” to telling Rose “You—you can take off your dress, you know. You won’t need it any more.” But this is of a piece with how Gaiman depicts all of the serial killers’ interiorities. There’s a guy who talks about steadily escalating from his shame over masturbating to following women around with a knife in his pocket to murdering them, noting that “I know it’s not normal for a man to go out and dismember a woman just because he wants to have sex with her. Emotionally, I don’t know how much longer I can handle it.” Another is a famous doctor, who “collects leather neckties. They wrote about it in the New York Times. He wears a new one at every media event he attends. He has over a hundred. He makes them himself.” Perhaps the most disturbing is the Connoisseur, who notes that “there’s something about preoperative transsexuals that makes the connoisseur uncomfortable. Something brittle and bright in the back of their eyes. He loves them. But he always feels like they’re laughing at him. He’s only ever found eight that he’s been able to talk to. Really talk to.”

Indeed, the idea of predation lurks throughout The Doll’s House. In the first half Rose’s brother Jed is kept a prisoner by his abusive foster parents, who are in turn being influenced by one of the escaped dreams, the duo Brute and Glob, who are using his dreams for their own schemes. The second escaped dream, meanwhile, is the Corinthian, who’s become a serial killer and is at the convention. It’s also an obvious component of the prelude about Dream and Nada. This isn’t quite enough to be called a theme, especially as it’s not especially present in the arc’s denouement, but it’s still clearly, and frankly understandably, on Gaiman’s mind. Certainly it’s a more substantial unifying element than hearts or whatever.

Perhaps the most interesting instance of predation in the arc comes in a two page sequence in the Cereal Convention issue where Rose is told the “original version” of Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolf has Red Riding Hood undress, telling her as she takes off each garment to “throw it on the fire; you won’t need it any more”—a beat that foreshadows her assault by Fun Land. Gaiman clearly means to position this story as a kind of ur-myth underlying all the subsequent serial killers. But it’s notable that in 2004 he wrote a blog post about his own identification with the wolf, arguing that he “represents an awful lot of stuff—the danger and truth of stories, for a start, and the way they change; he symbolises—not predation, for some reason—but transformation: the meeting in the wild wood that changes everything forever,” and notes that “when I was a boy, when I grew up I wanted to be a wolf,” before concluding that “The wolf defines Red Riding Hood. He makes the story happen. Without him, she’d just be another girl on her way to her grandmother’s house. And she’d leave her goodies behind, and come home, and no-one would ever have heard of her. But he’s not just her wolf: he’s all the wolves on the edge of the world, all the wolves in all the stories, all the wolves in all the dreams of wolves; flashing green eyes in the darkness, dangerously honest about what he wants: food, company, an appetite.” Even leaving aside his dubious assertion that the wolf is not a symbol of predation—certainly that’s how he uses it in The Doll’s House—this is striking in its apologism, particularly in its frankly alarming claim that the wolf is in some sense doing Red Riding Hood a favor by making her into a story.

All of this hangs uncomfortably over the first issue of Dream Country, a set of four stand-alone stories between The Doll’s House and the next arc. Called “Calliope,” the issue focuses on a writer, Richard Madoc, who, stuck and flailing on his second novel, makes a deal with Erasmus Fry, an aging writer, to acquire the muse Calliope, who Fry captured in the 1920s and had been using to fuel his own career. Madoc uses Calliope to catapult himself to an immensely successful career across numerous media and genres, ignoring her tearful pleas to be set free. Eventually Calliope contacts Morpheus, her ex-lover (as with Nada and, it will eventually emerge, literally every single romantic relationship over the course of Morpheus’s billions of years of existence, it ended badly), who frees her by cursing Madoc with an uncontrollable flood of ideas that drives him mad.

In 1990, this looked an effective horror story—enough so that DC included the script for it in the Dream Country trade paperback. With hindsight, however, what proves most unsettling about it is the degree to which the story prefigures so much of Gaiman’s own story. It’s not just the basic dynamic of a writer and a young, beautiful woman he treats as his muse while simultaneously abusing—a phenomenon that is hardly unique to Gaiman. It’s the specific details, from the way Madoc flits among genres and mediums to the way he insists that “I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer” to the detail of Erasmus Fry insisting that the captured Calliope call him “master.” Gaiman even sent artist Kelley Jones photos of his office to use as reference for Madoc’s.

What’s crucial to note is that this is not Gaiman telling on himself. It’s not just that Gaiman was still a decade away from the sort of outright abuse being allegorized in “Calliope”; the story is plainly aware of the horror of its subject. The line about Madoc considering himself a feminist is followed immediately by him being asked where he gets his ideas from, pointing very directly to the bitter irony of that claim. And Gaiman takes pains to linger in the awful sadism of Madoc’s behavior, most especially in the beat immediately after he gets Calliope back to his house in which he rapes her “nervously, on the musty old camp bed. She’s not even human, he told himself. She’s thousands of years old. But her flesh was warm, and her breath was sweet, and she choked back tears like a child whenever he hurt her.” Even the use of Gaiman’s office as visual reference is plainly a wry joke about the fact that the script for the issue proved a nightmare after he was forced to abandon his original idea, which he later described as “a story titled ‘Sex and Violets,’ in which the hobgoblin Puck is very, very old and is hanging on to the only youth he has left by consuming flowers native to England. He runs a brothel in London that has one whore: a succubus. Rock stars, writers, artists, and so on come and give Puck native English flowers, and in exchange they’re allowed to visit the succubus. And they leave with ideas, but only after the succubus drains away a year or so of their lives.” It was only when that story—which as described focused more on the price of creation—failed to work out that Gaiman switched to a story about writer’s block. and then sent reference photos of his office as a means of poking fun at himself for suffering from it.

No, “Calliope” is far more disturbing than the comic book equivalent of that monologue from the serial killer who started following women around with a knife in his pocket before escalating. It’s a warning of what’s to come, yes, but the warning is not a comment on the author’s private fantasies; it’s a comment on the degree to which he fundamentally failed to understand the magic he was taking hold of, and what its consequences might be. He understood the broad strokes—that if he could survive the tightrope grind of monthly comics for long enough and create a work of sufficient quality and impact he could change his life decisively enough to get him fully out from the towering shadow of his upbringing. He understood that writing this story, about the King of Dreams and his tragedy, would allow him to also rewrite his story—to become Neil Gaiman instead of David Gaiman’s son. But he did not understand what that meant.

What is most ironic about this is that a mere two issues later Gaiman would pen a story that was largely about this precise question. The roots of this story lay back in the “Men of Good Fortune” issue of The Doll’s House, in a scene where, during one of his meetings with Hob, Morpheus is taken by a conversation between at the next table in which one playwright takes another to task for his mediocre verse, particularly a couplet that ends with the instruction to “scourge the bad, revolting stars.” This is, of course, a monologue from Henry IV Part I, and the playwright is none other than an early career William Shakespeare, who is being mocked by Kit Marlowe. Shakespeare, referring to Marlowe’s own work, expresses that he “would give anything to have your gifts, or more than anything to give men dreams, that would live on long after I am dead. I’d bargain like your Faustus for that boon.” Concluding his business with Hob, Dream approaches the young playwright to make him an offer, but Gaiman opts to stay with Hob as the two walk off, leaving the implications of this unseen for the time being.

The payoff would come six months later, with Sandman #19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where it becomes clear that Dream offered Shakespeare a simple deal: all of the talent and success that he asked for in exchange for writing two plays for Dream. The issue depicts the debut of the first of them, which Dream has commissioned for the Fay, who have departed the Earth by Elizabethan times, but return for the performance.

There is a bracing and earnest exuberance to this, along with a brash confidence that’s captured by the credits on the issue, which, in a bit nicked from Blackadder, proclaim it to be “Written by Neil Gaiman, with additional material taken from the play by William Shakespeare.” In picking Shakespeare for his subject Gaiman is going to the heart of the British literary tradition (“Fuck off,” said William Blake in a 2025 seance), applying the same willingness to work on a mythic scale that he did to Hell and the concept of death. But that is largely necessary for the story Gaiman is telling—one that is not simply about the lust for financial success or the creation of good art, but for a notion of greatness. In one scene, Dream confides to the real King Auberon that his reason for commissioning the play was so that “they shall not forget you. That was important to me: that King Auberon and Queen Titania will be remembered by mortals, until this age is gone.” It’s a line that cuts to the core hubris of Shakespeare’s request, which is at its heart for a form of outright immortality.

Gaiman is clearly aware that this comes with a price. One of the threads of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” concerns Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who died some eighteen months after the issue is set. Gaiman foregrounds this looming history, having Hamnet catch the eye of Queen Titania, who gives him an apple and tells him of how, in Faerie, there are “bonny dragons that will come when you do call them and fly you through the honeyed ambered skies. There is no night in my land, pretty boy, and it is forever summer’s twilight,” and ending the issue with a caption about Hamnet’s death. This isn’t simply positioned as a side effect of Shakespeare’s deal with Dream either—Hamnet’s vulnerability to Titania’s seductions extends out of his dissatisfaction with his father, who he notes “doesn’t seem like he’s really there any more. Not really. It’s like he’s somewhere else. Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. I’m less real to him than any of the characters in his plays. Mother says he’s changed in the last five years.”

Indeed, Gaiman even gives Dream a monologue about how Shakespeare “did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart’s desire, their dream… but the price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted.” Perhaps Gaiman thought that because there was no ashen-faced cosmic entity standing before him and offering him escape, no incantations and summoning circles, nothing save the labor of scratching out script after script after script for the better part of seven years that what he was doing was different—that there needn’t be a price. Then again, Dream’s monologue continues, “And had I told him? Had he understood? What then? It would have made no difference.” Perhaps it simply didn’t.

Or perhaps once Gaiman realized more than mere escape from Scientology’s grasp was on offer he simply got greedy. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” proved another crucial rung on the upward ladder of Gaiman’s success. All that brash swagger and ambition paid off with a massively acclaimed issue that wound up winning the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction—an unprecedented level of renown for a comic book.

It’s easy to see why, however; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a triumph. Gaiman’s script dances around the edges of Shakespeare’s play, which unfolds in the background as he flits among the assembled fae, laying a mosaic of short scenes, each punctuated by clear and memorable moments. It is simply a phenomenally enjoyable comic; part of the reason for its confidence is simply that there are constantly things to be confident in.

But more than any issue of Sandman thus far—arguably more than any issue of Gaiman’s comics career save for his work with Dave McKean—much of its quality is due to his choice of artists. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is simply unthinkable without the art of Charles Vess, whose painterly, art nouveau style is as perfect for fairies as Sam Kieth’s is to demons. Drawing heavily from Arthur Rackham, Vess comes up with an impressive range of designs from the humanlike and noble Auberon and Titania to the positively bestial Puck and Peaseblossom. And he’s aided by Steve Oliff’s warm and sunlit colors, which make the issue a stark contrast from the eighteen issues of horror comic that precede it.

In hiring Vess for the issue, Gaiman was making a savvy pick of an up and comer. Vess had spent the 1980s doing a variety of odd jobs for Marvel Comics—work in Epic Illustrated, Kull the Conquerer, and Conan the Barbarian, generally favoring fantasy comics because, as he put it, “I’m very attracted to the curvilinear, rhythmic forms of nature. It makes me happy to draw it, whereas I can struggle through drawing a building or drawing a spaceship or a robot.” Prior to linking up with Gaiman his best known work was the cover to the debut issue of Web of Spider-Man when Marvel debuted the tertiary Spider-Man series in 1985, although he wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Spider-Man: Spirits of Earth around the same time as Sandman #19. But it was his illustration for Donning/Starblaze’s 1988 illustrated edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that caught Gaiman’s eye. Gaiman made a point of coming to his table at the 1989 San Diego Comic Con—Vess recalls that they “had a nice conversation about James Branch Cabell,” the early 20^th century fantasy writer, while Gaiman recalls that “he showed me some other work that included these amazing fairies,” which convinced him that he’d found his man. And once they won the World Fantasy Award, Gaiman quickly secured him for a pair of follow-up engagements, noting that they’d have to do an issue covering Shakespeare’s other play for Dream, as well as pitching him on an idea he had for an illustrated fairy story.

It would be some time before either of those emerged, however. In the short term, Vess’s next collaboration with Gaiman came just six months after “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with the third issue of Gaiman’s The Books of Magic miniseries, although, ironically given that the issue again focused on Faerie, Vess was far from the first artist considered—he notes that “they’d been through four artists before they got to me” including Dave McKean, Kent Williams, and Ted McKeever.” This series arose from Karen Berger wanting, as Gaiman recounts it, “a book which would be a Who’s Who and a guide and a history for all our magical characters, and which has a story. Instead of a Who’s Who of the DC Universe, it would be a comic and it would have a plot.” Gaiman initially viewed this as an unappealing prospect, but after a day or so of thought he came up with an idea and called Berger back to pitch it.

The broad strokes of Gaiman’s idea were to have the series focus on the introduction of a new character, a young boy named Timothy Hunter who “has the potential to become the most powerful human adept of this age.” Because this was a new character who merely had magical potential, he would of course need to have this whole magic thing explained to him, and by extension to the audience. Gaiman proposed a four issue miniseries, in which Tim would get a tour of a different area of magic from a different person each issue. In one sense there’s not a lot more to the comic than that. Tim is largely a cipher, existing to have things explained to him as opposed to as a character who emerges from a coherent backstory. The reader is not given a ton of information about him beyond a couple glimpses of his family and the fact that he skateboards. He’s simply a plot function, designed purely to accomplish the brief of making an explanation of magic in the DC Universe into a narrative.

For guides, Gaiman assembled a quartet featuring John Constantine (who dubs the group the “trenchcoat brigade”), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Dr. Occult, Mr. E, who was created by Bob Rozakis and Jack C. Harris in 1980 for the Secrets of Haunted House anthology, and, at long last after getting rejected at his initial pitch meeting and then having an issue of Action Comics Weekly that would have featured him go down in flames, the Phantom Stranger. The Phantom Stranger would give him a tour of history, Constantine of the present day, and Mr. E the future (where he gets stranded after attempting to betray Tim, and is forced to walk backwards through billions of years to return to his time by Death, who makes her inevitable cameo), while Dr. Occult handled the trip to Faerie, complete with a cameo of Hamnet, now a servant in Titania’s court.

While there are fleeting moments in The Books of Magic that impress, its rotating cast of trenchcoated supernatural guides and a lack of a main character ensure that it can never really be more than that. It is, at the end of the day, a lecture about fictional magic—the sort of thing Alan Moore would do to great effect in Providence and Promethea, only without the benefit of actual substance beyond DC continuity. Still, there are interesting things to glean even from a discussion of fictional magic. As with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Gaiman focuses heavily on the notion of magic as having a price—a moral that’s reiterated constantly to Tim, to the point that the series comes off as a slightly sympathetic cousin to conservative moral panics about satanism and the occult—one that broadly gets the appeal, while still mostly thinking that magic is a bad idea, only coming around to it because of the needs of the larger franchise.

For better or for worse, Gaiman clearly knows the comic is a bit thin, saying that “There was a level on which [Books of Magic] was an artists’ book. Sandman is a writer’s book. It doesn’t matter who’s on it,” a line that is only partially redeemed by his subsequent clarification that “With Sandman, I’m at the front. I work out every panel progression, every line where everyone is standing. There’s nothing accidental in Sandman, and if something is there, it’s because I want it to be there. I am a benevolent dictator as far as Sandman is concerned. Those are the terms that it’s done on. If you want to do an issue of Sandman, you’re going to get 48 pages of closely-written script from me. That’s how I want to do it. With Books of Magic, I sat down and wrote something that was vaguely like a film script. It was a film script written for them to tell the story as they wanted.” Leaving aside the troubling implications this has for Gaiman’s relationships with his artistic collaborators, another way of looking at this is to simply note that Books of Magic was clearly not something Gaiman considered an a-list project, and was instead something he was doing a minimum of work and letting other people finish. Indeed, not long after doing Books of Magic Gaiman remarked how “in an alternate past, I would have said ‘This is how you do it, now go and find someone to do it,’” although he concedes that “it turned out very well.” Indeed, that would eventually be exactly what Gaiman did, lending his name as a “curator” or “consultant” to a number of DC projects spinning off from his ideas, a reliable minor income stream requiring very little work on his part, and certainly not requiring two hundred pages of elaborate DC continuity riffs to little actual end.

Books of Magic launched the same week as the next major arc of Sandman, entitled Season of Mists, which would arguably prove to be the comic’s definitive storyline. It was not the first arc of Sandman to be collected as a trade—that was in fact The Doll’s House, which came out (with “The Sound of Her Wings” appended to the start) a week after “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Collections of the first arc, retroactively titled Preludes and Nocturnes, and of Dream Country followed a year later, alongside the start of A Game of You. But it’s notable that when Season of Mists was released in the summer of 1992 it came out first in a $30 hardcover edition before the cheaper paperback followed two weeks later. Gaiman was heavily involved in the design of this deluxe edition, wanting to ensure that it looked like “a kind of Victorian object,” and going so far as to choose the typeface for the introduction. It was a fundamentally decadent edition, every detail of which trumpeted the degree to which Sandman was a runaway success for DC.

But by the end of 1990 when the arc launched it was increasingly clear that Sandman was merely the flagship within Gaiman’s burgeoning career. It was not simply Books of Magic that suggested this—by that point he’d already taken over Miracleman, a job Moore famously described as a poisoned chalice, but one that nevertheless further marked Gaiman as his true successor. He also remained active in the UK scene, commencing another collaboration with Dave McKean entitled Signal to Noise, making a play for broader visibility by publishing it not in a comics magazine but in Nick Logan’s iconic fashion magazine The Face. And on top of this, he maintained an active prose career, publishing numerous short stories and, in early 1990, his first novel.

This was entitled Good Omens, or, more properly, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, and was in fact a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, best known for Discworld, a series of forty-one humorous fantasy novels set on the eponymous planet, a flat disc born aloft by four elephants who in turn rest upon the back of a turtle (an image drawn from Hindu mythology). These would soon grow to be a publishing sensation in the UK, where Pratchett would eventually become the best-selling author of the decade. In subsequent years, Gaiman has attempted to downplay the impact of this, noting that “Terry wasn’t ‘Terry Pratchett’ back then. He wasn’t this continent-sized, vast, one-in-every-three-books-bought-in-the-UK-is-a-Terry-Pratchett-type author. He’d done half a dozen or so books, and was doing okay.” This isn’t quite fair—Pratchett had written eight Discworld novels alone, and had also done a couple of science fiction novels and children’s books as well as a humor book of cat anecdotes entitled The Unadulterated Cat—but it’s true that, as Pratchett puts it, “he was barely Neil Gaiman then, and I was only just Terry Pratchett.”

Still, this was a typically savvy choice of collaborators on Gaiman’s part. He and Pratchett had become acquainted back in Gaiman’s journalist days when Gaiman interviewed him in the wake of the first Discworld book—in Gaiman’s recollection, “it was Terry’s first interview as an author where somebody took him out to lunch and asked him questions. I was interviewing him for Space Voyager magazine, a magazine so poor I had to take the photos of Terry after the lunch.”  As with many of his interview subjects, Gaiman struck up a friendship, and when he found himself with the first five thousand words of a humorous novel entitled William the Antichrist Pratchett was one of the people he sent it to.

The book was initially intended as a parody of Richmal Crompton’s Just William series—a sprawling series of short story collections about an eleven-year-old schoolboy who Gaiman meant to reimagine as the Antichrist, although his opening scene cut off before that, instead concerning itself with a demon named Crowley tasked with delivering the infant Antichrist to a hospital. Gaiman quickly abandoned the idea, however, in part because he didn’t know how to continue it, and in part because he feared it might typecast him as “the guy who writes funny horror novels,” and had largely forgot about it until Pratchett phoned him in 1988 to say that he had an idea for how to continue it and offering to co-write it.

The initial draft of the book emerged in a nine week frenzy of writing coordinated via phone calls and mailing floppy disks back and forth. As Gaiman describes it, “I’d wake up in the early afternoon and there’d be this message from him on the answerphone saying, ‘Get up, you bastard. Get up. Get up. I’ve been up since seven o’clock in the morning, and I’ve written all this.’ Then I’d ring him back, and then we’d talk. And then I’d work on Sandman and Books of Magic and stuff like that until about two o’clock in the morning, as I remember, and then at two, no matter where I was at or what I’d done, I would go over and do about five hundred words of Good Omens,” a schedule that meant, as Pratchett noted with delight, there was “always someone, somewhere, physically writing Good Omens.”

In practice the collaboration was lightly dominated by Pratchett, who explained that this was because wrote about two thirds of the initial draft, both because Gaiman still had a monthly comic to produce and because, as he notes, “I’m a selfish bastard and tried to write ahead to get to the good bits before Neil” before offering the more serious assessment that, by mutual agreement, he maintained the master copy on the logic that “if it had been a graphic novel, it would have been Neil taking the chair for exactly the same reason it was me for a novel.” This suited Gaiman, who fondly noted that the collaboration “was like going to college. Even at that point Terry was a master craftsman, like a Wedgewood chair-maker or whatever. He could do it. And I had never made a chair before.” And regardless of who wrote first drafts of scenes, over the months of revision, both of them went over each other’s sections heavily, and “made a point of going in and writing at least one or two scenes with any of the characters that up until then we hadn’t written.”  As this implies, the basic division of labor ended up being by character, with Pratchett writing most of the scenes with the Antichrist (now named Adam Young) and his gang while Gaiman, along with originating the characters of Crowley and his angelic counterpart Aziraphale, took the bulk of the storyline featuring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In practice, this meant that Pratchett largely handled the human scale, while Gaiman stuck to the more metaphysical aspects of the book.

Ironically, given that Pratchett was the more experienced writer, this meant that the strongest bits of the novel were largely Gaiman’s work. Certainly Crowley and Aziraphale proved to be the book’s standout characters even before the 2019 television adaptation cemented this status by casting David Tennant and Michael Sheen to play them, and the book can fairly be described as grinding to a halt at the 1/3 mark when they drop out of the plot so Aziraphale can spend two days reading a book, leaving much of it in the hands of Pratchett’s characters. The Four Horsemen sections, meanwhile, display Gaiman’s usual deftness at the mythic register, with clever beats like the fourth horseman being Pollution instead of Pestilence, the latter having quit in a huff with the invention of antibiotics. In contrast, Pratchett’s sections run a bit flat—especially the bits focusing on Adam and his gang, which Pratchett admits he “seldom let Neil touch,” but which suffer from a distinct sense of interchangeability among the supporting cast. Likewise, Pratchett’s note that “Neil’s had a major influence on the opening scenes, me on the ending” is ironic given that the beginning of the book is witty and compelling, whereas the ending is a slight rushed thing in which all of the characters are brought together at a nuclear base only to have the vast majority of them be wholly irrelevant to what happens.

More than the plotting, however, Pratchett’s real problem was simply that he lacked Gaiman’s killer instinct for a truly memorable beat, whether a moment of gruesome horror such as a scene involving maggots that Pratchett notes that “Neil proudly claims responsibility for,” or a more mythic one like the Pollution/Pestillence idea or a section in which Crowley reflects on his distaste for Satanists, noting that “It wasn’t just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They’d come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout ‘The Devil Made Me Do It’ and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to.”

Indeed, that bit was so good that Gaiman reused it shortly thereafter in Season of Mists, which also tackles Biblical themes, picking up the thread of Lucifer’s parting threat in “A Hope in Hell,” and in turn to the long-simmering plot of Nada and Morpheus’s spiteful decision to condemn her to Hell. There the complaint goes not to a minor demon who famously “did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards,” but instead to Lucifer himself, who complains that humans “use my name as if I spend my entire day sitting on their shoulders, forcing them to commit acts they would otherwise find repulsive. ‘The Devil made me do it.’ I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. I do not live their lives for them.” And of course, it’s a great line once again—better, in some ways, in that it discards the lightly comedic wordiness of “some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive” in favor of a cadence that highlights the bitter resentment of the line.

In other words, it’s a return to the mythic register that is Gaiman’s biggest strength. Indeed, Season of Mists gives him an almost untrammeled expanse of opportunities to go big and mythic. The first issue, flagged as a prologue or part 0, opens in Destiny’s garden. Destiny is not a completely new character—he appeared in a fleeting cameo back in Preludes and Nocturnes, and is, uniquely among the Endless, actually an existing character, repurposed from being the host of the 1970s Weird Mystery Tales anthology. This, however, is his first substantial appearance, and Gaiman proceeds to unfurl a stately monologue for him about how if you visit the garden “you will be forced to choose, not once but many times. The paths fork and divide. With each step you take through Destiny’s garden, you make a choice; and every choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness.” After a visit from the Three—Gaiman’s take on the maiden/mother/crone triple goddess, who had previously been sought out by Morpheus and showed up to give cryptic advice to Rose Walker—Destiny is compelled to call a family meeting. He goes through a gallery of paintings and one by one summons his siblings: first Death, then Dream, Desire, Despair, and Delirium, a previously unseen sibling. (A seventh sibling, unnamed, is said to exist, but Destiny declines to summon him, declaring that he’s “made his wishes on the matter perfectly clear.”)

At this point Gaiman breaks into three pages of prose, arranged in six columns over single-color portraits of the six Endless, each of whom get a brief introduction. It’s a striking sequence, in part because of how casually it flies in the face of expectations, including basic ones of what comics are. Gaiman notes that “I’d presented the reader with a number of the key characters in the series, and I was about to have them interact, but I hadn’t really explained who most of them were yet. It seemed to me a good idea to first stop and provide a little piece on each of them, as if I were writing entries in a very weird encyclopedia. It was one of those strange techniques that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did.” But its success is not nearly as mysterious as Gaiman suggests. The emphatic pattern break of three prose pages serves to emphasize the decision to have them, and Gaiman ensures that the descriptions live up to the importance signified by the vast half page panels, which teem with negative space. Each one has a sharp, memorable, and often compellingly idiosyncratic moment. Desire, for instance, “smells almost subliminally of summer peaches, and casts two shadows: one black and sharp-edged, the other transluscent and forever wavering, like heat haze,” while Despair is said to have once had a sect that “declared her a goddess, and proclaimed all empty rooms her sacred places. The sect, whose members called themselves The Unforgiven, persisted for two years, until its last adherent finally killed himself, having survived the other members by almost seven months,” Destiny is speculated to have “travelled far beyond blindness, that indeed he can do nothing but see: that he sees the fine traceries the galaxies make as they spiral through the void, that he watches the intricate patterns living things make on their journey through time,” Delerium is revealed to have once been known as Delight, and to have a shadow whose “shape and outline has no relationship to that of any body she wears, and it is tangible, like old velvet,” and Dream is described as someone who “accumulates names to himself like others make friends; but he permits himself few friends.” The section ends with a triumphant pattern break, the portrait of Death being captioned simply “And there is Death.”

For all the evident import of this meeting, however, it is only the inciting incident. The real story begins when Desire sends Dream storming out of the room with a snide comment about Nada. Death goes to console him, but ends up telling him that Desire’s criticism is not, in fact, entirely off base, saying, with some understatement, that “condemning her to an eternity in hell, just because she turned you down… that’s a really shitty thing to do.” The issue ends with a chastised Dream declaring that he will journey to hell in order to free Nada, setting off the actual plot of the arc.

There is a stately deliberateness to this that continues over the rest of the arc, although, ironically, this was in part imposed upon him. His original intention had been to jump straight from this prologue to Morpheus’s actual trip to Hell in issue #22. But the week before that issue was to come out Alan Grant and Val Semeiks’ take on The Demon was slated to wrap up a three issue arc in which Etrigan took over Hell, and so Karen Berger insisted Gaiman push his plans back a month to maintain the continuity. Gaiman, as he puts it, “blew my top,” sending Berger a fax arguing that there was no overlap in readership between Sandman and The Demon and accusing her of “upsetting the master plan.” Berger was resolutely unimpressed, and Gaiman quickly backed down and apologized, but the incident speaks volumes about the degree to which Gaiman was starting to believe his own hype.

Instead Gaiman crafted an issue’s worth of build-up as Dream prepares to travel to Hell. He begins with another sprawling page of narration describing “a place that wasn’t a place. It had many names: Avernus, Gehenna, Tartarus, Hades, Abaddon, Sheol… It was an inferno of pain and flame and ice, where every nightmare had come true long since. We’ll call it Hell,” then continues with Dream explaining to his subjects why he must leave and dispatching Cain to warn Lucifer of his coming while he makes a visit to Hob Gadling in his dreams and stops to visit Lyta Hall, a minor character in The Doll’s House whose child he ominously proclaimed he would one day come for. It’s plainly an issue of filler, but it has three major advantages. First, as mentioned, it helps establish a certain stateliness to the arc’s pace—something that will prove tremendously useful in the latter portions.

Second of all, it gives Gaiman the opportunity to have Lucifer quote Milton’s line that it’s “better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven” to Cain, who, improbably, fails to recognize it in spite of it being among the best-known lines in English literature not to be written by Shakespeare. (“No seriously, fuck off,” said William Blake in a 2025 seance.) Born in 1608, eight years before Shakespeare’s death, John Milton took to poetry at a young age, studying at Christ’s College, Cambridge to be a priest but feuding with his tutor and growing frustrating with the stifling curriculum. After graduation, he moved back in with his parents and committed to several years of private study, followed by several years of travel in France, then Italy, writing some of his early notable works like “Lycidas” and Comus. Returning to England as the Bishops’ Wars broke out—a herald of the coming Civil War—he became a pamphleteer, penning a series of anti-episcopal tracts, followed, after an unfortunate marriage, with a number of tracts advocating for divorce and, when these got a frosty reception, an anti-censorship tract called Areopagitica.

Following the Civil War and Cromwell’s victory, Milton became one of the Commonwealth’s staunchest defenders; he was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues within Cromwell’s government, although this became a sinecure following his 1652 blindness. Sent into hiding and poverty by the Restoration, he set out upon his magnum opus: the epic poem Paradise Lost, from which Lucifer quotes. In some senses this was a precursor to the revisionist reboots that would become the hallmark of post-Moore comics writers—a biblical epic that wove the serpent in the Garden of Eden together with the previously only hazily connected figures of the Devil and Satan in order to create a single coherent figure. This was the rebel angel Lucifer, cast out of heaven to rule hell; a figure so preposterously compelling that, despite having no real Biblical grounding, he has become an almost unquestioned piece of Christian lore.

Written, as Milton put it, to “justify the ways of God to men,” Paradise Lost quickly ran into what is, depending on one’s perspective, either a problem or one of the most fascinating ambiguities in literary history. Milton attempted to cast Satan as a tragic figure brought down by his hubris, making sure that Satan was a figure the reader could understand. To some extent this was necessary—Milton’s overall story is about Eve’s temptation in Eden, after all, and if Satan were not at least somewhat compelling then it would simply not work. But Milton takes to this problem with uncanny verve, giving Satan arguments that sound very much like the republican arguments that Milton had spent so many pamphlets articulating. He speaks movingly of freedom, declaring upon crashing down to Hell that “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. / What matter where, if I still be the same, / And what I should be, all but less than he / Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least / We shall be free.”

The problem arises when Satan is compared to the God that Milton claims to be justifying. Milton’s God comes off as a stultifying bore at best, and an elaborate sadist at worst. He goes on at tedious length about how he created Satan and humanity with free will and gave him the ability to fall and be damned purely so that he can take pleasure in their obedience, which he could not if they were simply compelled. This difficult to read without a faint sense of horror at the vast cosmic cruelty of creating a system where people can suffer for all eternally just so that you one can take pleasure in their groveling obedience. Satan, on the other hand, is one of the great and most compelling characters in all of literature. For all Milton sought to glorify God, what he wrote in practice was the archetypal story of the tragic, doomed rebel and his struggle against the tyrant father—a dynamic that would echo downwards through the ages as the essential paradigm of all of the Albionic wars.

This contradiction went on to vex centuries of critics none of whom ever mustered a better take on it than Blake’s assertion that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake, of course, could so easily have been the Devil to Milton’s God, locking horns across the century that separated them in another iteration of the War. Early in his career he even played at this role with in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where he reimagines Hell as a source of inspiration and productive defiance, a position that was in many ways alarmingly close to edgelording.  But Blake would never let himself be so enslaved by another man’s system as to simply be the petulant rebel, and he evolved his position later in his career, eventually providing a set of twelve illustrations for Paradise Lost itself. This was at once an act of devotion to a work of art he had profound respect for and an opportunity to remake it in its own vision, allowing Hell’s demons to ripple with idiosyncratically proportioned but coruscatingly homoerotic musculature, and imbuing Eve’s temptation and fall with a strange sensuousness as she literally eats the fruit out of the serpent’s mouth. Finally, Blake settled on shaping himself into a truer version of the role than Milton had been capable of. To this end, he eventually wrote Milton a Poem, summoning the poet himself out from Eternity, working with him to heal his incomplete vision and establish a new myth in which Milton has fused with his rejected feminine self.

Another interesting take on the underlying problem comes from the literary critic Stanley Fish, who makes the case that Milton is engaged in a “programme of reader harassment” in which he seeks to reveal to the reader their sinfulness and put them on a path to redemption. Fish, for instance, makes much of how Satan’s emphatic and rousing speech is followed by a description, “So spake th’ Apostate Angel, though in pain, / Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despair,” suggesting, not unreasonably, that Milton intended to make the speech seductive and then to wrongfoot the reader about it. But what is truly interesting is the way in which Fish’s argument evolved over his career, until, late in life, he was making the argument that Milton was in fact situating himself against the very idea of poetry, expressing horrified outrage at the ambiguities and imprecisions that form the basic magical capabilities of language, and seeing their power as a rejection of the absolute truth of God. In this interpretation, Lucifer’s fall was not simply a matter of free will, but an inevitable consequence of the very act of Lucifer’s reasoning, thought, and speechmaking. In a real sense, if sin is understood as separation from God then Lucifer, created not simply with freedom and choice, but as something able to think—something that is to any extent separate from God—was created to fall, as indeed was humanity.

Such an argument has interesting implications within Blake, who would view such single vision not as divine truth but as a source of pure and utter horror. Much of Blake’s art, such as the glorious and deliberately irreconciliable variations he produced in The Book of Urizen over his career, exists to do the precise opposite of what Fish views Milton as doing, rejecting not language’s imprecision but its fixity and trying to create a new vision of poetry that resists all singularity. Fish’s Milton would, far from being a beloved precursor that Blake could summon forth to heal the world, be the very embodiment of Urizen himself, although that observation must be taken in light both of the fact that Blake’s overall artistic quest was Urizen’s redemption and that Urizen was always more closely aligned with Blake himself than one might think. (For his part, when Fish’s interpretation of Milton was put to him in a 2023 seance Blake scoffed that it “sounded like projection” to him.)

This interpretation of Milton, however, has obvious similarities to the the bastardized Thelemic ideas that L. Ron Hubbard developed into Scientology, and which William S. Burroughs bastardized again to create his prototypic version of chaos magic. Scientology’s idea of an engram, for instance, offers a similar sense of language as something that is inherently harmful and destructive. It’s also worth considering the warning at the start of all of Hubbard’s books that commands the reader to “never go past a word you do not fully understand,” proclaiming that “The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood. The confusion or inability to grasp or learn comes AFTER a word the person did not have defined and understood. It may not only be the new and unusual words you have to look up. Some commonly used words can often be misdefined and so cause confusion,” an injunction that, in practice, amounts to a baldfaced demand that the reader simply avoid the ambiguities of language in favor of precisely the sort of direct and absolute truth that is, as Fish/Milton realize, plainly impossible.

Indeed, Gaiman comes to a conclusion much like this when he has Lucifer muse on “how much of it was planned. How much of it He knew in advance. I thought I was rebelling. I thought I was defying his rule. No… I was merely fulfilling another tiny segment of His great and powerful plan.” Lucifer is, in this moment, becoming somewhat aware that he’s a character in a story, and that this has an intrinsic horror to it. Indeed, this horror is one Hubbard conceptualized directly in one of his best known works of science fiction, Typewriter in the Sky, in which the protagonist becomes aware of the presence of an author in his life, literally hearing the sounds of a typewriter in moments when he is compelled to take certain actions. But the horror, as Milton and eventually Hubbard realized, does not emerge from the presence of a tyrant demiurge with some great and powerful plan. To be conceived of in language is Hell in and of itself.

The third advantage is simply that by having an issue of build-up and anticipation, Gaiman was able to have the subsequent issue spend twenty-four straight pages on a single unbroken scene depicting Dream’s journey to Hell. It is a truism in comics that space constitutes importance, and by taking care of beats like Dream’s departure, the introductory monologue about what Hell is, and Lucifer’s initial reaction to news of Dream’s visit—all essential beats that would have existed, albeit in a presumably compressed form, in any first issue of the arc proper—Gaiman is subsequently able to give the actual confrontation between Morpheus and Lucifer a dramatically increased weight. This is fortunate, because the confrontation results in what is probably the single most jaw-dropping plot beat in all of Sandman, and one of the all-time greats of fantasy literature at large.

When Morpheus arrives at the gates of Hell he is stunned to discover not only that Nada is nowhere to be found, but that Hell is completely empty save for Lucifer, who, grinning maniacally, informs Dream that he’s quit. Lucifer elaborates on this declaration over the course of a lengthy walk through hell while he finishes closing up shop—informing the last tortured soul, Breschau of Livonia, who, among a vast number of other crimes, had his unfaithful mistress “sewn to her lover, and, skin to skin, I left them in the desert to be eaten by ravens, and I laughed as I heard them scream,” that “no one today remembers Breschau. No one. I doubt one living mortal in a hundred thousand could even point to where Livonia used to be, on a map. The world has forgotten you,” driving out the last couple of demons, and finally travelling to lock up the last couple of gates. As they do, Lucifer explains his actions to Dream, explaining simply that he’s grown tired and bored of his role, and so is done. Finally, after they lock up Hell, Lucifer has Dream cut his wings off, and then, with a reminder of his promise of revenge, hands him the key to Hell to do with as he pleases and walks away. The issue ends with a caption box of Dream’s stunned reaction: “I feel cold.”

The remainder of the arc (save for an interlude issue akin to “Men of Good Fortune”—a standalone story about an English boarding school and what happens when the dead kicked out of Hell make their return) charts the consequences of this remarkable development as a parade of mythic figures arrive at the gates of the Dreaming to petition Morpheus to grant them control of Hell. This, of course, plays ridiculously to Gaiman’s strengths, ensuring that there’s always a new bit of mythic grandeur to work with. He gets to do a lore-accurate version of Odin, Thor, and Loki (a drunken Thor delightfully propositions Bast, “D’you want to play with my hammer? Eh, Miss Pussy-Head? It’s called Mjollnir. If I rub it, it gets bigger. S’true.”), delve into Japanese myth for Susano-O-No-Mikoto (riffing, not entirely tastefully, on Japan’s only just ending period of economic dominance, he has Susano note that “we are expanding—assimilating other pantheons, later gods, new altars and icons. Marilyn Monroe is ours now, as are King Kong and Lady Liberty”), explore angels, demons, and the fae (represented by Cluracan and his sister Nuala, who is surprised and dismayed to discover that when her brother offered her as a gift to Dream this was not conditional on how Dream handled the disposal of Hell, and that she is obliged to remain in his realm), and to concoct mythologies of his own like Lord Kilderkin, a “manifestation of Order” in the form of a cardboard box carried around by his personal slave, and Shivering Jemmy of the Shadow Brigade, a Princess of Chaos who manifests a an adorable young girl carrying a balloon.

The sheer weight of all this has a strangely distorting effect on the story. First Gaiman has to move through an issue that’s largely spent giving each of these characters a nice, suitably poetic introduction, then one spent having each of them make their individual pitches to Morpheus, and then, upon reaching the arc’s climax, simply implodes his plot into nothing by having the angels convey a message from “The Name” directing Dream to cede control of Hell to them, which he agrees to. This sparks a brief confrontation with Azazel, the head of the demonic delegation, who had brought Nada to offer Morpheus, and who threatens to devour her before being stuffed in a glass jar by Dream. But it is, on the whole, a surprisingly muted conclusion, especially after a couple of issues that either felt overburdened by the sheer number of moving parts or simply fucked off to tell a side story. On paper, this really shouldn’t work any better than the end of Good Omens.

And yet it did, and brilliantly at that—Season of Mists is by most accounts the most unadulterated triumph in the whole of Sandman. There are several reasons Gaiman is able to get away with this. First is the fact that he has an epilogue, which allows him to end the arc not on the anticlimax of the Hell plot but with an issue comprised entirely of emotional resolutions—showing the angels Remiel and Duma as they take over Hell, with a clever beat in which Remiel reassures a tortured soul that “there will be no more wanton violence; no further suffering, inflicted without reason or explanation. We will hurt you. And we are not sorry. But we do not do it to punish you. We do it to redeem you. Because afterward, you’ll be a better person, And because we love you,” only to have the sinner whimper “You don’t understand… that makes it worse. That makes it so much worse…”; a beat of Lucifer on a beach in Australia talking to an old widower who notes that “I’ve had a shit of a life, all things considered. It wasn’t fair. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead, and my leg hurts all the bloody time. But I think, any god that can do sunsets like that, a different one every night… ‘strewth, well, you’ve got to respect the old bastard, haven’t you?”, a point Lucifer grudgingly concedes; and perhaps most obviously, a scene resolving the by now long-running Nada plot in which Morpheus finally apologizes, first tentatively, saying that “I might have acted wrongly. I think perhaps I should apologize,” only to get slapped in the face and to meekly offer a more substantive one. These are substantive scenes, carrying considerably more weight than the cosmological detail of who is going to run Hell, and they ensure the arc ends on a note strong enough to do justice to its earlier fireworks.

Second, however, and perhaps more important, is simply that the plot wasn’t the point of Season of Mists. Other than the weight given by resolving a pair of threads that had, by the time the final issue came out, been running for two years, the plot was simply a means to an end. The point of the arc was to create a situation where Gaiman could maximize the amount of time spent doing mythology, and the result is eight issues of the best there is doing the thing he’s the best there is at. It’s a demonstration of virtuosity, and one that serves to effectively glorify the virtuoso. It’s notable that Season of Mists marks the point where any idea of Sandman as a book with a regular penciller is abandoned. Mike Dringenberg handles the prologue and epilogue, but these are his final contributions to the comic. The bulk of it is drawn by Kelley Jones, who had previously handled “Calliope” and the subsequent issue of Dream Country, “Dream of a Thousand Cats.” It’s a deft choice, of course—Jones has a sense of the macabre akin to Sam Kieth’s, and he does a magnificent job both on the Hell sections and the larger mythology, which he parlayed successfully into an iconic Batman run and, later, being successfully tapped to take over a Frankenstein comic from an ailing Bernie Wrightson. But Jones was a well-chosen a hired gun brought in for one specific arc, as was every subsequent penciller on the book.

The effect was to position Gaiman as a singular auteur, and Season of Mists was precision engineered to highlight that. This went well beyond its extended mythological riffing; the decision to pay off long-running arcs from two pencillers ago served to further emphasize Gaiman’s status as the only constant presence on the book. Gaiman proves an ostentatiously visible author, preening with formalist touches like the Morpheus/Nada scene in the final issue using the same panel layouts as the prologue to The Doll’s House where Nada’s backstory was introduced and proleptic moves like, when Dream deposits the imprisoned Azazel in a chest, having a variety of other strange treasures like a pocket watch and a Middle Eastern city in a bottle, both quietly setting up future issues of the comic so that, on a second read, readers will be reminded anew just how clever the author was. It is as though, after his fight with Karen Berger at the arc’s outset, Gaiman’s conclusion was not that he should be more humble and deferential to his bosses, but that he needed to acquire enough clout and weight that editors will cave to him in the future.

Gaiman’s Biblical phase had one final entry, a short story called “Murder Mysteries” he penned for a 1992 horror anthology called Midnight Graffiti, headlined by Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. This served as a sort of origin story for Lucifer, although its primary focus is the angel Raguel, the Vengeance of the Lord, back in the earliest days of creation, when the universe was still being designed—Raguel describes it, somewhat nebulously, as “a blueprint; but it was full-sized, and it hung in the Hall [of Creation], and all these angels went around and fiddled with it all the time. Doing stuff with Gravity and Music and Klar and whatever. It wasn’t really the universe, not yet. It would be, when it was finished, and it was time for it to be properly Named.”

Raguel begins his story with the moment of his creation in the Silver City (a name shared with Season of Mists, slyly positioning “Murder Mysteries” as, if not canon to Sandman, at least decidedly compatible), and describes waiting in his cell until the eventual arrival of Lucifer, who informs him that “There has been a… a wrong thing…  The first of its kind.” Lucifer then takes him to the body of a dead angel, instructing him to find who was responsible and take vengeance on him, sparking the first of the eponymous murder mysteries. It ultimately emerges that the angel, Carasel, was murdered by his partner Saraquael; the pair had recently designed Love, and had become lovers in the course of working on the project, but when they moved on to their next project, Death, Carasel lost interest, and Saraquael, jealous, killed him. Raguel destroys Saraquael, but Lucifer, watching, is appalled by this, weeping that Saraquael “loved. He should have been forgiven. He should have been helped. He should not have been destroyed like that. That was wrong.” (Raguel notes that “Perhaps Saraquael was the first to love, but Lucifer was the first to shed tears. I will never forget that.”)

Subsequently, Raguel speaks with another angel, Zephkiel, who he recognizes as a disguised God, accusing him of having arranged all of this. Zephkiel admits as much, explaining that “Lucifer must brood on the unfairness of Saraquael’s destruction. And that—amongst other things—will precipitate him into certain actions. Poor sweet Lucifer. His way will  be the hardest of all my children; for there is a part he must play in the drama that is to come, and it is a grand role.” Raguel departs, troubled; Zephkiel offers to wipe his memory, noting that “forgetfulness can sometimes bring freedom, of a sort,” but Raguel declines.

Raguel’s story, however, is positioned as a story within a story, told by a man who bums a cigarette of the frame story’s narrator. This frame story is of a British man stuck in Los Angeles due to snow storms in London; lacking anything else to do, visits an ex-girlfriend, then returns to his hotel where he is told the story. Afterwards, Raguel kisses the narrator on the cheek. The narrator notes that he “felt like he had taken something from me, although I could no longer remember what. And I felt like something had been left in its place—absolution, perhaps, or innocence, although of what, or from what, I could no longer say.” Looking more closely at the frame story, it becomes apparent that the narrator in fact murdered his ex-girlfriend, along with her child and roommate, and that Raguel took his memory of that event. The story ends ambiguously—the narrator returns to London, but shortly after he arrives another blizzard kicks up, trapping him in a freezing elevator where he remains for long enough that the batteries on the alarm run out. “There wasn’t anything in there except me,” he ends, “but even so, I felt safe, and secure. Soon someone would come and force open the doors. Eventually somebody would let me out; and I knew that I would soon be home.”

On the one hand, this sounds like some sort of oblique account of the narrator’s death. But this is too simple. The language of it, notably, evokes Raguel’s description of waiting in his cell, which repeats the phrase “there wasn’t anything in it except me,” and similarly notes that “I don’t know how long I waited there. I wasn’t impatient or anything, though. I remember that. It was like I was waiting until I was called.” Furthermore, the story opens with the narrator describing the trip to Los Angeles as being “ten years ago, give or take a year,” and describing how “looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve received  gift, unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation,” which cuts against the notion that the narrator dies in an elevator at the end. The implication is instead that being trapped in the elevator is some sort of purgatorial experience—something like the process of forgiving and help that Lucifer insisted Saraquael should have been given. This is further emphasized by the opening when the narrator muses, “If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of this introduction, however, is the story’s opening sentence, “This is true.” It’s clearly not, but the timeline of decade old travel and the narrator’s description of himself as having been “barely out of my teens” at the time lines up with Gaiman, who traveled to the United States for auditing at least once in the early eighties, and who, a decade later, did in fact have a wife, children, and a vocation. It’s possible that Gaiman is simply using a couple of autobiographical details from his life to shape the story—certainly he didn’t commit a triple murder in Los Angeles a few years before starting on his Duran Duran book. But using a narrator that’s sort of him and sort of not is a favorite approach of Gaiman’s, dating back to Violent Cases, and there’s a pretty clear sense that the story is engaging with his sense of dissociation from his decade-old self and his time directly under the thumb of Scientology.

Certainly Scientology’s fingerprints are visible elsewhere in “Murder Mysteries.” At one point it’s said that the murdered Carasel believed “that what we do here in the Hall of Being creates patterns. That there are structures and shapes appropriate to beings and events that, once begun, must continue until they reach their end. For us, perhaps, as well as for them.” This plays out in the story: the narrator’s murder of his ex-girlfriend comes after an awkward encounter in which the conversation peters out because “a twenty-one-year-old boy has little to say to a thirty-two-year-old woman,” and the narrator’s sexual advances are at least partially rejected—his ex-girlfriend declines intercourse, offering oral sex as a substitute, and the narrator fumes as she runs to the kitchen to spit afterwards—a detail that parallels Saraquael’s anger at Carasel’s rejection. This sense of people’s actions being guided by recurring patterns from long ago is, notably, an almost exact restatement of Scientology’s beliefs around engrams. It’s also notable that this is not the last time that Gaiman would embrace the notion of amnesia as a source of healing, nor that this idea would be situated in clear relationship to his experiences with Scientology—the same idea is central to the resolution of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

It is this, in the end, that seems to be the core of Gaiman’s period of fascination with Miltonian myth—an interest in the idea not only that the universe was in some sense designed for suffering, as implied by the notion that Lucifer’s rebellion was preordained, but also by the strangely antihumanist vision of the universe in Good Omens, which notably ends with Crowley speculating that the real armageddon would be “all of Us against all of Them,” a vision that treats both Heaven and Hell as forces that are fundamentally hostile to humanity. There is a clear sense of doom here, from Crowley’s musing that “nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse” up through the narrator of “Murder Mysteries” being a murderer for seemingly no reason other than the fact that once, before the creation of the universe, an angel was murdered and now that fact echoes and recurs through creation. One gets the sense that the only part of Scientology he’s actually rejected is the idea that one can do anything about the engrams pulling one towards misery or cruelty.

It’s significant, then, that this is also the period in which Gaiman seems to have conceived of the endpoint of Sandman. In an early 1991 interview promoting Good Omens he claimed that “Sandman is going to keep going for another two years,” a point he reiterated in the letter column of the final issue of Season of Mists where he says that “somewhere between issues #40 and #50 (and it’ll probably be closer to #50) the story that began in Sandman #1 will be over.” Gaiman’s estimate of how long it would take him to get there turned out to be off by twenty-five issues and three years, but he still had a destination in mind.

Gaiman followed Season of Mists with another triptych of stand-alones, this time under the banner “Distant Mirrors” and with the conceit that each was named after a month. The most notable of these was the third, “Three Septembers and a January,” which saw Gaiman tell the story of Joshua Norton, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Norton proves an engagingly eccentric character, and Gaiman packs the issue with guest stars—the plot concerns a wager between Dream, Desire, Despair, and Delirium in which the latter three attempt to claim Norton for their realms while Dream attempts to protect him by giving him his imperial dreams, so all three of them have substantial scenes, as does Death, who gets two appearances. On art is Shawn McManus, continuing the small tradition of having the artist on the next arc draw one of the short interstitials prior, which gives the story a whimsical expressiveness that ensures its status as a small classic of the run.

Although “Three Septembers and a January” is not devoid of significance to the larger plot—the scene featuring Desire ends with them furiously vowing revenge on Dream, saying they’ll “make him spill family blood; I’ll bring the Kindly Ones down on his blasted head,” retroactively setting up their motivations in The Doll’s House and prefiguring Gaiman’s endgame—it is not the issue of this triptych most focused on the larger story. That would be the first, “Thermidor” (named after the eleventh month of the French Revolutionary calendar), in which Gaiman introduces the character of Orpheus, or at least his still living head, who is stuck in France during the Reign of Terror, resulting in Dream sending Johanna Constantine, ancestor of Moore’s creation, to rescue him. This story would be followed up four months later in the standalone Sandman Special, which retold the basic myth of Orpheus in the larger context of the Endless, explaining how he and his father became estranged and how he came to be an immortal severed head, as well as offering the first appearance of Dream’s previously teased prodigal brother Destruction.

This sort of storytelling was increasingly characteristic of Gaiman, as with the glimpse of Dream’s collected treasures at the end of Season of Mists, and demonstrated not just his increasing clarity about the overall shape of Sandman but the increasing density of the series’ mythology. Gaiman became increasingly adept at milking dramatic impact out of incremental reveals. The appearance of Destruction, for instance, is not especially central to the plot of the Sandman Special—he provides Orpheus with information on how to find Death, but that’s hardly something that required unveiling the long teased seventh member of the Endless. Still, Gaiman makes his incidental appearance count—his first line of dialogue in a sequence in which all of the Endless introduce themselves to Eurydice at her wedding. First Death, Despair, Delirium, and Desire greet her, each given a panel in a 2×2 arrangement in the center of the page. Destruction, meanwhile, is given a full-width panel at the bottom, a case both of saving the reveal for last and of giving it a larger panel for emphasis. Furthermore, in this panel he’s wearing a large armored helmet that obscures his face—his full reveal waits for the subsequent scene where he directs Orpheus to Death, where his removal of the helmet is given two panels, with the first glimpse of his face a large panel taking up a third of the page. There are no revelations about why he abandoned his role or anything like that—all the reader discovers is that he’s a gregarious redheaded man with a beard—but the basic fact of his appearance is given weight so that, further down the line, when Gaiman reaches the storyline that’s actually built around him, all those subsequent reveals can have separate weight. It’s a clever use of serialization, but also one that highlights the degree to which Gaiman was catering to his most dedicated readers, rewarding them for their devotion.

And by 1991, Gaiman had acquired a solid number of them. That was when he began routinely sweeping major comics awards, winning ten Eisners in four years along with a trio of Harveys, three Comic’s Buyer’s Guide awards, and an Inkpot. He was the golden boy of the comics industry. All of which makes his next arc of Sandman a remarkable thing. Titled A Game of You, it is an at times willfully perverse story that seems designed to test readers’ patience—a fact Gaiman was well aware of, noting that “A story like Season of Mists tickles readers in the places where they like to be tickled, but I knew A Game of You would not do that.” Where Season of Mists is constantly evoking the series’ larger mythology, A Game of You is, at first glance, almost wholly divorced from them. Morpheus appears for two pages in the first issue, during which explains to his raven Matthew that he is simply observing events. The second arc features a single panel appearance of Nuala, while the third features no familiar characters whatsoever. Dream comes back for another two page scene in the fourth issue, but it’s not until the end of the fifth issue that he actually has a meaningful role in the story.

Instead the story’s only substantial tie to the thirty-one issues of comics that preceded it is the character of Barbie, a minor character from The Doll’s House who serves as the the arc’s protagonist. It’s eventually revealed that a secondary character, Foxglove, was the unseen lover of Judy, the lesbian killed back in “24 Hours,” but neither of these, to put it mildly, were hanging plot threads on the order of Destruction or Lucifer’s threat to destroy Dream. Coming off of three relatively quiet standalone issues, and with another triptych of short stories on the other side, the result was a year-long stretch in which Sandman largely refused to occupy the high stakes mythic space in which it had clinched its reputation and status.

There is a striking contrast between this deliberately alienating approach and the calculated populism that would eventually define Gaiman’s aesthetics. This is far bolder and riskier approach—the move of a hungry and ambitious writer who still thinks he has something to prove. But for all that Gaiman would eventually declare A Game of You his favorite arc and note that it “turned out to be almost precisely what I’d hoped for,” he had a clear crisis in confidence around this point. This began back on “Three Septembers and a January,” which suffered first from him having to scrap the script and start over, and then from a panic when McManus’s artwork came in, leading Gaiman to fear that the story the story “cheap and obvious,” and call associate editor Tom Peyer to propose scrapping the entire issue. Then he had another panic second-guessing the whole of A Game of You, this time with McManus’s artwork being what talked him off the ledge instead of what got him up there.

In one sense, however, Gaiman’s uncertainties about the arc dated back to The Doll’s House, for which his initial idea “was to have Rose Walker live in a relatively mundane world by day and a fantasy questlike world at night,” only to abandon the notion upon reading Jonathan Carroll’s novel Bones of the Moon, which uses a similar premise in which a woman named Cullen James dreams of adventuring in an elaborate fantasy world with a gigantic dog named Mr. Tracy to find the five eponymous Bones of the Moon. But he ended up including an homage to his original idea in a sequence featuring various characters’ dreams, including Barbie, who dreamed of fantasy adventures with a giant dog, this one named Martin Tenbones. The original concept stayed with him, however, and when he found himself talking to Carroll some time later and telling him about it, Carroll encouraged him to go for it; the result was A Game of You.

Gaiman built the first issue around the idea that had, as he put it, been “haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York.” Gaiman reintroduces Barbie and the rest of his cast for the arc while depicting Tenbones’s desperate journey from Barbie’s fantasy world to warn her that if she does not return “the land must be lost to the cold and the dark, and the Cuckoo prevail over all.” Barbie finally meets Martin shortly after he’s been gunned down by police, and he dies in her arms as he delivers his warning. It’s a stunningly upsetting sequence that makes exquisite use of McManus, who reworks Tenbones from the owl-like figure originally drawn by Mike Dringenberg into a lumbering and expressive shaggy mop of a dog, then proceeds to spend several pages brutally murdering the poor thing.

But this arresting visual is, in many ways, a crowning set piece to an otherwise low key issue. Gaiman, in fact, has noted that “the main joy” of the issue “was simply wandering around and meeting the different characters.” And perhaps the most notable aspect of these characters is their gender. Of the story’s six core characters five are women, and the exception, the landlord George, is a pawn of the Cuckoo. This is an instance of Gaiman’s somewhat puzzling theory that “Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders,” and specifically his approach to writing Sandman where he “tended to alternate between what I thought of as male storylines, such as the first story, collected under the title Preludes and Nocturnes, or the fourth book, Season of Mists; and more female stories, like Game of You.” There’s an obvious reductiveness to this, especially inasmuch as, by Gaiman’s own admission, the gender of a story has “something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story.” But it still captures a basic truth that, for many readers, Game of You wasn’t just off-putting because of its lack of clear connection with what’s come before, but because it was six issues driven almost entirely by women. Indeed, Gaiman even takes a direct shot at such fans in a scene where Barbie describes going to a comic store that hadn’t “swept the floor in a decade, and I bet the staff had to have taken unhelpfulness lessons. And there was a big greasy guy behind the counter who seemed really amused that I was like, female, and asking for this comic. He said it wasn’t very collectable. Then he said they didn’t normally see breasts as small as mine in his store, and all these guys laughed.” (Gaiman claims to have “received letters from a number of young men telling me how there are no comics stores like that in the whole world. But I’ve also gotten women readers coming up to me ever since saying, ‘How did you know?’”)

More than that, the bulk of the cast were specifically queer women. In addition to Foxglove and her partner Hazel the story features—and is perhaps retrospectively best known for—the character of Wanda, who is notable for being the first straightforward representation of a transgender character in mainstream American comics. And Gaiman makes a point of highlighting her as a character, largely by having her be a scene-stealing wonder. It is ultimately her, not Barbie, who serves as the viewpoint character for the first issue’s introduction of the cast—she wakes Barbie up to go shopping and offers to make her a cup of coffee, only to discover that Barbie has no cream in her fridge (“there’s only this carton of fuzzy green stuff in there not even you could drink. You might want to donate it to science, or take it to your leader”), which sends Wanda on a quest through the apartment building to borrow some, introducing the bookish Thessaly, who only has soy milk (“I don’t think she’d be satisfied with anything that wasn’t squirted from the udder of a real cow,”) and then Hazel and Foxglove, who joke that they’re not in (“The eagle eye of Sherlock Wanda cannot be fooled. I’ve already spotted a number of clues. Cigarrette ash. Parsley in the butter. All that shit”) before offering her some in a novelty frog mug, which she carries past the scowlingly silent George (“I’m just dandy. Thank you so much for asking. This? Oh, don’t worry. It’s not my cute frog mog”) before returning to Barbie’s to propose they shop at Tiffany’s (Barbie balks, as they’re broke, but Wanda points out that “It doesn’t matter where we go, we can’t afford it.”) It’s a serviceable five page introduction to the cast, but its real effect is to get the audience to instantly fall in love with Wanda.

Gaiman’s decision to showcase a trans character like this came from a number of places. In the afterword to the trade paperback he cites “the late Don Melia and his unnamed just-as-late roommate” as an initial inspiration. Melia was the publicist at Titan Books, the UK publisher who had put out Don’t Panic, and Gaiman visited him in hospice where Melia told the story of his roommate, a trans woman who contracted HIV during her surgery. Gaiman “never learned the roommate’s name, but Don told me the last thing she read before dying was The Doll’s House,” a detail which he found “haunting.” But while this provides a decent origin story for the basic spark, in practice Gaiman drew on multiple sources in crafting Wanda. The her of Wanda being non-operative because of a fear of surgery, for instance, was drawn from “meeting, briefly, a friend of a friend in London, and one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met… who just happened to have been born with a penis. And she was terrified of surgery.” This was a friend of Roz Kaveney, who, along with Rachel Pollack, was one of the two trans women Gaiman was closest friends with during the period.

Kaveney was born to a working class family in West London, moving to Yorkshire at thirteen where she was, as she puts it with a typically charming lack of modesty, a “horribly precocious teenager.” This got her routinely bullied, as did being “a very camp, feminine, pre-pubertal Southern ponce.” She took the usual refuge in books and, as she was being bullied for being gay, “did a lot of reading about sex and gender,” concluding that, no, actually she was trans. Reasoning that “there is such a thing as people who have surgery, and probably they are doing entertainment or sex work, so they will be in big cities,” she began hitchhiking to Manchester and, as expected, found a trans community, but was dissuaded from her dreams of running away from home and transitioning immediately by her mentor figure there, who noted that “your life will be much better if you go to university, and you’ve got years to sort things out.”

So she went to Oxford instead, earning a Masters degree and making excursions to the British Library in London, where she met up with the Gay Liberation Front and Rachel Pollack, with whom she contributed to the 1972 manifesto “Don’t call me mister, you fucking beast” about the emerging community of the Transvestite Transsexual Drag Queen group. A tour de force, the essay skewered various stereotypes enforced by medical gatekeeping in favor of celebrating the “thrills of not passing, or more precisely, not caring if you pass.” This was also when she made her first attempt at transition, only to be dissuaded by cis feminist friends high on the fumes of Germaine Greer and Janice Raymond. She also made an attempt at a career in the civil service but, as she put it, “managed to blow that by arrogance and obnoxiousness. I mean actually, I hit a real political issue with colleagues in the civil service, which is that the second time I had a crisis of conscience I stuck to my guns.” And so, in 1978, she finally did transition, moving to Chicago for a brief period to establish herself before returning to the UK, where she established herself as a critic and activist, particularly in the sci-fi/fantasy scene, where she was one of the founders of the now-venerable magazine Interzone.

In 1985 she was introduced to Gaiman by Pollack, who’d met him not long before when he interviewed her, then ran into him again at the Milford SF Writers Workshop. Kaveney recalls Pollack returning to London after the workshop saying, “I’ve met this young man called Neil, and you and he will be friends,” though Gaiman and Kaveney’s memories of their actual meeting differ: Gaiman recalls calling Kaveney to note that Pollack had told him much the same thing, while Kaveney remembers running into him at Forbidden Planet and, after some conversation, realizing he was the guy Pollack had been talking about. Pollack’s prediction/directive, in either case, was quickly realized, and the pair found themselves taking long walks around London talking about fantasy literature. For Kaveney, at least, Gaiman was “one of the first new friends I made who had never known me before and was someone who was just cool about it. My being trans was one of those things that was a bit interesting, like the fact that I’d been educated by Jesuits.”

More even than Gaiman, Kaveney had a sense of the historical moment’s vast momentum. Gaiman recalls that he used to tease Kaveney because “you’d be pointing to the people in the Cafe Munchen” near Forbidden Planet “and you’d say ‘one day people will look back on this era and they will not believe that Alan Moore and Iain Banks and Geoff Ryman and you and Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz over there and Frank Miller were all here just drinking and talking.’” Along with Mary Gentle and Alex Stewart the pair formed the Midnight Rose collective, where they co-edited a variety of shared world anthologies, collaborating on the framing story “The Lady And/Or the Tiger” for The Weerde in 1992.

At the same time, Kaveney was becoming more and more intensely involved in both the queer scene and in activism. She helped run Chain Reaction, a lesbian BDSM club held in Vauxhall, managing to avoid the scene on the club’s second night when a cadre of anti-sex feminists stormed the place in balaclavas by just twenty minutes. This was the effective beginning of what would prove a decades long feud with the political lesbian community, which eventually evolved into the trans exclusive radical feminist community and onwards to the gender critical feminist one. And when the Obscene Publications Squad launched Operation Spanner, arresting sixteen men for mailing sex tapes of themselves, many on the flatly absurd charge of aiding and abetting grievous bodily harm on themselves, it was Kaveney who got the National Council for Civil Liberties (aka Liberty) to intervene on the defendents’ behalf, “rather controversially,” as she notes, “because some people in Liberty were very hostile to the idea.”

As a prominent queer activist in his general social circle, it was unsurprising that Alan Moore invited Kaveney to contribute a piece to A.A.R.G.H. Entitled “A Short Walk on a Cold Day,” with art by Graham Higgins, this a simple three page slice of life comic about a woman, Anna Jones, meeting up with her friend Magda at a march against Clause 28. The piece doesn’t make clear that Anna is trans, but she’s plainly based on Kaveney herself—the same year she used the name Annabelle Jones for the main character in her novel Tiny Pieces of Skull. This was a roman a clef about her time in Chicago; Magda also appears as a not entirely sympathetic cis feminist, though to be fair it was set ten years earlier than “A Short Walk on a Cold Day” and, whoever she was based on, she’d surely had time to grow.

Tiny Pieces of Skull did not ultimately see publication until 2014—Kaveney recounts in an afterword that “one editorial director said it was cold, heartless and amoral, and another that his house had been publishing ‘too many quasi-experimental novels about sexual deviants.’” But among its first readers back in 1988 was Neil Gaiman, to whom it was eventually dedicated, with Kaveney proclaiming him “an ally to trans people as early as the 1980s, who has promoted the careers of a number of trans people that I know about and who has sometimes been unfairly maligned by people in the community who have their facts wrong.” So aside from being a shockingly ahead of its time and fascinating document of trans literature, the novel is also one of the most sustained lenses into what Gaiman’s understanding of trans women might have been when he wrote A Game of You.

The subtitle of Tiny Pieces of Skull is “A Lesson in Manners,” and Kaveney has described it as “social comedy.” The basic nature of both its tone and central thematic concerns are established in the opening scene, as Annabelle sits in a cafe with another trans woman, Natasha, who stares in horror at her as she adds sugar to her cappuccino before finally telling her, “You’ll never be a woman if you eat that cream cake.” Annabelle, quite reasonably, points out that this is nonsense and that there are, in fact, women eating cream cakes all around them. But the real point here is, as Natasha notes, about the social status of trans women, as opposed to women in general: “Mexica once told me we can never afford to relax,” she explains. “It’s about being the best we can be. Like we’re in training. Basic training. Very, very basic in your case.” And in the end, Annabelle passes on the cake.

The novel spends much of its length worrying this bone. Kaveney uses the recurrent image of Annabelle looking at herself in the mirror, which is “both the candid friend who would point out that one hair that needed to be tweezed, and the enemy who would tell her untruthfully that the top had been a colossal mistake like everything else” and “the flatterer who made her feel, as she did her makeup, that one day she would get to look at her face from every angle and not see a thing that she didn’t like; the thug who shouted in her ear when she caught sight of herself naked that she was a monster who no-one would ever love.” But while the tightrope of passing is a constant force within the novel, it’s not strictly speaking its main concern. Indeed, the book is largely devoid of cis characters to whom one could pass—there’s only three cis women in the entire thing, and a smattering of cis men in a variety of supporting roles. The cis gaze is ever-present, but it’s not the subject.

Instead the book is largely about relationships within the trans community. Natasha’s diatribe about cream cakes is illustrative, but what is most notable about it in many ways is the way in which it’s outsourced to the absent Mexica, a trans woman who hovers over the bulk of the story at a mythic difference. Later in the book, after an anecdote (from which the title emerges) about Mexica having surgery to change the shape of her skull, another character, Alexandra, mentions how after Mexica returned to town “we had lunch and she told me about not doing cream cakes,” quietly establishing the line’s status as a maxim within this specific trans community, and the way in which it maps a hierarchy.

Perhaps the book’s most revealing moment in this regard comes in a passage, after both Natasha and Alexandra have issued stern advice about Annabelle’s makeup routine, where Kaveney describes how “On days when she was going to be with Alexandra Annabelle shaded her cheeks and the sides of her nose and did her lip-lines one way; and when she was going to see Natasha she would do them another, the way Natasha liked it. She would make as sure as was consistent without actually using the fire-escape that she got in and out of the hotel without Alexandra’s seeing this; she felt innocent of disloyalty, but she knew both sets of cosmetology lectures were well-meant, and that her friends would be hurt and feel competitive if she got careless. There is such a thing as tact.” It is, of course, very funny—the whole book is—but it also highlights the harsh performativity of the trans community.

Annabelle has a complicated relationship to this performativity, maintaining a constant sense of distance from it even as she finds herself enmeshing herself deeper in the community, taking up sex work and getting herself into at times harrowingly dangerous situations. Many of the other characters recognize this as well, remarking frequently on the fact that she has a return ticket to London when she wants it and will, at some point, inevitably pack it in and return to her secure life as a writer. At one point she reflects on the fact that “the people with whom she was spending her time were criminals, if not in ways that did all that much immediate damage to people: but they all knew from their childhoods that what they were doing was very naughty indeed. They stayed up late as well,” an account that highlights the sense of this as a form of play. At times she seems as interested in making witty and slightly disaffected observations about the scene as she does in participating in it, as when she muses on how she “never found cocaine becoming more than an occasional interest; she was working hard on reading Proust, and the drug metabolized for her at irregular rates which caused odd glitches in her understanding of, and tolerance for, his longer sentences.” There is a constant sense that Annabelle is going through life already knowing that she’s going to write a book about it. As one character puts it, “I used to think it was just your accent or that you talked slow because you were on downers, but you sort of plan what you’re going to say, don’t you?”

But it becomes increasingly clear that everyone in the community is engaged in some version of this game. Perhaps not one as literary as Annabelle’s, but nevertheless, it’s all character work and one-upmanship. This fact doesn’t even endanger the sense of camaraderie or community—one of the book’s more charming character arcs comes in the form of Inge, a Sicilian dominatrix who pretends to be German to attract Nazi fetishists, and who initially introduces herself to Annabelle by proclaiming that she doesn’t like the English because they killed Hitler (to which Annabelle tells her to “fuck off before I lose my temper, bomb Dresden and ruin those silly fingernails”). Ultimately, however, it’s Inge who tips Annabelle and Natasha off that one of their escapades has gotten wildly out of hand and the mob has been called in to rough them up. (“My life does inhabit this land of urban legends,” Kaveney reflects when telling this same story for an interview.) The fundamental hollowness of all this performance becomes truly clear near the book’s end, when Mexica finally makes an appearance and it turns out that all her plastic surgery was horrible botched, and the filler in her butt and hips has pooled around her ankles and rendered her unable to walk without assistance. But then again, Annabelle notes that Mexica had “the most beautiful face that she had ever seen,” and Mexica stresses that it was, in her view, all worth it.

Bookending the novel are a pair of scenes between Annabelle and Magda in which Magda serves as a Greek chorus—a synecdoche for all the cis women who can accurately be described with the archly qualified claim that they were “amazingly supportive in the circumstances.” She maintains a clear suspicion of everything Annabelle is doing, from her initial transition at the book’s outset, fretting that “we don’t want you turning into some brainless bimbo clothes-horse,” and at her subsequent behavior; the novel ends with her gesturing at a piece of fashion photography, sneering that it’s “supposed to be artistic and subversive and all the rest, and just look at it,” and demanidng to know, “Is that erotica or is it just pornography?” Annabelle looks at the photo, and replies, “with a card-sharp’s smug drawl, ‘it’s neither. To me, it’s just a photograph of my old friend Alexandra. I wonder what she’s up to.’” This proves enough to mollify Magda, but not her TERFier girlfriend, who dismisses Alexandra as “one of the minor characters in all those rather sordid adventures you keep being so noisily reticent about.” This proves the setup to Annabelle and Kaveney’s final bon mot: “I suppose so. But I had thought that part of the point of feminism is that there are no minor characters.”

For better or for worse it is this sentiment, rather than any of the more substantively trans bits of the novel, that proves to have influenced Gaiman, who indeed parrots the line in an interview, noting that “one of the key points of A Game of You is that nobody is a stereotype, and nobody is what he or she seems on the surface, once you get to know the person. Every single one of us has glorious, weird, majestic, stupid, magical worlds inside us.” Wanda does not exist in community with other trans women. She doesn’t even exist in community with the other queer women—after encountering her in her underwear, Hazel notices and remarks upon her “thingie,” to which Wanda witheringly replies, “Hazel. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s not polite to draw attention to a lady’s shortcomings?” Instead, she exists for the cis gaze.

Certainly she’s drawn within it. McManus’s deftness at the cartoonist proves a significant drawback when it comes to Wanda, who he draws with a sense of caricature, giving her a hyper-extended face that always highlights her chin, and emphasizing her size relative to other characters. The result is that every panel she appears in serves to emphasize, and indeed mock the fact that she doesn’t pass. Bryan Talbot, who guest-pencils part of the fifth issue, does better with her, in that his treatment is not as cartoonish and thus does not have the faint sense of mockery that McManus’s does, but he still pointedly draws her with masculine features. It’s only in the third issue that she gets treated with relative dignity by the art, drawn by Colleen Doran, who notes that she “knew some transsexuals, so I understood how to make Wanda look feminine without losing sight of the fact that she’s got the body of a man.”

In terms of the writing, things are altogether trickier. For all that Wanda steals damn near every panel of the first issue, things do not subsequently go great for her. Her only appearance in the second issue is a two page dream sequence in which she’s forced to undergo surgery, a nightmare so vivid that it leaves her a sobbing, incoherent wreck for much of the third issue. (Notably all of the characters suffer from nightmares here, but only Wanda finds herself debilitated by them.) She rallies when Thessaly tells her Barbie is in trouble, but generally does poorly over the next few pages as Thessaly (who is, it turns out, a thousands of years old witch) reveals that she’s murdered George, then cuts his face off, removes his eyes, bites off his tongue, and reanimates him to interrogate him as to why it is Barbie can’t be woken. Wanda, for her part, spends this entire sequence whimpering and vomiting. Things get worse when Thessaly invokes the moon to gain entry to the Dreaming; only Hazel and Foxglove are permitted to accompany her because, as George later explains, the moon doesn’t recognize her as a woman and so won’t aid her. And finally, when Thessaly’s interference with the moon causes a massive storm, Wanda is killed when the apartment building collapses.

All of this has understandably attracted criticism. Rachel Pollack, for instance, notes that there are “two things I disliked about A Game of You. One is that I think the claim of the ‘face’ and Thessaly that Wanda is a man never gets answered. Instead, it seems to me that Neil tacitly supports it by having Wanda realize that she’s unable to cope with things the ‘real’ women take in stride. The other is that Wanda is the only major character who dies.” Both of these criticisms have been echoed repeatedly over the years since. On the first point, at least, Pollack’s case is overstated. George’s claim that “uh gender isn’t something you can pick and choose as uh far as gods are concerned” has to be taken in the larger context of Sandman’s casually mythic register, in which gods and godlike figures are routinely shown as unsympathetic or outright wrong. The moon’s opinion has no more weight—and arguably considerably less—than Wanda’s retort, “that’s something the gods can take and stuff up their sacred recta.”

Gaiman’s position is made clear in the final issue, which focuses primarily on Barbie attending Wanda’s funeral, where she’s buried under her deadname by her conservative family. Gaiman makes a significant beat out of Barbie crossing out the deadname on her headstone with bright pink lipstick and defiantly writing in WANDA in its place. More revealingly, it has Barbie dream of seeing Wanda and Death together, with Wanda depicted there as a woman. This scene has its own problems—Gaiman emphasizes her femininity by stressing that this version of Wanda is “perfect” with “nothing camp about her, nothing artificial”—but nevertheless makes it clear where Death, the closest thing that Sandman has to a moral arbiter, stands on the issue, a fact that would have been clear to any regular reader of the comic.

Closer analysis even makes clear what Gaiman’s larger intentions with the sequence are. Thessaly, as the ritual begins, proclaims that “it’s time to draw down the moon,” invoking the title of Margot Adler’s 1979 survey of American Wiccan communities Drawing Down the Moon. Within this context a gender-exclusive moon is a clear allusion to Zsuzsanna Budapest’s tradition of Dianic Wicca, which was famously transphobic, and part and parcel of the same radical feminist tradition that Kaveney railed against. But Pollack’s point that this never gets directly stated is also true; Gaiman is invoking Dianic Wicca and clearly concludes that it’s wrong, but what he’s doing isn’t quite a critique of it. Which gets to Pollack’s other point, the fact that Wanda dies at the end.

Responding to Pollack’s critique, Gaiman argues that he “killed Wanda because she was the only person whose death made the story a tragedy,” whilst patting himself on the back for the fact that “the same people who were writing to go ‘we don’t like this transsexual person in our comic make him/it go away” were the same people who six issues later were writing ‘They cut off her HAIR!’ ‘They didn’t even let her be buried under her name!’” Wanda, in other words, ends up being in the story to evoke readers’ sympathy, both for her and trans women at large. So while Gaiman invokes Dianic Wicca the point is not to refute it but to use it as an example of the tragic things that befall trans women. The reader is still meant to respond negatively to it, but the nature of the rejection is different. The point isn’t really about Dianic Wicca, but about Wanda’s suffering.

The limitations of this are stark. Gaiman notes that one of the reasons he killed Wanda was that it “meant that I was going to be able to do her funeral, and give Barbie a chance to show what she’d learnt.” But this highlights the degree to which Wanda is only there for cis people to have emotions about. Equally, it cannot be forgotten that this was 1991. Gaiman may pat himself on the back for his readers’ turnarounds, but the fact of the matter is that putting a trans woman in a comic was going to alienate a portion of the audience, and that getting that same audience to instead be outraged on Wanda’s behalf was a significant accomplishment. Yes, there were more and frankly better trans stories to be told. But Gaiman using his suddenly substantial platform to tell this one undoubtedly made things easier when, for instance, Rachel Pollack wrote a trans character in Doom Patrol some years later.

For all its flaws, the reality, as Roz Kaveney notes her dedication to Tiny Pieces of Skull, is that A Game of You was a landmark moment in queer representation. Gaiman used his imperial phase to do something important—something a writer without his reputation and clout would have struggled to do, and that made it easier for future writers to do the same. It was imperfect, to be sure, but that’s the nature of progress, the bulk of which must necessarily be intermediate steps. A Game of You mattered, and this can no more be taken away from Gaiman than his abuse can. On the other hand, of course, Kaveney ultimately rescinded the dedication.

A Game of You was followed by another triptych of short stories, this one under the banner “Convergence” and linked by the motif of storytelling; all of them featured a framing narrative. By and large these mark a diminishing return for the format, which Gaiman would not straightforwardly repeat again in the back half of the comic. The first of these was “The Hunt,” a charming but deeply inconsequential story about werewolves narrated by an old man to his granddaughter with a cute but obvious reveal that the grandfather is the protagonist of his story. The other two, however would have interesting ramifications in spite of their relative slenderness. First was “Soft Places” in Sandman #39, which saw Marco Polo lost in the desert and straying into the borderlands of the Dreaming—a concept that would be picked up thirty-five issues later in the comic’s penultimate issue.

The final and most significant story story, “The Parliament of Rooks” returned to Lyta Hall and her son Daniel, who the story follows into the Dreaming where he’s told stories by Cain, Abel, and Eve. This constitutes a sly joke about DC Comics history, as the trio had all hosted horror anthologies in the 1970s. (Eve, in fact, hosted two, beginning with Secrets of Sinister House, and then taking over Weird Mystery Tales from Destiny.) The actual stories told are largely trifles, as you’d expect from being three or four pagers in the midst of another story; the main point of the exercise is plainly to refresh the reader’s memory of Daniel. But Jill Thompson, on pencils in another iteration of having the incoming artist do the last of the one-offs, ended up dramatically elevating one of the short stories

This was the final tale, offered by Abel, about how he and Cain came to be in Morpheus’s employ. Gaiman’s concept for this story was to reimagine Dream and Death in the style of Sheldon Mayer’s humor series Sugar and Spike, which ran from 1956 to 1971 and featured the eponymous pair of toddlers. Thompson, looking at Gaiman’s instruction to make them “really cute,” meditated upon her Hello Kitty alarm clock on the grounds that “it’s the cutest thing on the planet,” and concluded that “it has a huge head with big eyes, but its face is all the way down in the lower third of its head. I then realized that kittens and puppies, and human babies, all have their faces smashed down towards the bottom of their heads; and their faces grow up into their heads as they get older. So I made Dream and Death look like little Japanese manga figures, with enormous heads and large eyes, but tiny noses and mouths.”

The result was, in fact, alarmingly cute, and immediately became a favorite request for convention sketches from Thompson. Indeed, she would go on to write and illustrate The Little Endless Storybook in 2001 and Delerium’s Party in 2011, a pair of picture book-style stories of the little scamps, as well as Death: At Death’s Door in 2003, which leaned into the manga influences more fully to do a suitably zany “Little Endless” retelling of Season of Mists from Death’s perspective. The nature of these spinoff books, however, is a more complex issue than it might seem. For all that Gaiman had successfully positioned himself as the auteur star of Sandman, the fact of the matter remained that it was a DC Universe book written under a work for hire contract. Gaiman was in no danger of being sacked from the book, but if DC had wanted to fire him and replace him with a new writer he’d have had no actual recourse either. Similarly, he had no control over future use of the characters. DC was free to do whatever they wanted with them, and could have simply continued Sandman ad infinitum, flanked with a host of secondary titles. In practice, however, this was not what happened.

Gaiman started pushing on the subject of what would happen when he left the book all the way back when he first envisioned the ending during Season of Mists, telling Karen Berger “‘I think I’m going to want Sandman to stop when I stop.’ And she said, ‘You know that will never happen,’ and so on.” A similar conversation followed a few months later with Jeanette Kahn. Gaiman shrugged it off and, as he tells it, “I just carry on with my grand plan, and everything keeps going.” In practice this meant that, when asked in interviews, he would give an answer to the effect of “DC will stop Sandman when I’m done, which I would really like, or they’ll carry on, and I don’t really have any control of it. Although, obviously, if they did carry it on, I would not do any further work ever for DC. If they stop it when I stop it, I will maintain a very cheerful business relationship with DC.” And in 1994, as Gaiman entered the home stretch of his run, Berger finally conceded the point and agreed to bring the series to an end.

The exact mechanics of this negotiation remain private, but several factors can be inferred. For one, this was around the same time that Alan Moore, after splitting from DC over, in part, creators’ rights, had landed at Image Comics, where Gaiman had already done some work. Avoiding an outcome where Gaiman—by this point a bigger star than Moore—gave his next big series to a competitor was an obvious priority. For another, Gaiman made sure that the carrot part of his carrot and stick act was actually substantive. He did not, for instance, attempt to insist that DC leave all of the Sandman characters alone forevermore; he simply demanded that Sandman itself be retired as a title, ensuring that he remained the sole writer on it. In fact, just three weeks after the end of Sandman DC would launch The Dreaming, a continuation of the story that plainly served as what DC would otherwise have published as Sandman #76, complete with Dave McKean covers. Gaiman was credited on that comic as a “consultant”—a credit he also took on The Little Endless Storybook—and while it was obviously a sinecure, it also served to emphasize Gaiman’s consent for the arrangement.

Crucially, Gaiman began dangling this carrot well before he departed the book. In January 1993 DC launched a new imprint, headed by Karen Berger, called Vertigo. The point of this line, as explained by Berger in the promotional Vertigo Preview, was an act of self-definition. “Most of you already know,” she writes in the introduction, “that DC currently publishes six monthly titles that aren’t quite like any others in the industry: Sandman, Hellblazer, Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Shade the Changing Man. But, despite producing comics that are challenging, disturbing, and creatively singular, we’ve been an ill-defined lot. We’ve been called horror, mature, sophisticated, dark fantasy, cutting-edge and just plain weird. Tired of tired misnomers, and not even having a collective name, we decided to define ourselves.” The common elements in these six titles were clear enough. For all that they’d been nicknamed the “Berger books,” Berger in fact had nothing to do with Doom Patrol and had by 1993 departed from Hellblazer, Animal Man, and Swamp Thing as well. What united the books was instead the fact that they were all primarily associated with, and in most cases currently written by writers hired out of the British market.

But a glance at Vertigo Preview makes it clear that the line was centered on Gaiman, with Sandman as its flagship. Sure, three of the books were ones that Morrison was heavily associated with—Animal Man, Kid Eternity, and Doom Patrol. But they weren’t writing any of those anymore—they were in the midst of a sabbatical from the industry, and their only new contribution was a miniseries called Sebastian O, an existing project acquired from a failed Disney imprint. And so the cover of Vertigo Preview, in addition to a piece of Duncan Fegredo’s art from Enigma, focused almost entirely on Gaiman, with images of both Dream and Death alongside one of the old Wesley Dodds gas mask version of Sandman, who would be anchoring a new book titled Sandman Mystery Theatre. Gaiman was uninvolved in both this and the new Black Orchid series that Dick Foreman was writing, with Jill Thompson strategically placed on art for the first six issues, but both were clearly in his orbit.

The bulk of Vertigo Preview constituted two page previews of the various launch titles. But its headlining attraction was a seven page Sandman story entitled “Fear of Falling” with art from Kent Williams. This was wholly disposable—a depressed theater director dreams of climbing a mountain, meeting Dream and Matthew, where they discourse about his fear of heights before he wakes up, newly resolved not to abandon the play he was working on. But it speaks volumes that Gaiman was willing to pen a short piece purely to allude to the brand name, just as it speaks volumes that Gaiman spent the end of February doing a bicoastal signing tour to promote the launch. As an advertisement for what keeping Gaiman on board and happy to be a good corporate citizen could bring, it was a compelling one.

Gaiman’s most substantial contribution to helping DC and Berger get Vertigo off the ground, however, could be found at the other end of Vertigo Previews, where he kicked off festivities with a two page excerpt of Death: The High Cost of Living, which released on January 12th as the first Vertigo book to hit shelves. This was, obviously, a marquee title, and had been a long time coming, dating back to the summer of 1991 when DC ran a fan poll for the convention season about what supporting character should get their own miniseries. Gaiman had been discussing the possibility of doing a Death one, and with the poll imminent Karen Berger called him about the possibility of including her in the poll, noting that “The thing is, if we put Death on, she’ll win. So basically, do you want to do the series now?” Gaiman decided that this would be “a nice excuse to actually get me to turn the story from a nice idea and something I wanted to do one day, into something I was definitely going to do,” and so told Berger to go ahead. Sure enough, Death won.

In many ways, the comic takes full advantage of that level of demand. The series concerns the idea, first raised back in Sandman #21, that Death spends a day of each century as a mortal, charting the course of her day spent living as an ordinary person in New York named Didi. But the actual plot is astonishingly threadbare. The villain—an immortal who calls himself the Eremite and seeks to force Death to kill him—doesn’t even appear until the second issue, and never really gets an explanation, though Gaiman has suggested in interviews that he’s “somebody I first wrote about in Books of Magic,” suggesting he’s probably Mr. E after returning from the end of time. More to the point, there’s not really a proper resolution to him—he just sort of fails and the story ends. There are some other threads that run through the entire arc, most obviously Mad Hettie, an immortal homeless woman who first cropped up back in Sandman #3, who implores Death to find her missing heart. But it’s emphatically not a comic that is primarily concerned with plot. In an interview while the book was in progress he was asked what Death does in her day as a mortal, and answered “Well, so far she’s eaten an apple, she’s eaten a hot dog, she’s gone for a ride in a taxi, she’s gone off to listen to music…” and the truth is that this is an entirely accurate summary of the first half of the comic.

But Death largely lends herself to this. She is, at baseline, the manic pixie dream girl, with her primary character trait being that she’s relentlessly, comprehensively charming. Much of how her debut worked so well was simply because she provided a startlingly fun contrast to the endlessly brooding Morpheus. And The High Cost of Living largely repeats that trick by pairing Death with Sexton Furnival, a teenager who’s introduced via two pages spent writing the world’s most pathetically unsympathetic suicide note, in which he declares that life is, in his estimation, pointless, and he should know because “I’m mature. I know my own mind. I’m sixteen—almost sixteen and a half,” and besides, “I don’t have anyone I’m in love with. To be honest, I think love is complete bullshit. I don’t think anybody ever loves anyone. I think the best people ever get is horny: horny and scared, so when they find someone who makes them horny, and they get too scared of the world outside, they stay together and call it love.” Gaiman suggests that this gives the comic a “Catcher in the Rye-ish kind of feel,” which is true both in its kind of meandering plot and in his comparison of Sexton to Holden Caulfield, where he notes that “in some ways he’s the hero, and in other ways you just want to slap him round the face and stand him in a corner until he cheers up.”

Obviously spending a day with Death proves enough to accomplish this, but even that’s not really the point of the comic. Sexton doesn’t get a big, moving speech about wanting to live; he just ends the comic musing that “It would be really neat if Death was somebody, and not just nothing, or pain, or blackness. And it would be really good if Death could be somebody like Didi. Somebody funny, and friendly, and nice. And maybe just a tiny bit cray. And I wish I could see her again. I wish she wasn’t dead. But if it means dying first… well… I suppose I can wait. For a while.” The point is by and large the journey—the time spent bantering about Disney movies (Sexton thinks that “Beauty and the Beast was a better movie, but I like the songs in Little Mermaid more,” while Death “liked The Little Mermaid more. I mean, even though they’d given it a happy ending”) or eating bagels (“I love food. Food is so great. I mean, it’s so much more fun than photosynthesis or having a power pack in your back or bathing in liquid crystals, or any of those things”) or having Death mend his jeans (“I left the holes in at the knees. I figured you wanted them”). It’s not that the comic is devoid of substance—a sequence after the Eremite captures Death and Sexton and they care for his grievously injured henchman until he dies is satisfyingly chilling. (“Hey,” Sexton muses, “if you were like, really the spirit of death shouldn’t you have been here for him when he died?” “I was here,” Death cooly replies. “Oh yeah. I’ve… never seen a dead body before,” a chastened Sexton admits. “I have.”) But it is by and large a slice of life comic, or perhaps a slice of Death one.

That it works is a testament to just how good a creation Death is. But what’s perhaps most remarkable about it is simply that it shows Gaiman slipping into the overtly populist mode he had previously resisted. It’s worth comparing to A Game of You, not least as a sizeable chunk of the second issue concerns Death and Sexton attending Foxglove’s first attempt at playing a concert (she sings songs about both Judy and Wanda, noting that both are dead. “Maybe it’s contagious.”). There Gaiman pointedly, aggressively withheld audience pleasures, forcing the reader to spend time with characters they didn’t know and were likely to find offputting. And this sort of confrontational approach with readers had been a fairly routine element of his style up to this point, starting from “24 Hours” and continuing with his decision to use The Doll’s House to train readers away from standard expectations for the comic. Up to this point Gaiman has been ambitious, in the way that conquering the world requires. But The High Cost of Living sees him cashing the check, so to speak—writing a work that rests on that reputation instead of building it.

And yet for all that it’s a somewhat lightweight bit of fanservice, it’s also clear that The High Cost of Living was a project Gaiman cared deeply about. He spent the whole of the 00s trying to get a film version made, working on a first draft of the script in 2001, with the film languishing in development hell before the final nail went into its coffin some time around 2010. That Gaiman was interested in a film isn’t entirely surprising, especially given the degree to which Gaiman’s late career focused almost exclusively on film adaptations of his older work, but what’s striking about The High Cost of Living is that not only did Gaiman write the script, he intended to direct it himself, going so far as to shadow Guillermo del Toro on the set of Hellboy 2 and to make A Short Film About John Bolton in 2003 as preparation for the task. When asked why he was insistent on directing it, his typical explanation wa something like “for me, the tone of voice was the most important thing about the movie. I didn’t want someone to make a bad Death movie anymore than I want anybody to make a bad Sandman movie.” But while Gaiman blocked plenty of bad Sandman movies on the way towards approving a bad TV show, at no point did he propose directing those himself. The fact that he spent a decade trying to direct a Death film speaks volumes about this weird little miniseries’ importance to him.

Gaiman’s populist turn was also on display in Sandman, which was in the latter portions of a ten issue arc entitled Brief Lives when the Vertigo switch happened. This arc had, in fact, been a key aspect of his thinking around Game of You; part of why he’d been willing to test the readers’ patience there was because he “expected everyone to like the next major storyline, Brief Lives; and everyone did.” Indeed, it’s the only arc to in any way trouble Season of Mists’ claim to be the iconic and definitive Sandman arc. Some of this is down to the fact that it offers similar pleasures. Once again the larger lore of Sandman is being explored in depth: all seven of the Endless appear, including Destruction, with the arc’s main plot concerning an effort to find him. And loads of other side characters make reappearances—Bast, the Corinthian, and Orpheus all show up, with the latter’s arc reaching its conclusion. It’s also an arc that is absolutely crucial to setting up the series’ eventual ending—Gaiman flags Brief Lives as the point beyond which “the course of the rest of the series is set in stone.”

None of these, however, are the core engine of why Brief Lives succeeds. That comes down almost entirely to Gaiman employing the same basic trick that animates The High Cost of Living, namely having a scene-stealing audience favorite of a character marauding around the story. This, of course, requires him to get lightning to strike twice, creating a second character on the same order of magnitude as Death. Or, rather, to elevate an existing one as Delirium, the youngest of the Endless, finally takes center stage. This is one of Gaiman’s most successful executions of the long game. By the time Brief Lives starts in Sandman #41 it had been twenty issues and nearly two years since her debut in the prelude to Season of Mists. In that time she made only two brief appearances—a three page scene in “Three Septembers and a January,” and a single line in the Sandman Special. She was not an ostentatious mystery akin to Destruction, although she had the intriguing detail that she used to be Delight, but she was certainly a compelling one from the moment of her debut, where Gaiman uses her as a sort of cracked mirror Greek chorus for the meeting of the Endless, letting her insert oddball comments about how “I lost some time once. It’s always in the last place you look for it.”

Aiding her memorability were her dialogue balloons, which, like virtually all of the lettering in the series, was the work of Todd Klein. Klein is one of the more remarkable figures in Sandman. Plenty of people made their reputations working on the comic, but Klein leveraged his work on it to become comics’ first and perhaps only superstar letterer. When the Eisner Awards established an award for Best Lettering in 1993 it was immediately won by Klein. And then, in 1994, it was also won by Klein, and again in 1995. 1996 saw Stan Sakai take one, but then in 1997 Klein began a run of twelve consecutive victories in the category. All told, out of the thirty-one times the award has been given fully eighteen of them were to Todd Klein—an absolutely astonishing level of dominance. And while that haul includes plenty of work beyond Sandman or even his many other collaborations with Neil Gaiman (he quickly became Alan Moore’s preferred letterer as well), it is hard to imagine that Klein would have had such titanic success if not for his work on the title.

The central reason that Klein was able to build this improbable reputation is simply that he was a visible presence throughout the book. Gaiman was fond of calling for bespoke lettering designs for individual characters, and Klein was very much up for it. As a result, Sandman is an almost constant parade of opportunities for Todd Klein to show off; by his estimate, he ended up creating around fifty unique lettering styles over the course of the book. Ironically the book’s most famous idiosyncratic lettering—the white-on-black balloons used for Dream—were not really his work. Klein lettered those balloons normally (aside from the drippy edges), with DC’s production department making negative image reproductions on a photostat machine and pasting them over the original lettering. Klein, in fact, opposed this, on the grounds that “I’d worked in DC’s production department for 10 years previous to this, and I knew that the reverse stats would vary greatly in quality, sometimes being too dark and hard to read, sometimes being too light, with the letters running together, also hard to read,” although he admits that he was wrong, and has besides long since digitally cleaned up all the times he wasn’t.

Delirium, however, was Klein’s work, and one of the more complicated designs he did. Gaiman called for it to “represent a sort of mad variety, getting louder and softer, like something going in and out of focus,” which Klein accomplished by having her lines run in undulating wave-shaped patterns instead of straight lines, with the patterns shifting around the points where the text got bigger or smaller. The balloons were then colored by Daniel Vozzo, with shifting colors—initially relatively simple gradients in her first appearance, but by the time of Brief Lives evolving into concentric rings of colors that pulse outwards from the center of her balloons. It’s a complicated effect—one Klein admits was “fun to do in small amounts, but tedious in large ones,” and one of the only effects Klein still had to do by hand instead of  on a computer when lettering subsequent projects like Endless Nights. But it further cemented Delirium’s status as a compelling and memorable character.

Brief Lives, however, requires her to be a star, not merely an intriguing background figure, and so Gaiman spends the first issue reintroducing her. Indeed, Dream is entirely absent from it, in what undoubtedly tested some readers’ patience given that by this point the previous year of the book had been six issues A Game of You flanked on either side by a triptych of short stories. Instead the issue follows Delirium as its protagonist as she has a small emotional breakdown in a BDSM club, then visits Desire and Despair, all of which leads her to gradually drift towards deciding to seek out her wayward brother Destruction. Delirium cuts a vulnerable and pitiable figure across this issue, her non-sequitur train of thought repeatedly hanging on ideas and clinging to them after their context has expired so that she’s out of step with whatever’s going on around her—a panhandler asks her for some change, and she gets hung up on the word, repeating it seven times before musing that “when you say words a lot they don’t mean anything. Or maybe they don’t mean anything anyway and we just think they do,” before concluding that she needs a change, much to the panhandler’s confusion.

But crucially, she’s also just very funny throughout. There’s a fantastic visual gag in the sex club where she approaches a goth girl she’s mistaken for Death, and a recurring bit across the issue in which, after relating to the panhandler how “There was a big flood once and I got really wet in that, only it wasn’t rain, it was the gunky stuff inside people’s eyes,” she attempts to remember what the name of said gunky stuff is, with Despair finally answering the question late in the issue. And she’s got loads of great bits like describing Despair’s “voice that sounds like people with wet and bubbly stuff in their lungs buried under the ground being crushed to death by giant worms talking.” She’s even capable of quality deadpan, such as when Despair describes the man she’s watching, a midwestern supermarket manager whose collection of child pornography was found by his wife who’s now “sitting in their family room, realizing that his life is over, wondering if he has the courage physically to end it. He doesn’t. Isn’t it beautiful,” Despair asks, to which Delirium offers the magnificently nonchalant “It’s okay. I suppose. If you’re into that kind of thing.”

An interesting detail of the first issue comes when Delirium arrives at the sex club, in a half-page panel where, unusually, Gaiman has bothered to specify what music is playing. More than that, the panel is designed to draw conspicuous attention to the choice—its foreground features a man in fetishwear and restraints kissing his partner. Their heads and postures curve slightly to the left, pulling the reader’s eye to the space above their heads where, instead of a dialogue bubble, are the lyrics: “All the world just stopped now, so you say you don’t wanna stay together anymore, let me take a deep breath babe.” It’s a strange amount of attention to bring to the opening bars of an album cut from a record that peaked at fifty-three on the Billboard charts, but for those who recognized the song in question it was a significant moment. The song in question is “Tear in Your Hand,” by Tori Amos, off her debut album Little Earthquakes; the lyric immediately after the portion quoted is “If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hangin’ out with the Dream King,” and Gaiman’s use of the song served to formalize one of the most significant aesthetic alliances of his career.

Tori Amos was born just a few years after Gaiman to a Maryland-based minister. A piano prodigy from a young age, she set out in her early twenties to make it as a pop star, where she immediately crashed and burned with a mediocre and directionless new wave band called Y Kant Tori Read. While regrouping from this setback and working on Little Earthquakes in late 1990, she was briefly host to a friend, Rantz Hoseley. Hoseley was a comics fan, and left a copy of the recently released Doll’s House trade lying around. Amos was charmed, and while home in Maryland for the holidays that year penned “Tear in Your Hand,” including the Gaiman reference.

The next summer, Hoseley was at San Diego Comic-Con, where he stopped by Gaiman’s table and dropped off a tape of Amos’s music with the comment “She sings about you on one of the songs—don’t sue her.” Hoseley had included Amos’s number, and Gaiman phoned her. Amos recalls him asking if she was “thinking of doing this as something other than a hobby, because it’s pretty good,” to which she replied “that’s a relief, because Little Earthquakes is being released in a couple of weeks.” Conveniently, her label had relocated her to London in the leadup to the album’s release on the rough logic that it would be easier to launch her there, and she and Gaiman quickly struck up a friendship, with Gaiman working in his reference to the album only a few months after it came out.

There is little doubt that Gaiman and Amos’s friendship is genuine. As Gaiman puts it, “we were old friends immediately. Whether you want to view that as fact or metaphor, that is very much true.” Amos, meanwhile, notes that “we held a spiritual brother and sister archetype, he would pop in and see me in the oddest places. I would get sent stories to read even in the down under of Down Under. He would find me somewhere in Australia—I can’t even pronounce its name. My spiritual brother would send me stories. I would pop in and see him just to have coffee and wave to Odin or Freya before jumping on a plane to make a concert.” More prosaically, Amos notes that the pair “met at a time when celebrity hadn’t made us guarded about people. Also, there was never any confusion that it was going to be a romance,” while Gaiman recalls waiting at Notting Hill Gate station after a gig as Amos “stood on the platform acting out the entire video for ‘Silent All These Years.’ I was thinking, ‘This is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met.’”

But for all the genuine warmth, their friendship also doubled as an aesthetic alliance, with both of them peppering references to the other across their career. Amos’s second album, Under the Pink in 1994, featured a line in which Amos bemoans that it “seems I keep getting this story twisted, so where’s Neil when you need him?” Boys for Pele, in 1996, features a song in which she asks “will you find me if Neil makes me a tree,” while one of the b-sides for the album was called “Sister Named Desire.” In 1998’s From the Choirgirl Hotel she off-handedly mentions the Velvets, a reference to Gaiman’s Neverwhere, while her 2002 album Scarlet’s Walk features a several line sequence in which she calls Gaiman for advice, demanding “get me Neil on the line, no I can’t hold. Have him read ‘Snow, Glass, Apples’ to me, where nothing is where it seems,” subsequently recounting Gaiman’s counsel, “Little sis, you must crack this… you must go in again. Carbon made only wants to be unmade.”

Gaiman, for his part, penned a series of brief pieces for Amos’s concert programs, beginning with the cheekily titled “Hi, by the way” for her Under the Pink tour. He established Rose Walker as a Tori fan, having her describe herself as “more of a cornflakes girl,” and had Amos pen the intro to the Death: The High Cost of Living trade paperback. He also based a talking tree in Stardust on Amos (hence her line on Boys for Pele), and wrote a picture book, Blueberry Girl, adapting a poem he wrote for Amos’s daughter. The most commonly cited Amos reference in Gaiman’s career, however, is the persistent claim that he based Delirium on her.

It’s easy to see why people think this. For one thing, by the end of Brief Lives Jill Thompson is drawing Delirium as a woman with long, curly red hair just like Amos’s. For another, Amos has an extremely distinctive rhetorical style. Explaining how she wrote the title track to Little Earthquakes, for instance, she offered, “My eye twitches sometimes. I was surrounded by the thoughts I smash. They decided I would be a good dinner. I decided I wanted 3 bridges in this song.” Discussing “Mr. Zebra,” off of Boys for Pele—a song whose lyrics would also serve as solid evidence here—she explains that “we pick up Ratatouille Strychnine, who we love because she’s our little double agent who can poison people and get us out of trouble when they’re hurting us! But she’s tired, she’s tired of the poisoning.” Or, when clarifying what she meant when she said that her song “Mother” was not just about a mother-daughter relationship, she offered the lengthy account that it’s about “how it was in the past, aeons ago, when we weren’t made of flesh and blood yet and our free spirits were floating around. There was no good or bad expression, just free expression. I have a certain idea about the deluge/flood that differs from the accepted interpretation. My vision has to do with the disagreement in yourself. The way you can split up yourself, which means the way you judge a certain part of yourself. Why is Caroline’s green so much better than mine? Instead of this you can also see the expression of others just as a message and stay true to yourself. The deluge/flood had to do with judgements. Some kind of energy is taking power over you when you start blaming yourself and condemn yourself. ‘Mother the car is here’ means: arriving on a place like earth, where that energy is very dark and attractive and sensual. That’s also a part of us. If you try to separate those things strictly, like light and dark, like those New-Age people do, then you are acting superior. Then your hands are so clean, no filth under your nails, no wisdom. You have to unify those two things, that’s what I tried to do in ‘Mother.’ The idea of: If I like it, I hope I can remember. Maybe it happened a billion years ago…” And, of course, it’s in an issue about Delirium that Gaiman first references Amos.

Nevertheless, the timeline simply does not work out. Gaiman introduced Delirium in November of 1990, back when Rantz Hoseley was first introducing Amos to Sandman, and around a year before the two of them first connected. And while it’s true that Delirium resembles Amos in the later issues of Brief Lives, this is best explained by the fact that Jill Thompson also resembles Tori Amos, and admits that she “used myself as a model for a lot of [Delirium’s] body language, the way she sits or stands.” Equally, Gaiman does not deny the resemblance, noting that Amos “seemed like a fairy to me. She was this little red-headed imp who reminded me of Delirium,” and admitting that “Delirium was created before I met Tori, but they steal shamelessly from each other.”

It is ultimately the bidirectional nature of this influence that is most revealing. Gaiman notes of Amos that “One of the misconceptions about her is that she’s barking mad. She’s funny, and she tends to concretise metaphors very colourfully, but if she’s talking about being wet like a mango it’s worth understanding that this is a figure of speech. She’s one of the most level-headed people I know.” This undoubtedly extends to her public persona, and her bonkers statements are at least partly character work on her part. Indeed, it is Amos who offers the most revealing account of her friendship with Gaiman, when she notes that “our whole relationship is about reading between the lines and pushing each other to be great. Good is not good enough.” Which is to say that at the end of the day, both Gaiman and Amos are profoundly ambitious and at times ruthlessly career-savvy people. Amos, for instance, adopted a shrewd career-long policy of not commenting on what contemporary artists she’s listening to, a trick that meant that when she incorporated massive amounts of trip-hop influences into her 1998 From the Choirgirl Hotel, all the press about the album still centered her creative vision instead of making Portishead comparisons. And when she does nod to her contemporaries, she does so strategically and provocatively.  She made an astonishingly swift and attention-getting move to cut a cover of Nirvana’s hit “Smell’s Like Teen Spirit,” ripping out its grunged out guitars and famously unintelligible vocals in favour of a smolderingly sexual piano cover and rushing it out only eight months after the original as a b-side to her lead single for Little Earthquakes. She repeated the trick some years later, cutting an equally headline-grabbing Eminem cover for her album Strange Little Girls, itself a brutally sharp move to burn off the end of a record deal she wanted out of with a throwaway covers album before releasing Scarlet’s Walk, a proper major work of an album, on a new label barely a year later. And when it came to her late career, once her hit-making potential was exhausted, she took a similar approach to Gaiman, learning to effectively monetize her core audience with an approach to touring in which she massively rotates her set list night to night, bringing out an endless parade of deep cuts and obscurities, and thus providing tacit encouragement to the legion of obsessive fans who will follow her from show to show.

The resulting alliance, unsurprisingly, paid off for both of them over the course of decades. Amos’s quirky persona and intimately confessional lyrics were tailor made to appeal to the exact same people that Gaiman was targeting with Death or, for that matter, Delirium. But as they were in completely different media and industries they never directly competing with one another for that audience. More to the point, both of them cultivated attentive readers who would pay attention to details like who, exactly, this Neil fellow and the Dream King are, or what that song playing in the background of a two page scene is. The result was that each served as a tremendously effective gateway to the other’s work.

Inevitably, of course, the revelations of Gaiman’s abuse derailed things. Amos is herself a longtime advocate for victims of sexual abuse—one of the most striking songs on Little Earthquakes is “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing account of her own rape—and Gaiman even used his proximity to Amos in manipulating one of his victims, bragging that he could get her a job at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, a charity Amos helped found. Asked about Gaiman in an interview a few months after the allegations surfaced, Amos offered the shock and dismay that friends of abusive men typically do, noting “that’s not the Neil that I knew, that’s not the friend that I knew, nor a friend that I ever want to know. So in some ways it’s a heartbreaking grief. I never saw that side of Neil.” But of course she didn’t; letting her find out about it would have been unprofessional.

His alliance with Amos secured, Gaiman briefly flirted with continuing the pattern of audience frustration that he’d been working in since Season of Mists. On the one hand, the second issue of Brief Lives finally reintroduces Dream, moving the story to the rough present of its main character for the first time in fourteen issues. But as befits that kind of absence, the story has lurched to a new and uncertain place. The first pace shows Dream walking despondently to stand on a balcony as he narrates “She… She has decided she no longer loves me.” The identity of Dream’s latest ex is left unrevealed—a decision Gaiman insists was not him trolling the reader, but simply that “a few panels later, I found the Sandman saying, ‘I would appreciate it if the palace staff would be so kind as to refraim from mentioning her in future, when in my presence.’ And I thought, ‘Oh dear. We’re not going to know who she is for a long time now.’” (It was, in fact, Thessaly from A Game of You, a fact that would finally be revealed some twenty-three issues later.) But after half an issue of Dream moping (and the castle staff, most especially the wisecracking janitor Merv Pumpkinhead, grousing about how “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 mean time everybody gets dreams fulla existential angst and wakes up feeling like hell. And we all get wet”), the story changes gears and never looks back.

The transition is, unsurprisingly, the arrival of Delirium to appeal to Morpheus for help finding their brother. What becomes immediately apparent once she does is that Delirium and Dream form an absolutely untouchable double act. Dream’s straight-laced mopiness is perfectly suited to serve as the straight man to Delirium’s excesses. He plainly loves his sister, but is also understandably frustrated by her. He invites her for a meal, for instance, at which she asks for “little milk chocolate people? About three inches high? Men and women? I’d like some of them filled with raspberry cream,” along with mango juice to drink—a setup that manages to make Dream’s subsequent request for “an omelette, a light salad, and a glass of white wine” one of the series’ more unexpected laugh lines. This, however, is simply setup for a nine panel grid page in which Delirium tells an increasingly dismayed Dream that two of the chocolates are “making lo-ove. K. I. S. S. I. N. G.” (This last bit is lettered by Klein with a distinct bubble for each letter, each colored differently by Vozzo) Chastised by Dream, she apologizes and meekly says “they weren’t really kissing. They were um. Squidging.” When this fails to improve matters she tries again, venturing that “It’s okay. I’ve finished mostly. They’ve gone all sticky anyway. And I don’t like mango juice. It’s yecchy,” although to this she appends, quietly, one more “kissing.” Dream suggests that they perhaps talk in his gallery, and they depart, allowing Gaiman what he proclaims his “favorite caption in all of Sandman” as he describes how “Touched by her fingers, the two surviving chocolate people copulate desperately, losing themselves in a melting frenzy of lust, spending the last of their brief borrowed lives in a spasm of raspberry cream and fear.”

And there are seven more issues of this. Gaiman literally takes the act on the road, which is to say that the bulk of the storyline is simply Dream and Delirium’s road trip to find Destruction and the various misadventures they get into along the way. It’s repeatedly fun—pretty much every issue has multiple astonishingly quotable lines. But it’s also a big tonal shift from the horror comic that Sandman had debuted as some three and a half years earlier. It’s not that the book has abandoned seriousness—this is the arc where it turns into a tragedy, after all. And even if it weren’t, there’s plenty of substantive and even quite dark beats: an entire subplot about the goddess Ishtar in which she blows up a strip club by unleashing the full capacity of her power during a dance, for instance. Still, the arc is focused on humor in a way that simply wasn’t the case in the comic’s early days—there’s scarcely a joke across the entirety of Preludes and Nocturnes, for instance.

Gaiman did not, of course, invent the approach of telling fundamentally dramatic story that’s laced through with comedy bits. It’s a time-honored strategy for popular success—a best of both worlds literary style that can have big, weighty concepts and dramatic climaxes while maintaining a moment-to-moment flow that’s focused on straightforward entertainment. That Gaiman should be adept at the style is hardly a surprise—he had after all collaborated with Terry Pratchett and written the book on Douglas Adams, so his understanding of comedy was clear, and his aptitude at the mythic/dramatic end has already been well established. But what’s notable is simply that Gaiman is being so adamantly and extendedly accessible. Like Death: The High Cost of Living, Brief Lives is positively decadent in its appeal to its audience, merrily stretching out over nine issues—the longest arc to date in the series—all of which are just tremendously fun. It’s a clear and conscious effort to play to the crowd—to lean into the reputation Gaiman had built and give the people what they want.

It’s notable, if only for context, that Brief Lives was also the period during which Gaiman emigrated to the United States. This was not done for career reasons—his wife was an American who’d been studying Scientology in the UK, and was simply returning home. They settled in western Wisconsin, about an hour outside of Minneapolis—not exactly a buzzing literary hub (although Gaiman would forge a long-term relationship with Dreamhaven Books and their associated press, which issued a number of small run projects for him starting almost as soon as he arrived with his first short story collection, Angels and Visitations; for years one could send things to Dreamhaven Books for Gaiman to sign the next time he was in). Gaiman has suggested there was some measure of culture shock, noting that “I thought I understood America. The Midwest, and by inference America, was weirder than I could have imagined,” although before long he was finding inspiration in the landscape, his experience as an immigrant, and the books on American history and folklore he was reading.

This move did not mean that he was wholly out from under the thumb of Scientology—his wife remained active in the Church—but it still marked a clear milestone in Gaiman’s escape from his family’s control. If Brief Lives and The High Cost of Living read as a victory lap, that’s only appropriate for a writer who had very clearly won. Whatever goals he’d had when he walked into that meeting with Berger and Giordano five years earlier had more than been accomplished; he was already more successful than he could have imagined. He’d made it.

It is helpful to think back to “24 Hours,” and Gaiman’s comments about how happy endings require stopping the story at a certain point. Or perhaps back to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and Gaiman’s line about the price of getting what you want being having what you once wanted. It would be nice, in many ways, if this is where Gaiman’s story ended. It would be a story about Moore’s most successful protege, who used what he learned from his mentor to escape a lifetime of abuse and write a hit comic. It would be a happy ending—the story of what is, perhaps, the most noble and worthwhile use of Moore’s magic there is.

The point in which the ending of Sandman becomes inevitable comes in the sixth issue of Brief Lives. Dream and Delirium’s initial efforts to find Destruction have faltered in the face of the magic Destruction has worked to cover his tracks, resulting in a trail of, well, destruction in their wake. Dream calls off the search, returning to the Dreaming and leaving Delirium despondent. After being memorably scolded by Death, Dream voyages to Delirium’s realm and agrees to resume the search. The consequences of this are hinted at earlier in the issue, when Dream visits Bast and she alludes to the existence of an oracle Dream could consult, and are made more explicit in the next issue, when Destiny bluntly informs Dream that he will need an oracle, and that there is precisely one who is capable of perceiving the Endless as he is “of the family.” This, of course, is Dream’s own son, Orpheus, whose price is simple: that Dream finally grant him death. This, however, makes him a kin-killer, exactly as Desire had long been trying to trick him into doing, and thus bringing the wrath of the Kindly Ones. (Desire, ironically, finds themself ambivalent about this development.)

Interestingly, there is relatively little thought given in the book to why Dream takes this decision. As soon as he returns to the Dreaming he is already giving thought to taking up the quest in earnest (having, initially, just been playing along with Delirium in the hopes of bumping into Thessaly on Earth), consulting Bast, when she asks why he wants to find his brother, answering that “I do not want to. But… I am much afraid I need to.” His conversation with Death tips the scales, but it’s not entirely clear why. He gives one sort of answer when informing Delirium that he’ll try again—she asks if he likes her, to which he says “I suppose I must do, Delirium. You entertain me. And it distresses me to see you troubled.” Later, when Destruction asks why he came looking for him, he suggests that it’s because of one of the people who died along the way, and a sense of justice. Neither answer quite satisfies, however, and the decision, for all its vast implications, remains opaque.

Dream’s fatal decision only takes the book to its two-thirds mark (the equivalent “Act I” break being, roughly, the end of Season of Mists), and Gaiman still had much to do before the end. Nevertheless, he had set the book on the path to its conclusion. More to the point, he had set his comics career on the path to its conclusion. He would not abandon the medium entirely, but in the nearly three decades since Sandman’s completion he’s written just over two dozen issues, the bulk of them written for Marvel Comics as part of a complicated deal to get them to clean up the copyright situation around Miracleman. He was, by and large, done with the industry.

Unlike his character, it is not hard to see why Gaiman made this decision. The same critiques he’d made at the beginning of his career about writing Future Shocks applied just as well to DC. While Sandman was technically in the DC Universe, Gaiman had for all practical purposes created a bespoke fictional universe featuring the single most iconic character he’d ever create in his career, and he owned none of it. The temptation to ensure that he actually had all of the rights to his next creation was obvious. Equally, the case he’d made about writing for Fleetway—that it represented a failure to invest in himself—plainly did not apply here. Writing Sandman had been an excellent investment in himself; it had gotten him everything he wanted, after all. The problem wasn’t even getting what he’d once wanted; it was just that he wanted more.

Brief Lives was paced to conclude with issue #49, as Gaiman had standing plans for issue #50. This was an oversized issue to be called “Ramadan” and return to the “Distant Mirrors” branding used for the short stories between Season of Mists and A Game of You. On art duties was P. Craig Russell, a longtime veteran of the industry (he joked that he was “probably the oldest Sandman artist ever,” although in fact he’s a few months younger than Charles Vess, and a fair few years younger than Duncan Eagleston, who illustrated “The Hunt” in the “Convergences” run of shorts). This ended up sparking Gaiman to take a different approach in scripting. As Gaiman tells it, “Because I was trying to capture the spirit of an Arabian Nights tale, however, I decided to first write out ‘Ramadan’ as a prose short story, so I could concentrate on capturing the appropriate rhythms and poetry of the language.” About halfway in—at the point in the story where Dream makes his first appearance—Gaiman recalls phoning Russell before breaking that half of the story into a full script, reading it over the phone to him, and Russell asking him to finish it as a prose story.

Russell remembers things differently. In his account, having inked an issue of Season of Mists, he was familiar with Gaiman’s Moore-derived style of highly detailed scripts, and knew his own preference “to just have the single words and to have to really think about it and then tell” the story, so he requested it. Gaiman agreed to “do it for the first half of the script, until Dream appears, and then he was going to do it tighter,” which Craig accepted as better than nothing. After Craig successfully drew the first half, however, Gaiman realized the approach was working, and ended up writing the back half in the same style. Russell also disputes that this style was a prose story, describing it as more akin to a play, with all the dialogue alongside a “couple of stage directions.” Regardless, it meant Russell was left to actually decide on the panel breakdowns and individual page structures, resulting in a number of interesting decisions such as a caption written on a scroll of paper that winds its way across three panels as a character travels through some catacombs, or a panel featuring a stunning 118-word dialogue balloon—a decision Gaiman freely admits he “wouldn’t have even attempted,” along with Karen Berger’s approval of a bonus payment to Todd Klein for successfully lettering all of that and a successful retirement for Russell adapting various Gaiman prose projects into comics.

The resulting issue, with its nice round number, metallic ink cover, and gallery of Dream pinups featuring John Totleben, Scott McCloud, and Todd McFarlane, proved to be the best-selling of the run, selling more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies. Unfortunately it’s also one of the pieces of Sandman to have aged most poorly, and certainly the one to have done so because of its content instead of its author. The plot concerns Haroun Al Raschid, ruler of the city of Baghdad in a mythic, Arabian Knights-infused past where it is universally recognized as the greatest city on earth. Haroun, concerned with the reality that all such cities will eventually fade, calls upon Dream and offers to sell him the city to preserve forever in dreams; Dream accepts, and Haroun awakens to a crumbling and far more mundane city before the story cuts to a previously unrevealed frame story in which a young boy is being told the story by an old beggar in a bomb-ravaged modern Baghdad.

Gaiman’s motivation in this is easy enough to discern. He started work on the script in early 1992, a year after the Gulf War. Much as he’d attempted to humanize trans women in A Game of You, it’s clear that “Ramadan” was intended to do the same thing for Arab people. But where Gaiman was able to base Wanda on the actual experience of trans people he knew, his only seeming frame of reference for writing about the Middle East is having read One Thousand and One Nights in some translation or another. As a result his description of the mythic Baghdad is a wall to wall expanse of tediously orientalist tropes—a harem of “concubines from every land, infidel and faithful, with skins white as the desert sand; skins brown as the mountain seen at evening; skins yellow as smoke; skins black as obsidian: all of them adept at the arts of pleasure. Also there were many beautiful boys, their chins still hairless, their dark eyes wanton and lustful, savory as apricots plucked in the dew,” a marketplace full of haggling connivers, and a too clever for its own good line describing Christians as “a dirty folk, who will not bathe, and who venerate the dried dung of their leader, whom they call the Pope.” Contrasted with a portrayal of the real world Baghdad, both in antiquity and modernity, as a crumbling city in ruins, this portrait of the Middle East becomes starkly condescending, polarized between fetishized and exotic myth and the cruel barbarism that allegedly constitutes reality.

Nominally “Ramadan” was the only short story between Brief Lives and the next arc, entitled Worlds’ End. In practice, however, Worlds’ End was a short story collection dressed up as an arc via a framing narrative in which a variety of characters from all manner of realms and worlds congregate at an inn (the Worlds’ End) to shelter from a reality storm and pass the time by telling stories. As Gaiman explains it, “I love doing short stories because of the variety they provide, and I saw Worlds’ End as my last chance to explore a bunch of different genres in Sandman. I’d previously found it arduous to begin every story from scratch, however, so this time I used the inn to provide framing sequences.” The framing sequences—which are substantial parts of the first and final issue of the arc, and two or three pages of the middle four—are illustrated by Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham, while the short stories, as usual, feature a rotating selection of guest artists.

It is worth comparing the stories in Worlds’ End to those of the three earlier runs of short stories. The stories in Dream Country at times extended from existing bits of Sandman’s lore—“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” unpacks the brief appearance of Shakespeare in “Men of Good Fortune,” but the arc also featured “Dream of a Thousand Cats,” an issue that existed purely to explore its own ideas. “Distant Mirrors” similarly features “Thermidor,” including the reappearance of Joanna Constantine to introduce Orpheus, and “Three Septembers and a January,” which, while deeply charming on its own merits, also runs through a cavalcade of guest stars. But it also features the wholly self-contained “August” and, retroactively, “Ramadan.” Convergences, meanwhile, contains only “The Parliament of Rooks” in terms of larger arc significance, while “The Hunt” and “Soft Places” are genuine standalones.

Worlds’ End contains stories in each of these moulds. The first story—a fourteen-and-a-half pager called “A Tale of Two Cities,” is  genuinely self-contained—indeed, the only thing tying it to Sandman is a single panel appearance of Dream, who gets no dialogue and could easily have been excluded with no harm to the larger narrative. And the fourth story, “The Golden Boy,” also largely stands alone, although it is riffing extensively on DC Comics history. The fifth, meanwhile, is very much akin to “Thermidor” or “The Parliament of Rooks,” unpacking bits of series lore and doing major setup work on what’s to come. But the second and third stories offer something distinctly different, in that they are stories anchored by the return of fan-favorite characters. The first is the rather straightforwardly named “Cluracan’s Tale,” which reintroduces Nuala’s brother Cluracan for a standalone tale of swashbuckling adventure, while the second, “Hob’s Leviathan,” offers an adventure of Hob Gadling from “Men of Good Fortune.” The titles even foreground the central pleasure here, putting the returning character right up front for readers.

This approach isn’t quite unprecedented—back in Dream Country there was a story, “Façade,” which traded entirely on the appearance of Death, who was its only tie to the rest of Sandman. But for one thing, that was Death—Sandman’s one unambiguous superstar character. For another, she wasn’t foregrounded in the title—she wanders in (literally) on page fifteen of a story that had previously focused on a depressed and immortal superheroine. Worlds’ End is operating very differently, and in a mode that only a long-running and beloved series could. In the case of “Hob’s Leviathan,” it’s so confident in its returning lore that neither Dream nor any of the other Endless even appear—a trait shared only with a couple issues of A Game of You across the entire run. As with The High Cost of Living, this is a victory lap, and a transition towards Gaiman writing stories that cash in on past glories.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Worlds’ End marks something of a stumbling point for the series. A Game of You may have been the least popular arc, but that’s by design—it’s a deft execution of an idea designed to alienate a portion of the audience, and there are undoubtedly Sandman fans for whom it’s a favorite. This is harder to believe about Worlds’ End, which is simply a weak arc. Short stories had never actually been Sandman’s strength—while classics like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Three Septembers and a January” exist, taken as a whole they’re markedly uneven in quality. This would be one thing if that were because Gaiman used the short stories to take ambitious risks, but he generally didn’t—things like “24 Hours” or A Game of You took place in the main arcs. When his short stories faltered, it was usually because they were just a bit insipid. And the victory lap conditions of Worlds’ End were hardly suited to buck that trend. Even Gaiman is uncharacteristically critical of it, complaining of the first story, the Lovecraft/Calvino pastiche “A Tale of Two Cities” that artist Alec Stevens drew a character too similarly to Death, saying that “it’s unfortunate that she does, because it adds overtones that don’t belong to his almost instinctive decision to run from her touch.” He’s similarly critical of “Cluracan’s Tale,” which he says “turned out rather horribly” due to his attempt to cram too much story into a single issue, saying that “I ended up trying to do a swashbuckler Errol Flynn movie in fifteen minutes, and fell flat.”

But Gaiman is hardly the only party at fault. Indeed, there’s a sense of a sort of general malaise settling over the book in this period—a common phenomena as long runs approach their conclusions. “Hob’s Leviathan,” for instance, is drawn by Michael Zulli, who’s an incredible artist with a soft, subtle line. Zulli is, by his own admission, “not easy to ink,” but here he’s inked by Dick Giordano, who bleeds the nuance out of Zulli’s pages, threatening to make him indistinguishable from any other penciller. (Zulli, diplomatically, notes that Giordano was “a fairly inspired choice at the time.”) Even Dave McKean found himself burning out, describing the arc as his “lowest point during the seventy-five Sandman covers. The images in my head and the poor relations that ended up on paper had never been further apart.”

It is not that the arc is a wholesale failure. Indeed, its fourth issue, “The Golden Boy,” is among the finest short stories in all of Sandman. It sees Gaiman dusting off what was, at the time, one of the most obscure characters in DC history, Prez Rickard, who starred in Prez, a 1973 comic by Joe Simon and Jerry Grandnetti that lasted all of four issues before it was cancelled—an outcome that feels more than faintly inevitable given its absolutely gonzo premise of documenting the life and story of the United States’ first teenage President. The comic was a deeply strange piece of pop art—its antagonist was the slumlord Boss Smiley, whose face was just the same Harvey Ball smiley face that would eventually find itself upon the cover of Watchmen #1, and who had assistants like Misery Marko, an ad man who lives on a garishly colored boat in Pollution Cove because he “thinks best when he’s unhappy,” and it portrayed a world where international diplomacy was conducted through chess matches with living pieces.

Gaiman leans into the strangeness of this, casting the story as the gospel of Prez as narrated by one of his adherents after he’s died and become a figure of multiversal veneration. In many ways—perhaps ironically given his cosmic gloss on the premise—Gaiman skews more towards a realist mode than Joe Simon’s original conception. The broad strokes of the story are in place, but there’s no Misery Marko or Pollution Cove, nor, mercifully, Eagle Free, Prez’s painfully stereotypical Native American friend who speaks to animals and teaches Prez how to wield their powers. (Well, mostly; a character who’s plainly Eagle makes a single panel non-speaking appearance.) Instead Gaiman leans on a fair amount of existent real-world culture—the issue features appearances from Richard Nixon and John Belushi, and sees Prez appear on the cover of Newsweek, all of which grounds the story in something like the real world. (The storyteller, in introducing his tale, inquires who the President was in his audience’s world, following history back to Carter before saying, “Ah, you come from one of those Americas. You have my sympathy.”)

And yet the underlying strangeness is still well in place. Most obviously, Boss Smiley is still there, his head marginally more three-dimensional and his facial features marginally more human, but still fundamentally a Harvey Ball smile in a suit and tie. There’s also, as befits Sandman, a strangely dreamlike quality to everything. Nixon’s appearance, for instance, comes when he appears in Prez’s bedroom one night to tell him that he’s going to be the next President, and when this claim proves accurate it’s met with a “number of magnificent omens,” including that “during a 42nd Street screening of Hot Teenage Love Sluts, the climactic sex scene was interrupted by the couple replacing their clothes and performing highlights from Guys and Dolls to an outraged audience.” This tone takes over the narrative in its final pages, as a consensus sweeps America that the now former President Prez has died, although nobody exactly knows how and “there was nothing about it in the newspapers, no word on television.” The deceased Prez is greeted by Death (Gaiman specifically singling out artist Mike Allred—an inspired choice for riffing on the pop art sensibilities of Jerry Grandnetti’s original—for a “standout” rendition of the character), who finds herself troubled by the circumstances of where she’s taking him. This turns out to be to Boss Smiley, now reverted to a pure Harvey Ball form, who attempts to exert his control over Prez only to be stopped by Dream, who’s been called in by his sister, and who Prez gifts with a pocket watch seen back in the treasure chest at the end of Season of Mists.

It’s clever and strangely moving—a poignant cracked mirror on American politics from a recent immigrant who had found himself “struck by how powerfully my friends reacted to Bill Clinton” and the way they “were genuinely heartbroken” when he did not simply fix everything wrong with the country after twelve years of Republican rule, “as if something deeply religious had gone wrong.” But perhaps more to the point, it’s a brash and decisive trump card in what was, by that point, the nearly decade-long game among the British Invasion writers of cleverly reinventing moribund concepts. Moore, of course, had kicked off the competition with his take on Swamp Thing, but more or less everyone to have moved to DC had taken a swing at it by late 1993: Morrison with Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and Kid Eternity, Peter Milligan with Shade the Changing Man, and Gaiman with Black Orchid, Element Girl, and of course the Sandman. But here Gaiman had ostentatiously taken one of the most obscure, unworkable, and plainly ridiculous concepts out there and made it absolutely sing. There was simply nowhere else to go with the game—no further escalations of improbable cleverness to be had. Sure, someone could try to dust off Green Team: Boy Millionaires or something, but for all practical purposes the game was over. The king had been crowned.

But as the issue and, in a different sense, Worlds’ End at large both show, the only thing a golden boy can really do is disappoint. Sometimes they badly let down their audience. Sometimes they try to climb too high. Sometimes they make a principled decision to stop working for the publisher with which they have found popular success in favor of being a more niche and esoteric creator, although that one’s a bit rarer. And sometimes they simply overstay their welcome, that golden sheen slowly fading and dulling until, one day, they wake to find that the world has moved on. By the time Worlds’ End wrapped at the end of 1993, Gaiman had already written over a year’s worth more issues of Sandman than his predecessor as golden boy had on Swamp Thing, and was already six issues past the point where he’d previously estimated the book would reach its conclusion. It was time to move on.

And more even than Brief Lives, where the implications of Dream’s decision to kill Orpheus could be pieced together but were not overtly stated, the final two issues of Worlds’ End made it clear that he was going to be doing that soon. Fist was “Cerements,” set in the Necropolis, a world that serves as a sort of interdimensional funeral home. Much of this issue is devoted to Gaiman being ostentatious with his “frame narrative” structure—the story in the Necropolis itself features various characters sitting down and sharing stories, several of which in turn feature acts of storytelling. In one of these stories within a story within a story within a story (within, it will turn out, yet another story, as the frame story of Worlds’ End is revealed at the end of its final issue to have its own framing narrative) there’s even mention of “a coal full of prentices and a master, swept away from Litharge by dark magics, who took their refuge in a tavern, where the price of haven was a tale,” just to take the ostentatious structuralism to a maximal level.

Within this blizzard of sub-tales, however, two establish concepts that Gaiman would soon be relying upon. In one, Destruction stops by the Necropolis and tells a story about the fall of the first Necropolis, which turns out to have been precipitated by the Endless coming to ask for the ritual tools needed to bury one of their own—the first Despair, who had been obliquely alluded to a few times throughout the narrative. In another, an elder in the Necropolis tells a story of her childhood, in which she accidentally wanders into a mysterious subterranean chamber. She describes how  “there were six silver cerements hanging in that room, shining in the darkness; and a huge book, locked closed, on a lectern,” as well as a disembodied voice that demands to know “which of them is dead?” All of which serves to actively establish not just that the Endless can die, but that it is an expected part of the universe, with systems in place to handle it.

The final issue, meanwhile, breaks the structure (or, rather, subverts it via the reveal that the entire arc has a framing narrative) in favor of an issue set entirely inside the Worlds’ End, in which the nature of the reality storm is finally made clear—it’s because of a funeral procession (drawn by Gary Amaro) consisting of basically all the major cast of Sandman and a host of smaller characters, save for the conspicuous absence of Morpheus himself.

Between these two issues came another interesting project for Gaiman—the first issue of a series called The Children’s Crusade. This project saw Gaiman stepping once more into the role of “good corporate citizen” by spearheading the first attempt to do a big crossover event under the Vertigo banner. It was also, as it happened, the last attempt, which gives a sense of how it went. Its failure is not exactly a surprise, as the idea was fairly obviously misbegotten. Vertigo had, after all, been founded on the principle of its iconoclastic and visionary creators. This was a very useful thing when it came to creating a line of quality and era-defining comic books; it was markedly less useful when it came to getting seven different writers on the same page to coauthor a story.

One suspects that Gaiman was largely aware of this. While he wrote the first and last issues of the crossover, published as The Children’s Crusade #1 and #2, it’s notable that he largely kept anything related to Sandman far away from it. There’s no cameo of Death or Morpheus, or any of the Endless. It would, of course, be impolitic to have no connection with Vertigo’s flagship title, especially given that Gaiman was writing the crossover, but it would be difficult to have picked a more marginal one than Charles Rowland and Edin Payne, the two ghostly schoolchildren who starred in the interlude issue of Season of Mists, and who had made precisely zero appearances since then. Eventually—ironically in part on the back of getting dusted off for this boondoggle—they’d anchor a couple of miniseries and a short-lived Netflix series, but at the end of 1993 they were as obscure a Sandman connection as they get.

The nominal justification for this choice came from the initial idea for the crossover, which Gaiman recalls being when “somebody not me had pointed out that if there was one thing all the Vertigo titles in question had in common, it was that they each had a child in them,” an anecdote in which the most telling thing is almost certainly Gaiman’s haste, even as the story was finally being republished as a trade paperback, to make it clear that this wasn’t his idea. But he got to work all the same, setting up a story in which all of the children have disappeared from the small English village of Flaxdown, which Rowland and Payne get to investigating. What they discover is that the children have been spirited away to the Free Country, a refuge “where there is no age or pain or hunger or death” established after the eponymous Children’s Crusade in the 13^th century, and more to the point that the high council of Free Country is planning to take five powerful children who will in turn give them the power to take all of the world’s children.

These children, as the core idea of the crossover suggests, were helpfully all characters in currently running Vertigo books. There was Suzy, the younger “daughter” version of Black Orchid, Maxine Baker, the daughter of Animal Man, Tefé Holland, the daughter of Swamp Thing, Dorothy Spinnell of the Doom Patrol, and Timothy Hunter, who didn’t actually have a currently running series, but would be getting a relaunched Books of Magic ongoing soon enough. And the middle portion of the crossover, over the next two months, consisted of each of these five titles publishing an annual advancing the storyline.

This was, unsurprisingly, where things went wrong. That the five annuals would be of deeply inconsistent quality is no surprise; that’s just how crossovers work. Perhaps these were weaker than some—it’s notable that Black Orchid and Doom Patrol would be cancelled about a year after the crossover wrapped, while Animal Man would only limp on a few months longer. That’s not entirely down to the writers—Animal Man would change hands before its cancellation, and Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol was eventually reevaluated as a minor classic, but these were not titles that were generally viewed as hitting it out of the park on a regular basis. But the bigger problem, as Gaiman recalls, was simply that “bits of plot that had been handed out to the other books weren’t actually in those books when they were done,” creating a mess of a situation when he returned to wrap up the story in The Children’s Crusade #2.

The result was a broadly incoherent narrative—things were so inconsistent that individual books couldn’t manage to agree what gender one character was. Gaiman, with assistance from Jamie Delano and editor Alisa Kwitney, made an effort to get things back on track, but with the book needing to tame the chaos and explain all the stuff that had failed to make it into the annuals the result was a chaotic and unsatisfying jumble of a comic that was considered, at best, an interesting failed experience, and at worst an outright debacle. The entire affair was so unloved that it sat for twenty years without being given a collected edition—by far the largest piece of Gaiman’s DC writing to sit out of print. As Gaiman explained it, once it finally had come out, “It never made sense to collect The Children’s Crusade into one book. The chapters in the middle were all so very much part of their own stories. But there was a beginning then, and an end.” This is an odd assertion—component parts that tie into their own stories are a fact of life for crossovers, countless numbers of which were collected over those twenty years. Perhaps the most revealing part of it is the closing assertion that there was a beginning and an end, which is to say some bits Gaiman wrote, the sole fact that made collecting it remotely sensible.

The eventual solution was to simply tear out the middle five issues and insert a new middle section. Gaiman, by this time, was long past that sort of thing, and so Toby Litt, who was writing a short-lived Dead Boy Detectives series, stepped up to pen the replacement middle chapter, although he ended up keeping the script for a few pages from Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol Annual. The new middle did not radically change the plot so much as it just cut large amounts of it out—at one point one of Russell Braun’s panels from the Animal Man Annual is just straightforwardly redrawn. The result is not especially more coherent than the five original annuals, and seems to mostly have the effect of screwing the original creators—whose work is still plainly being utilized on—out of credit or royalties. Even Gaiman admits that the new version mostly just “shows that Vertigo, all those years ago, was not the place for a crossover.”

But frankly, that was what the original version did too. Between it and the lackluster Worlds’ End, Gaiman went into 1994 in what was, in some ways, the weakest position he’d had since he was an actual up and comer at the start of Sandman. Equally, it was wholly straightforward what he needed to do turn things around. He just needed to stick the landing. This was not a small ask, and indeed The Kindly Ones is not a small arc, spanning fully thirteen issues. And its heft was far from the only imposing thing about it. By Gaiman’s own admission, he “knew the entire storyline would end up being collected in book form” and so “chose to pace the story in a way that would work perfectly for a book–but that would not work very well for a monthly comic.” Adding to this, he abandoned his usual practice of making sure to “attempt to reorient the reader at the beginning of each issue or to periodically reintroduce various characters.” All of this meant that the arc was, at least when it was coming out, quite divisive for the simple reason that it was hard to follow and paced for a different format than the one it was being released in.

Much of this been rectified with age, once the book was collected in the trade paperback format Gaiman was in reality writing for. But even there the book has a certain austere and alienating quality to it. This is down to Gaiman’s choice of artists for the arc, Marc Hempel. This was a deep cut choice to say the least—Hempel had a smattering of credits to his name, and was probably best known for drawing Breathtaker, a deeply idiosyncratic noir miniseries published by DC in 1990 and reprinted in trade by Vertigo a few months into the Kindly Ones, or perhaps for Gregory, his even more idiosyncratic black comedy about a triangle-headed child in a mental institution. It was, to put it mildly, not a choice made with an eye towards populism.

Gaiman’s justification for this choice was that “The Kindly Ones is about shadows and shapes, form and fire. I therefore wanted someone with a simple, lucid style.” And it’s true that Hempel is a very clear artist, in part because he’s a comparatively minimalist one. But his style is sharply angular and expressionist—at once cartoony and like a stained glass window. Hempel also involved himself heavily in the coloring—colorist Daniel Vozzo recalls that he “was literally on the phone with him for every issue” to discuss what he wanted. The result was that much of the coloring was done in large single color blocks, with relatively few gradients, further enhancing the sense of austerity in the art and making the arc seem off-putting and challenging.

But this was by and large for the good. For all that Gaiman got considerable mileage out of his big populist moves like Season of Mists and Brief Lives, much of what made Sandman work was the fact that Gaiman was also willing to go in more alienating and challenging directions, doing things like “24 Hours,” The Doll’s House, and A Game of You. The only way its denouement had any chance of success was if it continued with this sense of confident ambition instead of the coasting victory lap that had been Worlds’ End. A challenging arc with a radical art style that unapologetically made demands of its readers was very much what the book needed.

Not everything about The Kindly Ones was so inclined to test its audience’s patience, but it has a habit of managing to make even its populist moves somewhat austere and unapproachable. Much of its vast length is simply because Gaiman keeps bringing back past characters. Some of these are obvious—one could safely have predicted that most of the Endless would be making a reappearance, although Delirium’s lengthy subplot about looking for Barnabas, her missing dog gifted to her by Destruction at the end of Brief Lives, is perhaps rather more sizeable than one might have expected, and feels like a fairly straightforward reaction to her popularity following that arc. But reappearances by Lucifer, Hob Gadling, Alex Burgess, Thessaly, Titania, and the Corinthian were all, to varying degrees, more of a surprise. Most of these characters can fairly be described as fan favourites, but cramming them all in necessarily slowed things down. Gaiman, defending the arc against criticisms of its digressions, sniffed hat he “found that very weird, because there aren’t any digressions; every panel in the Kindly Ones is plot, moving the story towards its inevitable ending.” But this is, to put it mildly, hard to credit. The most obvious counterexample comes in the form of Rose Walker, the protagonist of The Doll’s House, who has a major subplot running through the latter two thirds of the arc. This plot certainly starts adjacent to the main plot, but it quickly veers off into its own thing with no real impact on the main plot, and continues taking up a substantial number of pages each issue even as the arc approaches its conclusion.

But it would be strange, in many ways, if The Kindly Ones were anything other than decadent. It’s been suggested that Gaiman originally intended the arc to run six issues, but this is hard to believe. For one, the actual length sets the series up to end cleanly at issue #75—a nice tidy milestone akin to how Brief Lives wrapped in issue #49 so that “Ramadan” could be issue #50. For another, it’s just absurd to imagine that the big tragic finale of Sandman would take place in an arc shorter than The Doll’s House. This was a series that had built its name and reputation on mythological grandeur; there was only one way it was going to go out.

Similarly, while Rose Walker and Lucifer might have been mildly unexpected returns, Sandman’s resolution was always going to be backwards looking. Gaiman had committed the story to being a tragedy, which structurally necessitates past decisions coming back to haunt. And while Dream’s killing of Orpheus is a key inciting incident, in that it means that the eponymous Furies can punish him, it is not ultimately the decision that most proves his undoing. That goes back to The Doll’s House, and the long simmering thread of Lyta Hall and her dream-gestated child Daniel. This, after a couple pages of the Fates offering ominous prophecy laced with metafictional commentary, is where the story proper begins. Its inciting incident comes when Daniel is kidnapped while Lyta takes a rare solo trip out of the house (Rose turns out to have been the babysitter on duty, which is her entrance into the story), sending Lyta into a dissociative spiral which, after she’s informed that the police have recovered Daniel’s badly burnt body, takes on mystical and visionary characteristics. Whilst wandering the streets in a strange waking dream (a sequence Gaiman takes particular pride in, describing how Lyta is “eating one of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, and in the next panel we see her sitting behind a Dumpster [sic] eating a pale, rotting apple. In each case, these parallel events are happening simultaneously—both of the views being presented are true. By presenting that idea visually, I thought we did something very special”) she eventually meets the Furies, who she sets upon Dream.

Morpheus’s doom unfolds with meticulous slowness, however. The Furies don’t begin hunting him until the end of the seventh issue—the rough halfway point of the arc—and their assault is a slow one. It’s not until Dream has to leave the Dreaming after being summoned to Faerie by Nuala, who leaves his service early in the arc, but to whom he promises that he will come and offer a boon if she calls, that his situation actually becomes wholly untenable, and even then there’s three more issues before his actual death.

All of this unfolded over eighteen months, from December 1993 all the way to May 1995, and much else happened over that time, not least including several other Gaiman projects. He penned three issues for the short-lived Marvel Music imprint, writing a comic adaptation of Alice Cooper’s concept album The Last Temptation, along with a three issue miniseries featuring the character Angela, who he had created for Todd McFarlane’s Spawn in 1993, and who, improbably, would end up being a key factor in the eventual sorting of the rights around Miracleman. His most significant work of the period, however, came in the form of a standalone graphic novel for Vertigo that he did with Dave McKean entitled Mr. Punch, or, more properly, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch.

This was an overt follow-up to Violent Cases. Where that comic opened with a flash back to when its narrator was four, Mr. Punch opens with a description of how “My grandfather Arthur once took me fishing. I was seven.” But from this first page it’s also clear that much has changed since that earlier volume. Where Violent Cases began with an intricate thirty-five panel grid of monochromatic lines, Mr. Punch opens with a nearly full page image of a proscenium arch that McKean has rendered primarily out of photographs of physical objects. A gaping mask at the top has lilies sprouting out of its top, while the top-right of the arch is adorned with the slightly corroded dial of an old grocer’s scale, while the top-left has a weathered image of a moon onto which McKean has digitally inserted a human eye to unsettling effect. The curtain is closed on one side, but hooked open on the other, revealing an expanse of pure blackness on the actual stage set. It’s a vastly more opulent visual than anything in Violent Cases, harkening back to the early Sandman covers in its sense of unsettling scale and photographic vividness.

McKean in fact uses an elaborate visual language for the comic. As the narrator explains, he quickly grew bored of fishing, and began to wander the beach where he discovered a small tent featuring a Punch and Judy show. These scenes of the narrator on the beach are rendered in a more abstracted style—full color, and with distorted and out of focus photographs providing some of the backgrounds, but with the actual people rendered in ink, drawn in a lightly cubist style. But once the narrator arrives at the Punch and Judy show the full photographic style returns—McKean has fashioned actual Punch and Judy puppets and photographed them in various poses to depict the show. The result is that the Punch and Judy world feels more real and vivid than the narrator’s actual childhood memories.

This persistent symbolic parallel narrative speaks to Gaiman’s growth as a writer as well. Describing the book, he noted that “it’s as If I was trying to do Violent Cases with the knowledge that I’ve accumulated in the six years since then—and that’s been six solid years of writing fiction.” And Punch and Judy provides ample fodder for that—a bit of British cultural detritus that was already fusty and old in the UK, and borderline inscrutable (without actually being unheard of) to Americans. The show is a descendent of the commedia dell’arte with the typical British spin of a beloved villain—the same cultural tension that Moore exploited in V for Vendetta. Its plot sees Mr. Punch murder his child, then his wife Judy, and then ascend his way through a policeman, a judge, and finally the devil himself in a blur of ostentatious comic violence. As with the best of classic British children’s media, it’s plainly horrible, and McKean’s rendering of it as a series of hyper-real grotesque terrors looming over childhood is entirely apt.

Like Violent Cases before it, Mr. Pumch is not quite autobiography—Gaiman describes it as “an autobiography full of lies. It is unreliable autobiography, thronged by analogs of my family. Here’s a thing that really did happen to me; here’s a thing that should have happened to me if things had happened to me the way things were in the story; here’s something that didn’t actually happen at the time I say it did—it was a family legend that happened 15 years earlier but I’ve moved it up. All that kind of stuff.” The story focuses on his paternal grandfather, who in later life was a successful grocery owner, but who had, years before Gaiman’s birth, operated an amusement park in Portsmouth. This was one of the things Gaiman moved forward, setting the entire story around this and a macabre drama of half-known relatives and half-glimpsed violence, the details of which are deliberately hazy in the comic and, given that the entire setting around his grandfather’s amusement park is fictionalized, clearly not actual features of his childhood. Scientology, of course, does not come up.

But if the precise events are not true, the underlying landscape plainly is. The climax of Mr. Punch is an act of violence witnessed in shadow—McKean portrays it as a hand-drawn narrator peeking under a photographed swath of burlap, upon which silhouettes are cast—a Punch and Judy show with shadow puppets. And there is no serious question that this captured the emotional reality of Gaiman’s childhood. Perhaps it was poor Johannes Scheepers. Perhaps it was some other incident the echoes of which didn’t reach the public record. Perhaps it had nothing to do with Scientology except inasmuch as abusive men rarely limit their behavior to a single area. More likely it wasn’t a single incident so much as the basic character of growing up as a scion of Scientology. But it is hard to doubt that, at some point, Gaiman was in the same position as his narrator, cowering yet rapt as horrible and inexplicable events played out in front of him.

Mr. Punch ends with the narrator, an adult now, visiting the annual May Fayre and Puppet Festival in the garden of St. Paul’s. A vendor offers him the opportunity to try out a Mr. Punch puppet for himself. (Interestingly, this puppet is rendered in ink, as opposed to photographed.) The narrator considers. “I almost put it on,” he says. “It would have whispered its secrets to me, explained my childhood, explained my life…” But instead he flees, stopping briefly by one of the many Punch and Judy shows, which is reaching its conclusion as Mr. Punch slays the devil. “HOORAY! HOORAY” the puppet shouts, rendered in disturbing, fractured closeup. “THE DEVIL IS DEAD!” Now everybody is free to do whatever they wish!” The narrator moves on, “shivering in spite of the May sunshine, and went about my life.”

Gaiman wrote Mr. Punch some time in the vicinity of 1992—he discusses having gone through two drafts already in an interview in the January 1993 issue of The Comics Journal. McKean, meanwhile, recalls the first draft having been “written at a difficult time in Neil’s private life.” Again, it’s difficult to discern exactly what this refers to, but it’s striking that it is the same period in which he made his move to the United States, at once putting distance between himself and his family and enmeshing himself further in Scientology via his wife—a situation hinted at in the text when the narrator offers the cryptic aside “I am lonely now and very far from home.” Whatever shadows had haunted his childhood, they plainly loomed still, no less terrifying for the passage of time.

As for Dave McKean, he followed Mr. Punch with the design work for one of the most unusual projects to emerge out of Karen Berger’s imprint: the Vertigo Tarot. Gaiman takes credit for first suggesting the idea, saying that it was an occasional theme of fan letters, but the project was spearheaded by Sharon Kattuah, who, as Gaiman puts it, went “into high, dark places [to] persuade some very skeptical people in suits that a Vertigo Tarot really would be a cool, practical idea, and really, people honestly would buy it.” Kattuah, Gaiman, and Berger convened in the fall of 1993 along with Rachel Pollack, one of Gaiman’s mentors, to start figuring out how to do the deck.

That Pollack would be involved was in many ways inevitable. She was at the time writing Doom Patrol following Grant Morrison’s landmark run on the title, and was well-regarded as a fantasy novelist, most significantly at the time for her 1988 novel Unquenchable Fire, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award. But Pollack was always a polymath, and her best known work was on the Tarot, most obviously Seventy-Eight Keys of Wisdom, first published in 1980, and one of the landmark surveys of the subject. With her involvement the project instantly shifted from a chintzy comic book tie-in to a project with serious heft and credibility.

This was further increased by the decision to have Dave McKean do the art for the cards. Pollack had considered working with McKean on a Tarot previously, only to end up creating the resultant deck, the Shining Woman Tarot, on her own, but her recollection on how he came to be involved in the Vertigo Tarot was that “Neil recruited Dave, I guess?” Pollack, Gaiman, Berger, and Kattuah spent the weekend deciding how the twenty-two major arcana would be handled and what Vertigo characters they’d represent (Gaiman recalls that “We all immediately agreed that John Constantine was the Fool. After that our opinions were spirited and varied…” although there’s another card it’s difficult to imagine there was much argument about), and sent that along to McKean, along with some information from Pollack on the basic meanings of the minor arcana, and he proceeded to get to work, with Pollack returning at the end to write the guidebook.

In terms of how it introduces the deck at large, Pollack’s guidebook amounts to a slimmed down version of Seventy-Eight Keys to Wisdom. Both open with an account of the Tarot’s history as a game, make much of the Hanged Man’s beatific expression, offers a brief account of the Kabbalistic parallels of the Tarot, drawing a link between the four suits and court cards and the Tetragrammaton, then acknowledge the clearly constructed nature of these links before pivoting to Pollack’s preferred understanding of the Tarot as a set of symbolic archetypes. It’s not a complete overlap—the Vertigo Tarot book contains a riff on Tarot and comics that is original to it—but she sticks to her distinctive choice of structure for understanding the deck, most especially her division of the Major Arcana into three groups of seven cards (with the Fool standing outside the system).

When it comes to the descriptions of individual cards, things are more of a mixed bag. In some places the guidebook sticks closely to Seventy-Eight Keys to Wisdom—virtually everything in her account of the Moon, for instance, can be found in her earlier book, right down to her comment that “Many emergency room nurses and doctors maintain that they see more violence, accidents, and suicides during the full Moon” and a concluding pivot away from the more unsettling readings with the suggestion that it need not be a negative card if one does not attempt resist the card’s influence. Elsewhere, however, she finds herself departing from her earlier work, sometimes quite significantly; these departures generally have one of two causes.

The first of these is simply Dave McKean’s often astonishing artwork, which at times makes major departures from traditional Tarot iconography. McKean’s Ten of Swords, for instance, completely abandons the Rider-Waite-Smith image of a corpse with ten swords sticking out of its back, in keeping with Crowley’s naming of the card “Ruin.” Pollack’s interpretation of this in Seventy-Eight Keys to Wisdom is subtle—she notes that “It takes only one sword to kill someone. The ten swords int he man’s body, even including one in his ear, suggest hysteria,” and notes that the card’s dark sky gives way to sunlight on the horizon, suggesting that “The situation is not so bad as it looks.” But McKean’s art has none of the underlying imagery—his card features features an out of focus face, eyes closed, and ten swords arranged above his head, all pointing upwards, and thus posing no threat. The imagery more closely resembles the traditional Four of Swords (which McKean, correspondingly, takes a somewhat more sinister approach to). Pollack, accordingly, treats the card as being about a dreamer creating a “universe of thought,” and offers an interpretation with no resemblance to the standard occult one. While this may pose a challenge to people seeking to use the deck as a traditional Kabbalistic Tarot, it correspondingly helps the deck stand out from the dozen others in most Tarot afficionados’ collections, and fulfills the basic iconoclastic promise of setting a startlingly innovative artist like Dave McKean upon the task of designing a deck.

The second reason Pollack has to depart from her standard interpretations is unique to the deck’s Major Arcana, which is that the basic premise of the Vertigo Tarot requires those cards to be based on characters from the line. Pollack does not let this fact keep her from taking the cards seriously—her interpretation of Justice, for instance offers a nuanced and clever analysis of the way in which the notion of justice has changed between the 1930s, when its subject Wesley Dodds was first developed, and the 1990s when he had been revived by Matt Wagner and Steven T. Seagle, and on the way in which Dodds’ iconic gas mask complicates the card’s traditional emphasis on observation and discernment. Similarly, it’s still Dave McKean art, and so the cards in question are still vibrant and suggestive (and that’s when McKean is actually coherently drawing the character requested in the first place, which is decidedly not always true; one would be hard pressed, for example, to say exactly which part of his design for the World is meant to be Swamp Thing).

Nevertheless, the fact remains that this is a Tarot deck in which the Major Arcana are comic book characters, which is in several regards unfortunate. For one thing, it makes the deck a strangely dated thing—one card, the Chariot, is based on Peter Milligan’s Enigma, a comic that’s since moved with Karen Berger to be kept in print by Dark Horse. Even beyond that, characters like Chantinelle and Tali from Garth Ennis’s Hellblazer run or the Tower of Babel as depicted in Rachel Pollack’s Doom Patrol arc “The Teiresias Wars” were simply not parts of the Vertigo line that retained cultural cache in the decades since the deck’s printing. For another, largely more significant thing, it’s just very silly. There are undoubtedly people who legitimately think the Tarot would be improved if the Hermit were the Phantom Stranger, but it’s hard to imagine why one would ever want to get a reading from them.

There is, however, one card that transcends the goofiness inherent in the premise to offer something with meaningful appeal—the card whose assignation was surely even more straightforward than that of the Fool, for the simple reason that it shares its name with the most iconic and popular character in the Vertigo line. It is not, of course, that putting Death on the Death card is less silly than making Brother Power the Geek into the Emperor; there is always going to be something slightly tawdry about taking a complicated set of mystical symbols and slapping a “Vertigo and all other characters, the distinctive likenesses thereof and related indicia are trademarks of DC Comics” notice on it. But the fact remains that Gaiman’s Death is a significant new perspective on the concept itself. Having that perspective reflected in a Tarot deck has merit, just as McKean’s at times radical reworkings of the Minor Arcana do. And while any Tarot deck could slap a cute goth girl on its Death card without requiring a note that “Sandman characters created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith, Mike Dringenberg,” everyone would recognize this as the knockoff that it is. McKean’s version, which sees Death peering out of a deep black hole, the image of a ribcage ominously superimposed on her, largely reduces the comic book elements to her basic signifiers—the makeup around her one wholly visible eye and her ankh, the only thing that meaningfully distinguishes her black tank from the darkness that surrounds her. It’s a tasteful execution of a card that only something called the Vertigo Tarot could ever do.

Ironically, for all that Pollack has to spend a lot of time distinguishing between the traditional “mysterious and terrifying” portrayal of Death and the “intimacy and playfulness” of the Vertigo one, nothing about this especially requires her to rework the underlying meaning of the card. Her section on it in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom pivots on the claim that “Contrary to what many people believe the card of Death does not actually refer to a transformation” while her Vertigo Tarot one instead has to note that “Contrary to Hollywood movies, Death in the Tarot does not actually predict anyone dying,” but she arrives at the same place—“the end, or death, of some old way of life which has grown meaningless” in favor of “a time of change.”

This also proves to be the major theme of The Kindly Ones. Dream is not ultimately killed by the Kindly Ones. As they rip the Dreaming apart, Death comes to visit him. They talk for a bit—Dream manifests a loaf of bread for her to throw at him, though she declines. Then she orders the Kindly Ones to cease their threats and leave, which they do. She tells Dream to give her his hand, there’s a flash of light, and that’s that. This, interestingly, only marks the halfway point of the final issue of The Kindly Ones. The remainder of the issue is spent in a series of brief scenes checking in on the arc’s secondary characters—Nuala, Delirum, Lucifer, and Rose. There’s a scene in which Alex Burgess finally wakes up, and one where Lyta wakes up in Thessaly’s apartment and is told to run, as “lots of people are going to want to hurt you or kill you for what you’ve done. Including me.”

But then the comic returns to the Dreaming, with a wide shot of Dream’s castle that, over a page, pulls in on a single illuminated window in which Daniel sits, playing with a green stone. Morpheus had called for this stone to be brought to him shortly before he journeyed out to the solitary outcropping where he met with his sister. The stone, he explained to Matthew at the start of the penultimate issue, is “one of the twelve Dreamstones,” along with the stone that sustained Barbie’s dreamworld back in A Game of You and the ruby that provided much of the plot back in Preludes and Nocturnes. And then he gave it to Daniel with a cryptic comment that he and the child “have spoken.” As the arc closes, the stone morphs in Daniel’s hand into a necklace, while Daniel’s hand changes from an ordinary child’s hand to an alabaster white one with long, spindly fingers. The hands attach the pendant around their neck, and Daniel stands revealed as a new version of Dream, his body and clothes all stark white, and his speech rendered in the same drippy lettering style as Morpheus, only now black on white instead of reversed.

Gaiman leaves an unusual amount of ambiguity around key aspects of this. He does not, most obviously, delve into the metaphysics of exactly what it means that Dream has died and come back in this new form. As he puts it in the narration of the next issue, “there are some powers that no one, not even the Endless, seeks to inquire into too deeply.” More practically, however, there are a number of ambiguities around Daniel’s kidnapping. This turns out to be the work of Loki and Puck, but they in turn are revealed to be working for an unknown third party, the identity of whom is never actually revealed, although Puck’s declaration, when asked about it, that he “could answer you endlessly” is suggestive. There is similarly much to suggest that Dream is more aware of the big picture than the actual plot might suggest. He spends the first few issues of the arc recreating the Corinthian, who he immediately sends along with Matthew to find and retrieve Daniel, who Puck and Loki did not actually kill, but instead began ritually burning the mortality out of. Little is made of this, but it’s clear that Dream knows Daniel has been taken, and in fact knows he’s going to be taken, as his recreation of the Corinthian begins just before the kidnapping. Multiple characters remark on his actions as well—Odin, who visits Dream to scold him about freeing Loki back in Season of Mists, muses whether he’s “a spider who’s spun a web of cunning and deceit and now waits patiently for his prey to come to him” or “a deer, frozen by the light of a hunter’s flame as disaster comes toward you,” while Death accuses him of being devious, saying that “the only reason you’ve got yourself into this mess is because this is where you wanted to be,” to which Dream admits that he “had imagined that I would be able to keep events here in check,” suggesting that it was but a couple of stray misfortunes that doomed him. And Lucien, in the next arc, comments to Matthew that Dream “did a little more than let it happen.” The implication of all of this is clear—that Morpheus’s death and transformation into Daniel was something he actively planned.

In this, Sandman’s form and function aligned. Gaiman was an attentive student of Moore, and understood the magic that he had worked. In some ways he understood it better than Moore, who had been caught flatfooted by the consequences of penning Watchmen and found himself reeling in their aftermath. Not so Gaiman. Indeed, many of those consequences were for him the point of the exercise. His needs in writing Sandman were always brutally simple: to escape the reach of his abusive upbringing. In that pursuit fame, like money, was a tool—a blunt instrument of power. The Church of Scientology had both, and Gaiman needed his own.

It is easy to accuse this of being cold-hearted or cynical. Certainly it lacks the high-minded grandeur of ending the Cold War, although it’s not as though Moore realized that was the magic he was working. Nor is it anything like the battle for the soul of the twenty-first century that was already unfolding by the time Sandman concluded. There’s something unpleasant about taking the not entirely wanted side effects of becoming a great magus and making them into the explicit goal. But then, there’s something unpleasant about child abuse too. The scale and horror of what Gaiman was fleeing is clear. One can hardly blame him for his priorities, nor for the cynical efficiency with which he approached them.

And so Sandman concludes with the very act it was intended to bring about. For all that Gaiman is coy about the metaphysics of the Endless, he cannot avoid offering some explanations of what, exactly, Morpheus’s death and rebirth as Daniel entails. It is clear that Daniel maintains some continuity of memory with Morpheus—he tells Matthew that “you were my friend,” and that “I have existed since the beginning of time. This is a true thing. I am older than worlds and suns and gods.” And yet it’s equally clear that there’s a disjunct between them—he acknowledges that when he meets his siblings following his funeral that it will be for the first time. The clearest explanation is offered by Abel, to Cain’s predictable fury—that what died was a “point of view.” But this phrase has considerable nuance when talking about a prince of stories. It is perhaps more accurate to say that what died was a way of telling a story—an identity and an understanding of what that story was.

This is the magic Gaiman sought to work with Sandman. The man who wrote that first issue, with all its cruel fathers and terrible secrets, was not the man who wrote the death of Morpheus. The man who created Death was not the man who wielded such star power that DC Comics would yield to his wishes and end a landmark series, leave characters they unambiguously owned fallow, and give him a veto over their future use. Sandman was a tool to end the story of a desperate abuse survivor who grabbed at an unlikely lifeline and begin the one of Neil Gaiman, internationally famous author.

Like Sandman itself, however, that story was a tragedy.

The jaws of the trap closed slowly but inexorably. Sandman concluded with six final issues, collected as The Wake, although only the first four form an actual storyline with that title. Illustrated by Michael Zulli, these told the story of Morpheus’s funeral and did the work of introducing Daniel as a character. In some ways they’re even more of a cameo cavalcade than The Kindly Ones had been, with Gaiman delighting in visual jokes like having Rose Walker and her brother seated between the Emperor Norton and Darkseid, or a panel featuring the Alder Man, one of Destruction’s old friends who evaded his doom by turning into a bear, who is seen giving a eulogy for Morpheus, still in bear form. Some of these are legitimately entertaining—there’s a bit in which Superman and Batman reflect on their recurring dream of being “an actor on a strange television version of my life,” agreeing that everyone has that dream, to which Martian Manhunter (who’s never had a TV show) responds that “I don’t.” And the arc’s serious beats largely work as well. The structure of it means that Gaiman is usually left to write one or two pages of wistful melancholy, and he delivers reliably with moments like Thessaly’s eulogy, which ends with her breaking down as she notes that “I swore I would never shed another tear for him.”

Gaiman is aided in all of this by Zulli, who Gaiman pushed to be allowed to do the art in straight pencils, without an inker. The result, aided by a beautifully soft coloring job by Daniel Vozzo and a healthy dollop of technical wizardry from Todd Klein, both of whom worked closely with Zulli, is one of the most breathtakingly gorgeous runs of issues not just in Sandman but in American comics at large. The pages positively glow, while Zulli’s linework is intricate, soft, and expressive. The result is a storyline that soars into some of Gaiman’s best mythic grandeur, culminating in a sequence in which Death’s eulogy is described instead of depicted, the reader being told that “her words make sense of everything. She gives you peace. She gives you meaning. And she bids her brother goodbye” before, in a sly pun on the arc’s title, having the reader themself wake from the dream through which they’ve nominally been experiencing the story. A coda, once more drawn by Zulli, grounds the story back in the human register with the delightful conceit of Hob Gadling attending a renn faire.

The final two issues of Sandman return to the short story format, both sequels to previous issues. First is “Exiles,” which revisits the iconography of “Soft Places” back in the Convergences arc and sees Jon J Muth invert Zulli’s art process to do an issue entirely in inks. The second, meanwhile, finally returns to the matter of Shakespeare’s second play owed to Dream as part of their pargain. Gaiman had been planning for this to be the final issue of the series for some time, saying “I’d originally planned on doing ‘The Tempest’ about a year after ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But I later realized that because the play is all about stories and endings, it would be an appropriate subject for the last issue of the series.” This is thematically sound, but it also served to ensure that Sandman could end on an unambiguously strong note, with a reprise of one of the issues that had been most key to its rise and reputation.

Where “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” had focused on the performance of its eponymous play, “The Tempest” focuses on its play’s writing. It opens with a half-page panel of the opening scene—a ship in a storm, rendered not as a dramatic presentation but as a storybook illustration rendered with minimal inking so that when the story cuts to Shakespeare, alone at his desk, writing the contrast is clear. The issue stays with Shakespeare as he writes his final play, looking at his life and what his bargain with Dream got him. As befits The Tempest and the fact that this is the end of Sandman, the answer is melancholic—Shakespeare assures Ben Johnson that “I shall be pleased to put down my pen,” and scoffs to Morpheus, “Look at me now: a fat old man, lustless and lackluster, with my two-score years and seven. I dream of being nobody at all. My every third thought is of the grave.” He describes his life as a dissociative blur—“My son died,” he explains, “and I was hurt; but I watched my hurt, and even relished it a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss.”

All of this is set up in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” where Morpheus muses on the subtle curse of getting what you once wanted. But when Gaiman has Anne Shakespeare upbraid her husband for claiming to be a “practical man” with a sarcastic retort that “Of course you do, my dear. Practical men always desert their wives and run away to make up pretty tales; and write pretty sonnets to pretty girls and pretty boys,” it’s hard not to see the parallel to his own habit of sleeping with fans while traveling away from his wife—a parallel that wouldn’t have existed so clearly in 1990 when he wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

But for all its melancholy, “The Tempest” never has Shakespeare come close to deciding he wishes he’d not taken the deal. Indeed, Dream tells him that had he not he “would not have been satisfied with your life; and, from time to time, you would have bored your children with the tales of your years in London, your days on the stage.” The story has much to say about the price of getting what you once wanted, but at the end of the day it is not a critique of Shakespeare’s actions so much as a romanticization of the supposedly great burden of creating art. And when it comes to the story paralleling Gaiman’s life, the fact that he and Shakespeare were both adulterous cads who spent much of their time away from home rather pales before the basic fact of Gaiman using the consensus greatest writer in the English language as a self-analogue. (“On reflection, I’m actually OK with being left out of this one,” said William Blake in a 2025 seance.)

Alongside the end of Sandman Gaiman penned a second Death miniseries for Vertigo. This was by all appearances intended to immediately follow Sandman as a tacit (and, ultimately, false) reassurance that Gaiman wasn’t going anywhere—its first issue is dated April 1996, while Sandman #75 is dated March. But the end of Sandman was marked by delays—just as The Kindly Ones saw thirteen issues over eighteen months, the final six issues of the series took nine months to come out, and the final two were sufficiently delayed that they were actually coming out the same month as their cover date instead of the traditional two months before (an artifact of the days of comics being sold on newsstands and magazine racks, where the dates served as sell-by dates). The result was that in practice the first two issues of Death: The Time of Your Life were already out when Sandman #75 hit, whereas the last one suffered a three month delay and came out in June.

These delays appear to have been almost entirely down to Gaiman. Chris Bachalo, who returned to draw the second Death miniseries, had by that point moved on to drawing X-Men books at Marvel, but cleared a few months from his schedule to fulfill his promise to Karen Berger that he’d return for a second Death series. This, however, did not go entirely according to plan. As he describes it, “what was happening was that I was getting one to two pages a week to draw. Four months went by and we had an issue done.” Ultimately Bachalo ended up departing the series halfway through the second issue, with Gaiman’s Miracleman collaborator Mark Buckingham, who’d been on inks, stepping up with a Bachalo imitation so good as to be functionally seamless.

Bachalo’s theory for Gaiman’s slow output was that “at that point, Neil was receiving a lot of opportunities and he was probably taking a lot of stuff on. I don’t believe that the Death series was a priority with him.” And it’s certainly true that, as Sandman wound down, Gaiman began turning his attention to non-comics projects. But Gaiman’s scripts had started slowing down some time ago. A quick perusal of the numbers for each full year of Sandman’s run shows that Gaiman went from producing eleven issues a year in the first couple, up to an incredible fourteen issues in 1991, both double shipping in January and penning the Sandman Special before, in the latter years, falling off sharply—1994 saw only nine issues produced, and 1995 saw seven. Beyond that, there’s a sense of being rushed to Gaiman’s work in this period—both Sandman #72 and the final issue of Death: The Time of Your Life saw Gaiman fail to get his script to work in the requisite number of pages, resulting in their climaxes being redone in the trade paperbacks—Sandman #72 had Michael Zulli cram a four page sequence into two, then redraw it as four for the trade, while The Time of Your Life has four extra pages spliced into its closing sequence. All of this points to a writer who was getting increasingly frazzled by the grind of comics production.

In the script for the second issue of The Wake, Gaiman reflected on this, noting that “I wish I were still a fast writer. I’m not slow, by any rational criterion, but I’m not fast anymore. Thinking takes longer—particularly on Sandman, where I’ve done it before. I’ve done it all before.” But Gaiman’s notion of repeating himself, at least at this stage of his career, seems to have been idiosyncratic. He describes how, around halfway through Sandman, “my scripts began taking longer and longer to complete. I’d start to lay out a page and then say, ‘No, I already used that panel sequence in The Doll’s House’ or ‘I already exploited that image in Season of Mists,’” which are both fairly hyper-specific things to fret about. Indeed, Gaiman admits that “after the first round of awards I began freezing up, getting terrifying writer’s blocks,” and periodically feared that he had simply lost the capacity to write entirely. This would only get worse s his career progressed, and seems to have consistently been at least in part an anxiety about living up to his own past—it’s notable that he, at various times, teased sequels to several of his most popular novels, none of which ever materialized.

Death: The Time of Your Life returned to Hazel and Foxglove from A Game of You, both of whom were significant minor characters in Death: The High Cost of Living, where Foxglove had a music career begin to take off. The Time of Your Life rejoins her on the publicity tour for her second album, by which point she’s become a major star who appears on Letterman and gets scolded by her manager about how she needs to upgrade to a stadium tour. The plot concerns Hazel and their son Alvie, who dies of SIDS in the story’s two page opener, but, it’s revealed, is kept alive for several more months after Hazel makes a deal with Death.

The dramatic core of the story is Foxglove and Hazel’s rapidly disintegrating relationship, which is suffering under the strain of Foxglove’s celebrity. Talking to Death, Hazel reflects on how “it was like she wasn’t just mine. She was everybody’s. I mean. I’d hate it. I’d love her when she was at home, with me, with Alvie But I didn’t love her when she was in a crowd. I didn’t love the star. I didn’t love the person they all loved. They didn’t know her. I knew her,” and how “it wad like she was going up in a balloon. And she was getting further and further away from me. And I just felt stupider and stupider. And I mean I am pretty stupid. I mean, I’m not, but I never knew much except cooking.” Foxglove, meanwhile, has been cheating on Hazel while on tour—a one point she reflects on how she started kissing a woman “before I had a chance to think about what I was doing—because I was so far from home—her head between my legs—stuttering my lust into the night—knowing somewhere down deep that I could take whatever I wanted, but that one day it would all have to be paid for.” As with Shakespeare in “The Tempest,” it’s difficult not to see Gaiman’s own marriage reflected in this, nor the ominous shades of what was to come in the dissociated but power-hungry comment about being able to take whatever one wanted (to say nothing of the scene where Foxglove initiates sex with Hazel while Alvie is still in the bed with them).

The Time of Your Life ultimately sees Hazel and Foxglove reconcile. There’s a climactic beat in which Foxglove confesses to Hazel that “for a while now, I’ve been, well. Not as faithful as maybe you thought I was. And there’s a girl who’s going to the magazines about it. I didn’t want to be outed. I don’t think I ever wanted to be inned. And I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I don’t think I love you anymore,” to which Hazel laughs and, not unreasonably, points out that Foxglove just spent three issues following her “into Death, because I needed you. What do you think love is?” And with that and a heroic sacrifice from a side character all is well. It’s plainly a fantasy, and almost heartbreaking in its innocence—Gaiman imagining a sort of idealized peace that might be waiting for him if he came clean to his wife. Perhaps he even did, and Mary McGrath gave him that sort of perfect acceptance, though if so, it plainly didn’t change his behavior.

In the comic, however, it all works out. Foxglove renounces art and celebrity and runs away with Hazel and Alvie, disappearing so thoroughly that the non-trademark infringing World Weekly News is running stories about her playing shows with Buddy Holly in an Arizona ghost town. As she puts it, “I didn’t become a singer because I had something to say. I didn’t do it for the money or the fame or the glory. I did it because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I was so tired of being poor.” She’s not entirely serving as a mouthpiece for the author here—Gaiman at least did have things to say, and a pile of ideas he’d been collecting since adolescence to use. And yet when pushed on why he became a professional writer, as opposed to someone who was writing things purely for himself, his answer is not all that far away from Foxglove’s: “I was in bed imagining my life, and I got to the point in my imagining when I was old and dying, and I thought if I die and I haven’t been a writer, I will lie on my deathbed going, ‘I could have been a writer. Really could have been a writer.’ Whatever it is that I’ve done—if I’ve been any of the things I wanted to be or the things I didn’t want to be, or the things I thought were inevitable, like becoming an English teacher—I’d be lying there on my deathbed going, ‘I could have been a writer,’ and I wouldn’t know if I was kidding myself. I wouldn’t know if I really could have been a writer. And the thing that would kill me would not be having failed, it would be the idea of having this life and having had this idea that this was the thing I wanted to be and this was the thing I could have been, and not knowing if I was lying to myself.” And now he knew. If he’d wanted it, the ending he wrote for Foxglove was available to him, albeit probably not with quite as much beatific grace as he has Hazel give Foxglove.

But he didn’t. He wanted to be a famous writer. And so, once his obligations to DC were completed, he got to work. The latter half of the decade proved both fruitful and varied for Gaiman. He expanded his earlier collection Angels and Visitations into a new short story collection called Smoke and Mirrors. He handled the script localization for Mirimax’s English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. He wrote an episode of J. Michael Straczynski’s cult classic space opera Babylon 5—the only writer other than Straczynski to do so over the show’s final three seasons. He even made a brief return to Sandman at the decade’s end, penning a novella-length prose story riffing on Japanese mythology that DC put out with illustrations by Yoshitaka Amano. These, however, were side projects. His primary work in the aftermath of Sandman was to successfully break out as a novelist.

His first major step towards this was, in fact, well in progress when Sandman concluded, although at first glance it had little to do with that goal. Back in 1991, while judging the Arthur C Clarke awards, Gaiman ran into the comedian Lenny Henry, who he’d recently met while working on the Comic Relief charity comic with Richard Curtis. Henry had been talking to the BBC about developing a fantasy television show, and asked if Gaiman wanted to help develop a vague idea about tribes of people (there’s some dispute over whether Henry specified homeless people) living in London. Gaiman was reluctant to glamorize sleeping rough, but came up with the idea of London Below, a shadow city of people who fell through the cracks of London proper. The idea developed at the slow pace of BBC development, but in the spring of 1996 production began on a six episode series called Neverwhere.

The result is a fascinating case of a tremendous amount of talent failing comprehensively to make good television. Gaiman’s script is a Campbell-by-Numbers piece of classic urban fantasy, but it fizzes with clever ideas. The cast is stellar, with Peter Capaldi, Patterson Joseph, Tamsin Greig, and Laura Fraser headlining a collection of up and comers and fine grizzled veterans of the British industry. Gaiman and Henry were even able to draft in Brian Eno to compose the score. The problem is simply that the BBC picks up where they’d left off producing Doctor Who seven years earlier. (Indeed, Patterson Joseph’s performance of the Marquis de Carabas, a cunning trickster in an excellent coat, would ensure he was in the rumor mill for playing Doctor Who for much of the first decade of its eventual revival.) The original plan had been to shoot the series on video and then filmise it, and it was lit accordingly, only to have that decision abandoned in post-production, leaving everything badly overlit. Gaiman, meanwhile, for all his cleverness, was a television neophyte, and badly misjudged the capabilities of the BBC, creating concepts like the Great Beast of London, a terrifying monster living in the sewers of London that, once scaled to the budget available, ended up being a perfectly ordinary cow.

Like large amounts of Doctor Who itself, there’s something endearing about Neverwhere, but it has all the markings of a project that would have faded into obscurity. Except that Gaiman did something enormously clever, which was to retain the right to pen the novelization of the series. This came out from BBC Books in September 1996, midway through the series’ transmission, then in the US from Avon Books the next summer. Unlike the TV series, the book version was a triumph, picking up solid reviews across the board and quickly becoming the consensus “real” version of the story, with the BBC series little more than a curiosity for Gaiman fans.

Something similar happened with Gaiman’s next major project, which was called Stardust. Gaiman had first developed the idea for this in 1991, at the World Fantasy Convention where he and Vess won for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when he saw a shooting star out in the desert and came upon the idea of the star in fact being a girl. As he tells it, “I went back to the hotel, found Charlie who was at a different party, hauled him out of the party—holding a bottle of celebratory champagne. I said, ‘Okay, let me tell you this story. I think I’ve come up with something.’ I told him everything that was in my head about the story, and then at the end he smiled and said, ‘I can’t wait to draw it,’” although, burnt out on comics, he suggested it might be an illustrated novel instead.

In practice Vess had to wait several years to draw it—Gaiman didn’t start work on the manuscript until 1994, and it finally came out in four prestige format volumes from Vertigo in 1997 before being collected into what Gaiman and Vess had viewed as its intended form, a single illustrated volume that could evoke Victorian fairy stories—Gaiman, in fact, wrote the manuscript in fountain pen to try to bring himself back to a 1920s milieu. It is, to be sure, a gorgeous package. Vess’s illustrations are predictably lush—an early double page spread of a fairy market exists almost entirely to show off his capabilities, allowing him to absolutely pack the page with details like a woman walking a pair of red dragons, a surly looking rodent vendor, or a cameo from Hayao Miyazaki’s creations of Kiki and Totoro. But the story is plainly a trifle, and Gaiman is open about the fact that it was meant to be, noting that “there seemed to be a general consensus that it was the most inconsequential of my novels. Fantasy fans, for example, wanted it to be an epic, which it took enormous pleasure in not being,” and explaining that “it’s like an ice cream. It’s to make you feel happy when you finish it.”

As with Neverwhere, Stardust would likely have become a minor bit of DC’s back catalog alongside Black Orchid or Books of Magic, except that once again, Gaiman retained the rights to the underlying text of the story, and in 1999 Avon published it as a standalone novel, shorn of Vess’s illustrations. And so as the twentieth century wound itself down, Gaiman found himself in the unusual position of having three novels out along with a short story collection, all without ever having actually gone and sold a novel as a solo author. More than that, he’d built a body of work that was not only significant, it was surprisingly diverse in audience. Neverwhere was urban fantasy, but it had an ample tinge of horror that was picked up by many of the short stories in Smoke and Mirrors. Good Omens, meanwhile, was a comic novel where he was still second fiddle to Terry Pratchett, at least in terms of marketing heft. Stardust, on the other hand, was effectively cross-marketed to romance fans. And, of course, there was still the horde of Sandman fans, whose ranks expanded yearly from DC’s continually in print trade collection. And while it’s undoubtedly true that many, perhaps even most readers of these books stuck to whatever genre had brought them there, plenty of them became general Neil Gaiman fans who bought all of the others.

When he did finally write and sell a novel, this fact was crucial to the promotional campaign. On February 9th, 2001, just over four months before its publication, Gaiman took the then extremely novel step of starting a blog to promote his upcoming novel, to be called American Gods. Gaiman had experimented with this before, spending a year on early social media site the Well conducting an ongoing conversation with readers, and he was good at it, posting every couple of days at a minimum. Although the blog nominally existed to promote American Gods, Gaiman quickly realized that he could only get so much drama out of checking copy edits and learning that Dumpster is in fact a trademark that should be capitalized (March 2nd) or discovering he’d sent a permissions request for a poem he quoted to the wrong people (March 5th), and soon let the blog expand to a more general discussion of what he was reading (March 7th), the former exotic dancer who tried his patience at the post office (March 14th), or a lengthy essay’s worth of advice for attending a book signing (April 11th), before eventually settling into a primary format of an ongoing reader Q&A.

Gaiman developed a wry and avuncular voice for the blog—one capable of taking news like the fact that Harlan Ellison made an exception to his categorical refusal to give blurbs for the book and making it sound like a charming anecdote instead of just like bragging. (The trick is to bury it more than 1500 words into a post about blurbs and some six hundred words after the fact that Harlan Ellison doesn’t do blurbs has been established in one of several amusing anecdotes about the process.) He was adept at giving a carefully managed illusion of openness—his kids, especially his youngest, were frequent and amusing characters, but a more detailed perusal will reveal that he essentially never talks about Mary McGrath except in a couple of fleeting mentions. But it was more than enough to foster a strong parasocial connection with his fans. Just as he’d savvily transformed Sandman into an auteur project with him at the center, now he was expanding the strategy into a broader career one, acquiring readers from all sorts of places and converting them to Neil Gaiman fans who could follow him directly and get helpful updates when there was something new to buy.

This would, of course, eventually become commonplace. But at the beginning of 2001 Gaiman was profoundly far ahead of the curve, and he maintained the strategy for more than twenty years after, at first on the blog and then, as that became a more sporadic affair, with an active presence on various social media platforms such that his 2013 novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane bore an affectionate note in its acknowledgments that “The good folk of Twitter were extremely helpful when I needed to double-check how much blackjacks and fruit salad sweets cost in the 1960s. Without them I might have written my book twice as fast.” More to the point, when it came to American Gods at least the strategy was an unequivocal success—the book debuted at #10 on the New York Times bestseller list, instantly establishing Gaiman as one of the top fantasy writers of the era.

The book itself is a curious thing. In one sense it can be fairly described as a retread of Sandman. Its central premise—that immigrants over the millennia brought their gods to America, where they became lost and wayward figures as belief in them waned—is absolutely in the same vein as the casually mundane mythology of his breakout project. Indeed, the Ishtar sequence in Brief Lives, in which the ancient Sumerian fertility goddess is working as an exotic dancer who explosively reveals herself, is so close to the novel’s approach that it could trivially have been rewritten to fit into it. When American Gods fires on all cylinders it’s clearly offering the same basic pleasure that Sandman does at peaks like Season of Mists.

Gaiman also plainly leans on his comics experience in structuring the novel. Its three act structure can just as easily be read as three arcs, especially as the middle of the novel takes an unexpected detour to leave its protagonist, Shadow, cooling his heels in a tiny Wisconsin town called Lakeside, providing an effect not unlike The Doll’s House swerve to focusing on Rose Walker or A Game of You’s even more aggressive detour. Gaiman also peppers the novel with interludes that are, effectively, short stories akin to those in Convergences or Distant Mirrors. He even makes a move akin to “24 Hours” with the first of these, telling a story in which the semi-Biblical Bilquis devours a man whole through her vagina that serves to put the book’s most extreme moment early on, both to make a strong impression and to quickly define a limit point that everything else will fall within.

But while American Gods was clearly trying to get Sandman’s lightning to strike twice, there are clear points where Gaiman is pushing himself in new directions. The largest of these is, ironically, also the least successful: his attempt to grapple with the notion of America. As he puts it, “I moved to America in 1992. Something started, in the back of my head. There were unrelated ideas that I knew were important and yet seemed unconnected: two men meeting on a plane; the car on the ice; the significance of coin tricks; and more than anything, America: this strange, huge place where I now found myself living that I knew I didn’t understand. But I wanted to understand it. More than that, I wanted to describe it.” And yet Gaiman has relatively little to say about America itself. The novel reiterates, like a mantra, that America is “a poor place for gods,” but there is no reason given for this save for a monologue from Wisakedjak, an indigenous figure, in which he explains that “we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it,” which is, to put it mildly, an extremely dubious account of indigenous American theology. Its concept of what America offers instead of gods, meanwhile, is almost comical in its datedness—he creates a pantheon of new gods who oppose the old gods of traditional mythology like Media, a goddess of television, or the Spookshow, a version of the shadowy men in black working for nameless government agencies. There are gods of airplanes, cars, UFOs, and drugs. But these are all painfully twentieth century notions. He nods to computers and the Internet in the form of the Technical Boy, but he’s little more than a parody of 90s cyberpunks. For all that Gaiman was anticipating the future in his promotion for the book, his vision of America could not be more stuck in the just departed twentieth century if it tried.

This is not to say that there are not interesting components of his portrayal of American spirituality. It’s just that these are largely not the innovative aspects of the book. The Technical Boy, for instance, makes the Burroughsian claim that “we have fucking programmed reality” and that “language is a virus,” but of course he does; cyberpunks loved Burroughs almost as much as magi did. More interesting, and not entirely unrelated, is his understanding of how the old gods function in America—as old stories and patterns that recur and shape things long after their meaning and context has been forgotten—which is plainly a reiteration of Scientology and engrams. But there are no shortage of other innovations. Gaiman’s protagonist, for instance, is a mixed race ex-con who begins the novel in prison—a character very much unlike any Gaiman had previously written. The result is not some striking portrayal of the American carceral state or anything like that—indeed, Shadow ends up being something of a cipher—but there’s a clear ambition to the decision; it shows Gaiman pushing himself to do new things.

The book’s most significant new idea, however, came in one of Gaiman’s interpretations of mythology. The book’s antagonist is Mr. Wednesday, Shadow’s employer, who is revealed to be running a complicated ruse in order to spark a war between the old and new gods so that he can harvest the energy of the resultant blood sacrifice. Wednesday is in fact Odin, and his partner in this is Loki, hiding in plain sight as Shadow’s old cellmate Low Key. This interpretation of Odin and Loki is reasonably supported by the lore—they’re attested as blood brothers, and are both known for their cunning. But the idea of Odin and Loki as con men engaged in a two man con is wholly Gaiman’s invention. Nevertheless, in the wake of American Gods it quickly took hold in modern germanic pagan spaces as a common interpretation of the lore, more often than not with the idea that Ragnarok is some sort of inside job and that Loki’s murder of Balder is in fact at Odin’s behest—a notion that closely parallels Gaiman’s plot, where one of the key reveals is that Wednesday is in fact Shadow’s father.

This is no small thing. For all of Moore and Morrison’s accomplishments, neither can honestly be said to have transformed the cultural understanding of major and well-established gods. The fact that he did so a testament both to the legitimate weight of Gaiman’s talent and to the potency of the underlying magic he’s wielding. For all that he never subscribed to the overtly mystical paradigm of Moore or Morrison, the seventy-six issue sweep of Sandman was a staggeringly large working, considerably vaster in scope than anything else in or around the War save perhaps Jerusalem, and American Gods, as its realization, was an object of tremendous power in its own right. Gaiman did not simply make it as a writer—he did so by harnessing the forces that had ended the Cold War and that would define the shape of the twenty-first century and the millennium it birthed.

What he had failed to consider—the fatal mistake that ultimately caused such vast ruin and pain—was that you cannot escape Scientology with the bastard fruit of L. Ron Hubbard. In one of his few public comments about the influence of Scientology, Gaiman noted that he “grew up in a world in which being a science-fiction writer was a good thing. As far as my parents were concerned, that was an incredibly esteemed profession.” And now, as he swept the genre awards for that field, picking up nominations for practically every Best Novel award there was and winning the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Bram Stoker awards, the engrammatic patterns implicit in the Gaiman family’s vision of being a famous science fiction writer took hold.

Indeed, the earliest account of Gaiman abusing a woman took place at the 2002 World Horror Convention in Chicago where he won that Bram Stoker award. It is almost certainly not fair to treat American Gods as the singular point where Gaiman became abusive. His victim’s account of what happened in Chicago notes that Gaiman “seemed to have a script” that he slipped into during the encounter—that “it was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.” This description suggests she was not the first person that he treated this way. And, more prosaically, it’s simply unlikely that one of the victims brave and secure enough to come forward would also happen to be the first person he ever did this to. Indeed, there’s an accuser from the mid-80s, though her story is more that of an ill-advised drunken pass than an iteration of the script.

And it’s clear that Gaiman’s script moved in iterations. More to the point, it escalated steadily over the years, first through increasing sexual violence, and then into financial abuse and active exploitation of power imbalances. Implicit in this fact is an escalation up towards the first known instance of abuse as well. Around 2006, Gaiman told one of his victims that he’d been introduced to BDSM by a woman who’d asked him to “whip his pussy.” His victim recalls him saying this happened in his early twenties, but he recounted the same basic story to Jason McBride when interviewed for his biography of Kathy Acker, describing it as happening while Acker was living in New York, which would be somewhere between September of 1989 and the summer of 1990. In both recountings, Gaiman portrays himself as stunned and scandalized by the request—he told his victim that he was so naive that he assumed she meant her cat, whereas when telling the story to McBride he’d already been aware of Acker’s history with S&M, but claims that he’s “very vanilla” and that he found the encounter “profoundly unsexual.”

But if Gaiman was telling the truth about this being a turning point—and the assumption that he was being honest with someone he was abusing is, to state the obvious, a dubious one—then it can only have been a transition from thought to action, given that by September 1989 he’d already penned “24 Hours,” a story he elsewhere describes as the point where Acker “decided I was a Real Writer and not a groupie,” and that demonstrates a chilling familiarity with the psychological logic of sexual sadism. The only possible thing he could have gained out of his encounter with Acker is the actual knowledge of what it felt like to inflict sexual violence—a fact that’s highlighted by the fact that McBride recounts Gaiman having “found the depth of her need both startling and sad,” which is to say that his primary emotional takeaway was centered on Acker’s abjection in the exchange.

But whatever might have happened before American Gods, it’s clear what happened afterwards: Gaiman repeatedly groomed younger women, often fans, and then subjected them to extreme sexual violence with stunning disregard for both their consent and emotional well-being. The contours of this sexual sadism are tediously cliched. The seemingly tightly scripted nature of them, Gaiman’s claim to one partner that sexual violence is “the only way I can get off,” and the fact that his reaction to being asked questions about his childhood and Scientology was such an intense shutdown that “he would curl up on the bed into a fetal position and cry” all sound like details from a particularly heavy-handed intro psychology textbook. But while occasional details of Gaiman’s behavior echo Scientology—his demand of one victim that “she promise him her soul” evokes the infamous billion year contract that members of Scientology’s SeaOrg are expected to sign, pledging their loyalty not merely until death but through all subsequent incarnations—the abuse does not seem to have centered on the actual content of Scientology. Its defining characteristic is simply its astonishing cruelty, which seems largely to have been an end in itself.

It is worth voicing the specific nature of this cruelty, lest one be tempted to consider Gaiman’s actions in euphemism, allowing the particulars of his psychology the focus instead of the horrible things he did to people. One victim reports having informed Gaiman of a painful urinary tract infection, drawing an explicit line that she did not want to be vaginally penetrated; Gaiman ignored this, penetrating her first with his fingers and then, after she reiterated her explicit lack of consent, escalating to using his penis. Another reports Gaiman suddenly grabbing her, beating her, and then anally penetrating her, first without lubrication, and subsequently with butter, while she screamed “no” the entire time; afterwards, he made her lick up her own feces. Multiple victims report him forcing them to have sex with him in front of his child. And these are simply the worst details to have made it into the public sphere. Just as it would be a mistake to assume that the earliest instance of abuse to have emerged is coincidentally the actual first, it would be profoundly naive to assume that these examples actually represent the apex of Gaiman’s brutality.

But beyond the raw horror of the violence there is a clear thread of Gaiman relishing in the level of power he commanded. One victim was a recently divorced woman whose husband had been working as the caretaker on Gaiman’s eighty acre estate; Gaiman explicitly lorded his control over her continued access to housing over her, saying, “I like our trade. You take care of me and I’ll take care of you.” Another he assaulted while she was at his house working as a babysitter—her first time meeting him, although she’d been previously employed as a babysitter by his estranged wife—pressuring her to take a bath in his garden and then joining her in the tub and anally penetrating her; she was never paid for the work until after she agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement barring her from discussing his behavior. In perhaps the most grotesque instance, one victim remembers him explicitly telling her that “I’m a very wealthy man, and I’m used to getting what I want.” It feels at times like a bad parody of L. Ron Hubbard—as if Gaiman were simply trying to be the most cartoonishly abusive rich man it was possible to be.

And if American Gods does not clearly mark the line between Gaiman as an adulterous rake who slept with fans and Gaiman as a violent sexual sadist, it does mark a significant turning point in his ability to say shit like that. More interestingly, however, it marks a clear dividing line in Gaiman’s writing. Up through American Gods he demonstrates aesthetic ambition. Throughout Sandman he challenged readers, withholding easy pleasures in favor of unfamiliar and potentially alienating directions. In both Neverwhere and American Gods he is plainly going all out, cramming in good ideas, making every effort to ensure that the story is not merely enjoyable but an outright classic. And in his collaborations with McKean he openly aimed for outright highbrow respectability.

But as soon as he reached the career summit of American Gods and was unquestionably a bestselling and famous author he not only embarked upon a spree of abusing that position, all traces of adventurousness departed his work. His next book, Coraline, is another classic, but the manuscript predates American Gods; his next one composed, Anansi Boys, was a lightweight comedic sequel to American Gods focusing on the titular West African trickster god. This was followed by a young adult novel whose premise—a young boy adopted by the ghosts in a graveyard—feels like the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story. He wrote a screenplay, which Dave McKean brought his all to the task of directing and designing, but which was never anything more than a cut rate Labyrinth knockoff. He wrote a handful more comics, but these were cash-ins on his existing reputation—a pair of Sandman nostalgia volumes called Endless Nights and Sandman: Overture (the latter managing to take two years for six issues, none of them interesting except for the art by J.H. Williams) and a pair of series for Marvel Comics that demonstrated no ambitions beyond allowing Marvel to advertise that Neil Gaiman was working for them. Beyond that his output consisted of things like a series of throwaway picture books about a sneezing panda, a book of plot summaries of Norse mythology, and a pair of episodes of Doctor Who, the good one of which was heavily rewritten by the showrunner. (Reputedly he pitched ideas for a third, none of which were workable, before getting frustrated and starting a conversation with his own hand about how “the nasty man won’t commission my scripts.”) There are a bare handful of exceptions, most notably The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the closest Gaiman ever came to grappling with his Scientology background through means other than sexual assault, but for the most part the latter portion of Gaiman’s career consisted of timid attempts to cater to his existing fanbase and maintain his status as a famous author; eventually he settled into a career of overseeing television adaptations of his earlier work, having already cashed in on them a second time by having P. Craig Russell (or, in the case of Neverwhere, Glenn Fabry) adapt them to comics.

It is a sobering cautionary tale. It is not, obviously, that the magics being wielded are intrinsically tainted by their fleeting association with L. Ron Hubbard any more than they are by their far more substantial association with the only mildly less abusive Aleister Crowley. But their power is, as Morrison attests and Moore demonstrates, vaster even than nuclear arsenals. Used well they can reshape reality, defy death, and wage spiritual war for the very soul of Albion itself; used carelessly, they can leave the most promising writer of his generation little more than a washed up hack who rapes his fans.

This is the thing that Aristotle knew
The single thing that brings all crashing down
That spreads the mortal plague around the town
Laws that apply no matter what you do
No matter all your virtue. It is pride
To think yourself exception, that your sin
The cuddled little vice you keep within
Will not corrode and everything will slide
Collapse like card house fall like dominoes
Endless slow motion of stern nemesis
Takes everything away and leaves you this
Regret for one first thing you poorly chose
Before. Not seen your sad friends turn their face
Your books and deeds slow line by line erase

-Roz Kaveney, untitled 2024 poem

Last War in Albion Volume 4 will commence shortly on Patreon (which is currently $70 away from Doctor Who reviews being public), and begin serializing here in the fall.