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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

49 Comments

  1. Ross
    February 24, 2025 @ 10:57 am

    I am struck by the fact that to this day, I still occasionally see clickbait proposing “The Books of Magic” as a superior and less-problematic alternative that is “basically the exact same story” as , y’know, THAT seven-book series about a school of magic. It is hard to imagine this suggestion coming from someone who had read… Anything at all, really.

    Reply

  2. L
    February 24, 2025 @ 11:14 am

    Well that was a fucking great read – incisive and clear-sighted at every point. Thank you for this.

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  3. Dan Sumption
    February 24, 2025 @ 3:59 pm

    Thank you so much for writing this. I’ve always got a strange vibe off Gaiman, though never known much about him, not been a huge fan of his work. My dear friend Suz was close to him in the 80s, and he used her childhood story as the lead character’s backstory in Black Orchid. I’d wanted to know more about this, but Suz would clam up when I asked about him (in fact she ended up giving me her copy of Black Orchid… I’ve never been able to bring myself to read it). Sadly Suz died of COVID in 2020 – I wrote a little about her here: https://peakrill.com/blogs/news/sue-schofield-r-i-p – I would dearly have loved to hear her take on this. As on so many things that have come to pass.

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  4. J
    February 24, 2025 @ 4:55 pm

    No idea how I ended up here, but I’ve just spent the best part of half a day reading this.
    Thank you for writing it – it is engaging, important and balanced.

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  5. James Whitaker
    February 24, 2025 @ 6:02 pm

    This is just phenomenal, damning, thorough, intense, upsetting, full of vivid texture. Thank you

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  6. Tobias Carroll
    February 24, 2025 @ 8:36 pm

    Absolutely fantastic work here.

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  7. Heather Wallace
    February 24, 2025 @ 9:03 pm

    Really hard, good read. The interesting thing is reading the background and breakdown of a lot of Sandman and its limitations, which I consumed as a teenager as it came out in the 90s in a slightly discomfited haze. (The violence and sadism and general ick was the main reason for the discomfort, alongside my deep love of Death and Delirium) And then falling deeply in love with Neverwhere, from the moment I first heard Lenny Henry talking about it on late night BBC radio prior to the tv show coming out, followed by gradual distancing as each subsequent book came out, to the point I only liked The Ocean at the End of the Lane when it became a stunning piece of theatre stage craft. (I’ve been friends with Roz Kaveney for years – mostly distantly for the last several – and reading her reaction and processing the news was heartbreaking.)

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  8. John
    February 24, 2025 @ 9:38 pm

    This was really good, as usual.

    How much did your plans for the Gaiman section of the War change as a result of the revelations about him?

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  9. Rei Maruwa
    February 24, 2025 @ 10:28 pm

    When I was in middle school, my mom got me Watchmen and the first big “absolute” volume of Sandman. I really liked both, but they were both “adult” in ways that both unsettled me and had unimaginable power. For Sandman in particular, the way that nobody could leave the diner, the Corinthian tying up little boys, Jed’s home life, and the overwhelming theme of predation in that last arc gave me an enormous feeling of darkness and danger. Those early horror parts stuck with me the most, and as I read the later parts a few years later I certainly found myself enjoying A Game of You much more than the grand mythic stuff. But then, I would enjoy hanging out with a bunch of girls more than with Dream.

    I never actually finished the story, for exactly the reasons listed here about The Kindly Ones; I found myself really uninterested. Though the earlier Prez issue is certainly one of my favorite comic issues in general. But as I looked back on the comic in general, despite my young age, I got a sense of – this is sometimes perfect, but sometimes it feels like Neil’s big pat on the back about the power of stories, doesn’t it? And that’s a sense I’ve gotten from Neil ever since, this partially-constructed self-circular cleverness. Which doesn’t make him a bad writer at all, but it did make him not particularly intriguing to me as a person, compared to the personal affinity I feel with, say, Morrison. And Morrison DOES pursue some of the same goals, in constructing a clever writer persona, but for Morrison, the pursuit became the point of what they were doing.

    For Gaiman the point was the goal, not the pursuit of it, and as you say here, he never did grasp what that process was he was actually doing. Reading Sandman as the process of Neil’s life, inseperable from his own personal arc, makes me appreciate it a lot more, even or especially the “power of stories” stuff. Look at Shakespeare’s wife’s admonition to him, at the end of the comic, that all he knows are stories and dreams, and compare with the biography from way at the top, where Gaiman’s childhood is defined purely in terms of media.

    It does seem significant to me that not only did Gaiman’s career stagnate, but he never before or since did another long-form serialized story. If we think of Morrison’s use of “hypersigil”, it particularly applies to a serialized story, to make it a “sigil through time”. It’s not just writing a fiction that changes one’s life, it’s syncing up the continued progression of that fiction through time with your own progression through time. Sandman is Neil’s only large-scale hypersigil. It’s the one story arc of his life.

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    • krisis
      February 25, 2025 @ 6:05 pm

      Rei, I cannot stop thinking about your comment and the idea of Sandman as Gaiman’s lone hypersigil. I feel like this could actually be the thesis statement of Sandifer’s extraordinary essay.

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    • Aristide Twain
      February 25, 2025 @ 9:12 pm

      Agreed with krisis that “Sandman as Gaiman’s only hypersigil” is a really good point. Though I’d nuance it by pointing out that had it worked out, the mooted three-season Good Omens TV show was the closest he came to a second one, and certainly the only time he recaptured the same pop-culture lightning strike as Death. (As measured in cosplay! For some years now, every convention has at least one Aziraphale and Crowley, just as they used to all have at least one Death.)

      Which makes it very telling that Good Omens S2 is such a shambles at a structural level. I didn’t even hate it, but I enjoyed it mostly as a delivery system for the cast and David Arnold’s music, with the occasional good bit. The arc seemed to have been written by a complete amateur. It really does speak to a Gaiman who’d stopped trying.

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  10. Avi
    February 25, 2025 @ 12:22 am

    Excellent post. You have made something clear to me which was heretofore a subject of some confusion. I once, while tripping on acid, took it upon myself to watch a BBC documentary about Kate Bush from, if I remember correctly, 2014. Kate is basically my Stella Maris as far as music goes and I found the documentary extremely enjoyable except for one part. The documentarians included commentary on Kate’s music from several musicians, all of whom claimed some influence from the esteemable songstress. Tori Amos was included and her inclusion must be the reason that the only non-musician, Neil Gaiman, was asked for commentary. It was watching this documentary that first gave me the sense that there was something off about him. While everyone else delighted in her virtuosity and clear talent, Neil was almost singularly fixated on her womanhood and sensuality. While these are part of what’s going on in her work, much of the documentary tells of her struggle to be recognized as more than a pretty face singing girlish tunes. While everyone else seems to understand her greatness in sympathetic imaginings of the lives of others, Gaiman seems entirely sexually fixated on her. It’s hard to explain without seeing for yourself. I often asked why the BBC decided to include him at all, but based on your article I think I now understand that he must have come along with Amos (her commentary was wonderful and I am deeply saddened to learn that so much of her life was wrapped up in Gaiman’s). Thank you for clearing that up for me.

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  11. (Not That) Jack
    February 25, 2025 @ 3:25 am

    I remember when I discovered this series long, long ago-on a Livejournal devoted to pro wrestling, oddly enough-reading the series to date, chuckling to myself, and thinking “There was a winner to the Last War In Albion, and it was Neil Gaiman.”

    Funny how that worked out, though until recently it remained true.

    My eyebrow raised at the description of “The Doctor’s Wife” being heavily re-written by the showrunner; the actual Eruditorium post on it suggested that Gaiman was pushed to increasingly better drafts by Moffat, not that Moffat did massive re-writes. Having drifted away from Doctor Who by and large, I don’t know if more about the writing of that episode came out, but I did make a note of it.

    I understand, too, the urge to cram Gaiman into one long post and just set him aside, because while it would be more consistent to have Gaiman’s work contrast directly with what Moore and Morrison were doing (especially the latter, given their using Daniel in a JLA arc)-what Gaiman did is so fucking reprehensible that spotlighting him is just gross. I will also not attempt to say that “oh, I suspected something weird about him from the start” or anything like that, because I didn’t. Until all this broke, my main opinion on him was weariness at how all he seemed to do was hype his television projects, where I once said to myself, exasperated, “does anyone other than fucking Neil Gaiman post on Bluesky?!” He had always seemed very much about making himself into a brand name; he had a skill set that he deployed in very calculated ways, and he caught lightning in a bottle with Death.

    But I had no fucking idea what he was doing with the brand he created, and seemingly has destroyed forever.

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    • Nicholas R
      February 25, 2025 @ 8:20 am

      My eyebrow raised at the description of “The Doctor’s Wife” being heavily re-written by the showrunner; the actual Eruditorium post on it suggested that Gaiman was pushed to increasingly better drafts by Moffat, not that Moffat did massive re-writes.

      When promoting the Good Omens TV series, Gaiman commented on his two Doctor Who episodes. He made it sound like both The Doctor’s Wife and Nightmare in Silver involved rewrites and changes, but he said nothing about who actually carried out those rewrites, him or Moffat. But he was clear that the difference that he objected to was that on the latter he had less of a say in that process:

      “I did two episodes of Doctor Who over the last decade, one I loved and it won awards, one I do not love and it is widely regarded as having some good bits in it but being rather a curate’s egg.

      “As far as I’m concerned both of the scripts were of equal quality but the biggest differences were having a say in what actually got to the screen, a say in what got changed, a say in what got rewritten, a say in the colour scheme, a say in all those things.”

      The Eruditorum/Last War in Albion entry on Nightmare in Silver talks about its drafts being written either side of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and says:

      “Unfortunately, perhaps because Gaiman had time for fewer drafts, perhaps because Moffat was too occupied with other projects to edit as extensively…”

      and:

      “Gaiman has admitted that while ‘I got 95, 96, 97 per cent of what I wanted’ when writing The Doctor’s Wife, when it came to Nightmare in Silver, ‘a lot of the things I wanted didn’t really happen.'”

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      • Doctor Memory
        February 25, 2025 @ 2:05 pm

        Gaiman carrying a small chip on his shoulder about the editing of Nightmare in Silver always seemed like one of those un-played cards: he’d slowly been working on bigger and bigger TV shows, and maybe he would have thrown his hat into the ring when RTD decided to re-retire? Now no longer possible, thankfully.

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    • Einarr
      February 26, 2025 @ 5:14 am

      the way various people have told it (including Steve Manfred, a friend of Gaiman’s, and Rob Shearman, a friend of Moffat’s, plus IIRC possibly also Gaiman himself) ~40% of The Doctor’s Wife was by Moffat, whereas Moffat didn’t have any time to do rewrites on NiS at all (which was at one point supposed to be a two-parter and involved the Victorian governess Clara but then had to be radically overhauled).

      Gaiman’s account that he had far more control over TDW than Nightmare in Silver is just patently untrue, and smacks of him trying to blame everybody else for things going wrong. So pressed for time was Moffat during the annus horribilis of S7 that he practically gave executive-producer level control to Neil Cross and to Gaiman for their respective episodes (which included things like approving designs etc that would normally be above a writer’s pay grade). That doesn’t mean that Gaiman is lying when he says he got most of what he wanted from TDW but not much of what he wanted from NiS (the direction of the latter is very poor, and as noted it had to be radically reworked in ways that almost certainly hurt it), but it does mean that I wouldn’t take him at his word when he says things like “they messed around with my second DW script” as though he didn’t have much input.

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  12. Oliver
    February 25, 2025 @ 2:54 pm

    Read this with great interest, just thought I’d add, regarding your comments on American Gods, the origin of “America is a bad place for gods” – it’s taken from a Kipling short story, “Weland’s Sword.” I haven’t seen much mention of it with regards to American Gods, but I remember reading the Kipling story ages ago and being startled by how direct the lift is. Not that I begrudge Gaiman using the idea, Kipling didn’t expand on it much, but still:

    ‘I’m glad they’re gone, then; but what made the People of the Hills go away?’ Una asked.

    ‘Different things. I’ll tell you one of them some day—the thing that made the biggest flit of any,’ said Puck. ‘But they didn’t all flit at once. They dropped off, one by one, through the centuries. Most of them were foreigners who couldn’t stand our climate. They flitted early.’

    ‘How early?’ said Dan.

    ‘A couple of thousand years or more. The fact is they began as Gods. The Phoenicians brought some over when they came to buy tin; and the Gauls, and the Jutes, and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles brought more when they landed. They were always landing in those days, or being driven back to their ships, and they always brought their Gods with them. England is a bad country for Gods. Now, I began as I mean to go on. A bowl of porridge, a dish of milk, and a little quiet fun with the country folk in the lanes was enough for me then, as it is now. I belong here, you see, and I have been mixed up with people all my days. But most of the others insisted on being Gods, and having temples, and altars, and priests, and sacrifices of their own.’

    ‘People burned in wicker baskets?’ said Dan. ‘Like Miss Blake tells us about?’

    ‘All sorts of sacrifices,’ said Puck. ‘If it wasn’t men, it was horses, or cattle, or pigs, or metheglin—that’s a sticky, sweet sort of beer. I never liked it. They were a stiff-necked, extravagant set of idols, the Old Things. But what was the result? Men don’t like being sacrificed at the best of times; they don’t even like sacrificing their farm-horses. After a while men simply left the Old Things alone, and the roofs of their temples fell in, and the Old Things had to scuttle out and pick up a living as they could. Some of them took to hanging about trees, and hiding in graves and groaning o’ nights. If they groaned loud enough and long enough they might frighten a poor countryman into sacrificing a hen, or leaving a pound of butter for them. I remember one Goddess called Belisama. She became a common wet water-spirit somewhere in Lancashire. And there were hundreds of other friends of mine. First they were Gods. Then they were People of the Hills, and then they flitted to other places because they couldn’t get on with the English for one reason or another. There was only one Old Thing, I remember, who honestly worked for his living after he came down in the world. He was called Weland, and he was a smith to some Gods. I’ve forgotten their names, but he used to make them swords and spears. I think he claimed kin with Thor of the Scandinavians.’

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  13. Ian Stewart
    February 26, 2025 @ 2:12 am

    My only attempt at reading Sandman was probably 10 years ago now. I was exchanging trades with a friend — I lent him Morrison’s Batman through RIP, plus Final Crisis, and he lent me the first few volumes of Sandman. Ultimately, though, I stopped early on. Looking back, it must have been around “Calliope” or shortly after. Like everyone else here, I’m not trying to say, “oh ho ho, I saw through THAT guy!” In point of fact, I hardly thought about Gaiman at all in the years between failing to complete Sandman and his victims coming forward. But it remains that Gaiman’s depictions of abuse and victimization felt centered in his narratives in a way that Moore and Morrison’s similar depictions just don’t. And that, more than anything, was what drew me to a stop.

    Thank you, as well, for so vividly laying out why these characters were so vital and original when they were new. By the time I was approaching them, they had been around for probably twenty years, and they felt perhaps more ossified. The brooding, wandering loner Dream had nothing for me compared to Morrison’s Bruce Wayne who could take whatever extradimensional space gods threw at him, and of course Death was well-established as Prototype Goth Girl Alpha One. But then, I must have already absorbed a dozen pastiches and homages to them through the culture at large, both intentional and subconscious. In considering these stories as works of magic, it definitely feels worth contemplating how the magic becomes diffuse.

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  14. Abigail Nussbaum
    February 26, 2025 @ 10:46 am

    Excellent, thorough and thought-provoking overview. There’s been an understandable impulse, post-revelations, to comb through Gaiman’s writing for clues to his nature and proclivities. Or alternatively, to review it with an eye towards “proving” that everything good in his work came from someone else (the Good Omens fandom appears to be doing a lot of work in that quarter). This is the first piece of writing I’ve seen that both acknowledges the immensity and impact of Gaiman’s career, while also allowing what we now know about him to wash away the awe-struck hagiography that characterized so much earlier discussion of him. Your analysis of Gaiman’s day-one careerist impulses, or the way that his career in the 21st century has mostly consisted of resting on his laurels, is extremely sharp.

    On a small, related matter, perhaps this was a reference that went over my head, but the Green Team: Boy Millionaires have been revived in a recent DC comic. They are main characters in Tom King’s Danger Street miniseries. King is probably not on a level to be considered Gaiman’s successor – for one thing, he is operating in a world that Gaiman largely made, and for another, he hasn’t attempted anything as ambitious as Sandman – but he echoes him in his willingness to take extremely minor, in some cases forgotten big two characters and build something adventurous and bold around them.

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    • Ian
      February 28, 2025 @ 2:35 am

      I actually assumed “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.” was a bit of a subliminal shot at Tom King

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    • Sean Dillon
      February 28, 2025 @ 10:47 am

      I’d argue Danger Street is a completely different beast than what’s being described here. Indeed, it being not usable as a rebooted idea (despite Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani’s best efforts) is part of the point.

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  15. Anton B
    February 26, 2025 @ 2:16 pm

    Bravo; One of your best. It deserves to be published as an unofficial biography and has taken me two quite trippy days to savour. I’ve wondered how you’d fit Gaiman into the Magickal War, particularly in light of the revelations about his private life, and you’ve worked a miracle; giving praise where it’s due and critique where it’s needed. Look, I also don’t want to be ‘that guy’ and say I’ve always thought there was something rum about Gaiman, but truthfully I’ve never fully bought into his self-aggrandisement and “I’m just the teller of tales” feyness.

    Now, excuse the cheekiness but my wife, being a busy creative witch with no spare time, asked me to give her a tl:dr on your essay. I don’t know where to start. If you, Doctor Sandifer, or any of your erudite commenters wants to give that a go and distill this opus’s main points down to a line or two we’d be most grateful.

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    • Pádraig Ó Méalóid
      March 17, 2025 @ 1:19 pm

      tl:dr – Scientology fucks you up

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      • Anton B
        March 19, 2025 @ 12:41 pm

        Yep. That about covers it.
        I cant help thinking not resisting the temptation to write yourself into the narrative as a dark protagonist inevitably has a price to pay. See also Grant Morrison.

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  16. Riggio
    February 26, 2025 @ 3:00 pm

    This was engrossing and beautiful to read. It brought me back to the same excitement when I first discovered your work as you were starting the Pertwee Years posts of TARDIS Eruditorum. But enough of my being a Sandifer hipster.

    The revelations about Gaiman are horrifying to think about, especially if, like my wife, you were the perfect age to read Sandman as a teenager as they were being written, and, if I can quote her, “I basically was Death.” But I’m a few years younger, and only started really digging into sci-fi and the kinds of things dorky teenagers tend to enjoy a few years after Sandman finished (she often describes it in terms of her favourite Nine Inch Nails album being The Downward Spiral, and mine being The Fragile). I very much lived in a world where Gaiman’s ideas deeply influenced the popular culture of goth, nerd, and comic-con culture, without having experienced the weight of that impact in progress. So when I see all of these engagements throughout his career with sexual violence, child abuse, confinement, sadism, and cruelty, it all comes together as a dark potential lurking inside his personality, and haunting so many of his fans.

    Reading your history of his life and artistic production, it seems as though one way to look at his life is that he was able to channel his trauma (or express his destructive engrams?) in the innovations of his art for a few massively influential years, creating stories that had this enormous social impact. Even his careerist approach to comics writing was driven by a need to escape dependence on the networks that pressed cruelty and violence on him, trying to find a career that could let him escape depending on Scientology. But then the internet and blogging / social platforms let him slip into the parasocial cult-building personality worship that Hubbard used to build Scientology as a way for him to build the community of Neil Gaiman fans. One of the things I’ve come to realize over the last few years (and I’m probably pretty late to realize this fully) is that parasocial fandom building on social media has a lot of very troubling cult dynamics.

    So Gaiman was letting his artistic creativity fizzle while more and more of his energy was spent on building the parasocial relationships of social platform marketing for Neil Gaiman™. Instead of sublimating and processing his trauma and echoes of cruelty through art, he poured himself into building a cult fandom that enabled cruelty to express itself in action and direct relationships with people. His art processed the trauma of cult abuse, but social media marketing created a cult that fostered the trauma of cult abuse into its repetition.

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    • Aristide Twain
      February 28, 2025 @ 7:35 am

      While a lot of digital ink has been spilled about the relationship between Gaiman’s actions and his fans’ parasocial relationship with him via social media, I do think it’s worth recalling that the principal victims we know about were people he met through entirely other means, e.g. because one was babysitting for him. It’s one thing to view his brand of social media presence as cause for concern in hindsight but the relationship between its issues and the abusive behaviour IRL can’t really be purely causal.

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    • AJ McKenna
      March 2, 2025 @ 5:22 am

      That’s a smart observation, about Gaiman as early adopter of blogging/social media leveraging parasociality to become a sort of cult leader figure. Mind you, his comments about comic conventions cited above seem to suggest he was already having some thoughts in this direction.

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  17. Karen
    February 27, 2025 @ 9:02 am

    At a panel at an SF convention in 1996, I asked Neil Gaiman about the Game Of You/Bones of The Moon similarities. My recollection of his answer is that it did not contain the ‘Oh, Jonathon Carroll gave me his blessing to retell the story my way’ narrative that has emerged subsequently. He did not admit to having had any contact with Jonathon Carroll (my favourite author at the time) at all. His response was almost being a bit embarrassed at being caught out retelling a contemporary story, rather than rehashing old stories such as Shakespeare or bits of the Bible.

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  18. ScF
    February 27, 2025 @ 10:13 am

    For those who may be interested in another little detail, Roz Kaveney has written a sequence of extremely powerful and very good poems about the Gaiman situation beyond the one quoted at the end of this piece, and they are well worth seeking out.

    They constitute, I believe, a further working.

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    • Sajia Kabir
      March 5, 2025 @ 1:36 pm

      I feel sorry for her. I’d had issues with her then Islamophobia many years ago, but she changed, and she was kind to me when I reached out to her during a bipolar episode. I just lost a favourite author. She was betrayed by a beloved friend.

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  19. D.N.
    February 27, 2025 @ 7:05 pm

    “…the character of Wanda, who is notable for being the first straightforward representation of a transgender character in mainstream American comics.”

    Just curious, is it the “straightforward” part that disqualifies Camelot 3000’s Sir Tristan?

    Anyway, brilliant piece (as always). I confess to only knowing Gaiman largely by reputation, having never read any of his work besides a few “Batman” stories, and having never watched any film or TV adaptations of his writing. Let’s just say, I’m not going to start now.

    As the years go by, the more singular Alan Moore appears to be in comparison to the other biggest players in the war. Unlike Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman, Moore never cultivated a trendy/sexy rock star image (despite actually playing in a rock band) and, unlike Gaiman or Warren Ellis, Moore never developed or exploited a parasicial pop-celebrity relationship with his fans (as far as I’m aware).

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    • Ross
      February 28, 2025 @ 9:37 am

      I think the peak of my awareness of Gaiman’s work was that when there was a lot of talk around him penning a Doctor Who episode, it finally clicked for me that he was the same guy who’d written the behind-the-scenes book about the Hitchhiker’s Guide that had been sitting on my bookshelf for the past 20 years. It remains, technically, the only of his written works that I have read in its entirety.

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    • John
      March 3, 2025 @ 4:58 pm

      I think “straightforward” excludes Sir Tristan and Cloud and Wanda Langkowski

      Reply

  20. John G Wood
    February 28, 2025 @ 3:45 am

    Informative and really well put together, thanks. I adored Sandman (especially “Dream of a Thousand Cats”) and was very fond of Neverwhere on TV – even the cow felt more like quirkiness than a flaw to me. However, I never read any of Gaiman’s prose novels other than Good Omens, which I bought because of his co-author. I don’t know why. It wasn’t because I picked up on any warning signs – I thought he seemed like a decent bloke and felt for him when he wept over Pratchett’s death. Ironically it was Sandman Mystery Theatre that worried me, as it seemed to include a quite misogynistic focus on abuse of women (I stopped enjoying it quite a while before I stopped buying it, which says something about my buying habits at the time).

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  21. Thoror
    February 28, 2025 @ 9:08 am

    I just wanted to say that a big reason why Ramadan turned out the way it did is because Gaiman’s favourite translation of One Thousand and One Nights is the Mardrus one, which is NOT a real translation but an orientalist travesty without an ounce of respect for the original text (my “favourite” example is its version of Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land, one of my favourite tales; Mardrus decided to turn the fascinating theological disagreement that tragically breaks the friendship between both Abdullahs into a friggin’ butt joke because hey, why the hell not?). As someone who years ago loved both the Mardrus One Thousand and One Nights and Ramadan I’m still slightly ashamed of it.

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  22. Conor Carton
    March 1, 2025 @ 3:48 am

    This essay is a testament to the power and joy of literary criticism. I read The Sandman back when it was a monthly comic. I bought the lovely box set of the first three trades. 24 hours is one of two comics that truly horrified me, I could never reread it and I do not like to think about it. I started to watch the TV series until I realised where the story was headed and stopped. I never caught most (any) of the themes and ideas you have exposed. All told I have found your essay more enjoyable and engaging that the comic. At least until you gave the stomach churning details of the abuse Neil Gaiman perpetrated. Brilliant work.

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  23. Anthony Bernacchi
    March 1, 2025 @ 10:57 am

    Fantastic essay, Elizabeth. I haven’t read any of the previous installments of “Last War in Albion”, but this one is comparable in scope and quality to your Eruditorum essay on “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”, albeit on a far less happy and celebratory subject. And, of course, you wrap it up with a devastatingly succinct closing phrase.

    For no specific reason, I never consumed much of Gaiman’s work. I skimmed “The Case of Death and Honey” — I don’t think I read it in its entirety, but Sherlock planning to administer the immortality formula to Watson without his consent is highly disturbing in retrospect. I’ve also read “Don’t Panic”, “A Study in Emerald” and the first two or three issues of “Preludes & Nocturnes” and seen “The Doctor’s Wife” and “Nightmare in Silver”.

    “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.” — Minor correction: the quote is from Henry VI, Part 1. (Confusingly, the Henry VI plays and Richard III were written before Richard II, the Henry IV plays and Henry V.) Ironically, Henry VI, Part 1 is now widely considered a collaborative play, with Shakespeare absolved of blame for the line in question, while some scholars have attributed parts of the play to Marlowe himself.

    “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.” — As you pointed out earlier in the essay, John Milton did that with Lucifer (if we must consider Lucifer a god), as did Richard Wagner with several gods, although Gaiman and Marvel Comics, among other influences, have resulted in more authentic versions supplanting Wagner’s in the public mind.

    Your account in the last several paragraphs of how far Gaiman has fallen artistically as well as morally is sobering. The terse statement that “His next book, Coraline, is another classic” is haunting — presumably, had the truth about Gaiman not emerged, Book Four would have included typically trenchant in-depth analyses of both that book and “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”.

    The omission of the titles of “MirrorMask” and “The Graveyard Book” effectively conveys your contempt for Gaiman’s later work, but it’s worth remembering that the book you described as “the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story” managed to win both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Newbery Medal. Let’s think about that for a moment — the name of a serial rapist who made one of his victims lick up her own feces will be listed on bookmarks that librarians distribute to children until our civilization ends. Beautiful, perhaps, if you’re into that kind of thing.

    Reply

    • Nick Moon
      March 3, 2025 @ 7:16 am

      Even more confusingly, Henry VI part 1 is now regarded has having been written last, capitalising on the success of the earlier two part play which is now designated Parts 2 and 3.

      Reply

  24. Josh04
    March 1, 2025 @ 7:04 pm

    Congrats to El on finally writing one where I felt the need to convert it to epub in order to get it read.

    Interesting that even without his unspeakable behaviour coming out, Gaiman’s late career is such a dud in the long view – I’d been fascinated for a while with his repeated failure to launch a TV career, going all the way back to Neverwhere, and then the Doctor Who episodes, one good season of American Gods before falling out with the showrunner, one good-ish season of Good Omens and also falling out with the showrunner, and an Anansi Boys show that disappeared into the aether and might never return. The Sandman show barely scraped a second season from the now-thifty Netflix (who seemed to be holding Gaiman at arm’s length a little anyhow). The (now ex-)dream king just does not seem to have a head for images.

    Reply

  25. David Hoffman
    March 1, 2025 @ 7:18 pm

    This is a phenomenal piece of work thank you so much for both writing and sharing. I’ve been reading your pieces for some years now and in particular am a big fan of your work on Dr Who (and have all the collected books), but for me this tops what is an extremely fine body of work with a beautifully nuanced piece. I have found it personally very helpful in how to navigate finding out that a writer of favourite works (in my case Sandman) is in fact an appalling and shameful excuse for a human being. As a kid I read Roald Dahl; I enjoyed Harry Potter (not great lit but fun) before JKR went off the deep end; and now Sandman it turns out is by a something of a monster; and I am not of course alone in having trouble with the dissonance of that sort of revelation. I found your discussion really helped to crystallise what that means; and I had no idea about Gaiman’s Scientology background which also explains a lot (though it excuses nothing). Very sincere appreciation.

    Reply

  26. Eli Bishop
    March 1, 2025 @ 11:57 pm

    This is phenomenal, and I look forward to rereading it more slowly and finding even more good ideas that I probably missed due to hurrying ahead to see how you would cover the next period/book/etc. Critical overviews organized around a main psychological narrative about the author can so easily be shallow and one-note, but this is the opposite, and the digressions are all fruitful.

    Here’s a side note that you may well have already known about, but in case not, I’m curious what you would’ve thought about it in the larger context of the piece. You mentioned the creepy fan “Philip Sitz” in The Doll’s House. There are very few (as far as I know) characters in The Sandman who correspond directly to real living people; this one is a pretty direct parody of the edgelord writer Peter Sotos. Sotos was pretty obscure but he was somewhat worshipfully profiled as an outsider artist in the 1988 book Apocalypse Culture, due to being prosecuted for his zine “Pure”, so I’m guessing Gaiman had read the book. Anyway—whether Gaiman had a specific distaste for Sotos and wanted to give him a horrible fate, or just picked him as an archetype to play with the idea of a creepy fan of serial killers becoming their victim—the little bit of dialogue in Sitz’s final scene has a pretty specific focus. Sitz thinks he shares the killers’ understanding: “Females are insects created for male pleasure. Strength. Energy. Lust.” I think we’re meant to assume that’s been only a theoretical pursuit so far—he’s depicted as a proto-incel, expressing his issues via a zine no one reads and hoping that a kindred spirit might help him be a monster for real. Instead he’s mocked for his pretensions before being killed, but when the Corinthian tells him he doesn’t get that it’s not about regular human things like “sex or power or cruelty”, that’s clearly not true—the Corinthian isn’t honest or human, and Sitz has the same pathology as lots of these guys, he’s just intellectualized it.

    Between him and the nameless guy with the “I know it’s not normal” line, I think there’s something there that’s more central to “Collectors” than it looks. It’s a thing that could also have been written by someone who was not personally aware of sadistic impulses and just had a good imagination, but if one assumes there was a personal angle there, then it tells a pretty depressing story: “These feelings are fucked up, and you’re not special, just fucked up. But don’t even think of talking about it to figure it out! Especially not to anyone else who’s had these feelings—they’re surely even worse than you. You’re on your own. The best you can hope for is to have no illusions.”

    Reply

  27. Pregethwr
    March 2, 2025 @ 3:00 pm

    A requiem for a dream indeed!

    Like most others I got into and fell in love with Sandman at an impressionable age. Quite enjoyed American Gods too.

    I remember giving up half way through Ocean at the End of the Lane, even though by then I was kind of reading it for work. It just seemed deeply dishonest to me.

    Around that time the marriage laws in the UK were liberalised and more places and institutions were allowed to carry out weddings. The Church of Scientology made a huge fuss about their first wedding and managed to get it covered by all sorts of media. There in the corner of the ceremony was Neil Gaiman, I think it was his niece who was the bride (his family at that time basically ran Scientology in Europe I think). The disjunction between the happy uncle act and the novel was just too weird.

    Reply

  28. KC
    March 2, 2025 @ 7:19 pm

    This is not only a very detailed breakdown and analysis of all of NG’s work, but covers many of the allegations against him and puts them into the context of a rough timeline as well. Thank you for this.

    Reply

  29. Sajia Kabir
    March 5, 2025 @ 1:29 pm

    A lot of talk has been going on about how the character of Richard Madoc in the Sandman is a tell about Gaiman’s own abusive behaviour. That’s accurate, but as I was doing zikhr today, my mind wandered as it always does during zikhr, and I thought about how Hinzelman in American Gods was created through an act of child sacrifice, and how he committed acts of child sacrifice to foster his power. I’d recently heard about how Gaiman was abused as a child in the Church of Scientology, and I am certain that he was using this as a basis for Hinzelman’s character.
    In a way he was worse off for being raised in Scientology. It’s easier for a Muslim woman or even a Christian woman to speak out against the patriarchy in those institutions. He was trapped.

    Reply

  30. P G
    March 7, 2025 @ 8:04 am

    This was an excellent, lengthy and thorough overview, thank you.

    I was led to wonder, while reading the allegations against him, and again while reading through this work whether there could have been something of a realization mid-Sandman that Morpheus’ (and, by extension, Gaiman’s) behavior had made him the villain.

    I’ve always been moved by the observation (highlighted here, through Gaiman, but clearly far from original) that people often ‘live long enough to see themself become the villain’: clearly Morpheus had an unfair advantage through extraordinary longevity, and now Gaiman has fallen, too.

    Could Sandman then maybe be seen as a processing of suppressed feelings, and with the dawning understanding that many of his fictional actions were deeply problematic, the author’s post-Sandman professional flailing and personal failings be viewed as seen to be inevitable?

    Power corrupts, few escape their upbring, and characters either die as heroes or their stories inexorably become tragedies.

    Reply

    • Danny Johnson
      March 10, 2025 @ 3:49 am

      Maybe if Gaiman had undergone therapy he could have avoided this dark fate. I know he was heavily conditioned to hate and fear therapy and psychiatry but once he was away from his family and in a more autonomous situation maybe he could have pushed himself to try it out. Maybe Jungian therapy would have appealed to his love of myth and archetypes. I showed my English Lit teacher the Midsummer’s Nights Dream issue and he responded with how deeply Jungian it felt. Maybe Grant Morrison could have helped him find a therapist in the Wilhelm Reich school and helped him to break through his “emotional armoring.” Maybe psychedelic mushrooms?
      The saddest thing in all this besides the trauma and abuse he inflicted on his victims seems to me to be the damage he’s done to Tori Amos both emotionally and to her reputation and to Alan Moore who helped him get started in comics and get a foot in the door with DC. I fear this could cause them both to spiral severely but I hope it doesn’t.

      Reply

  31. Pádraig Ó Méalóid
    March 17, 2025 @ 12:00 pm

    Comprehensive! You might think about making this available as a volume in its own right, particularly given its length.

    Reply

  32. RSH
    March 18, 2025 @ 10:37 pm

    This is such a rich and thoughtful essay. I’ve devouring it on the train for the last few days.

    I was a Gaiman superfan as a young person, although I think I’m unusual in that my favorite (and first) novel of his was Coraline. I read a lot of Sandman and pretty much all of his other novels, but I think Coraline is his best work–it’s so short and simple that he can’t dawdle or get too grandiose. It really is a perfect, haunting fairy tale, though I doubt I will ever be able to read it again.

    For most of my adolescence, he was my favorite writer, although I grew out of his work at some point and I always found his online behavior embarrassing. I can’t say I was surprised when the allegations came out, as I had heard enough about him being pretty unpleasant in real life. Still, I could not imagine the level of depravity.

    Thank you for writing this.

    Reply

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