The Four Color Media Monitor

So anyway, here's the 3rd part of this special examination of some of the fishiest moments from Gaiman's pretentious comics of yesteryear, before the sexual assault scandal in 2024 that brought down his career. Next panel comes from issue 52 of the Sandman, as we look at the last third of run: This is getting even more disgusting as this whole travesty of literature and comicdom goes along. Next, from 53: Just what we need. A cross-dressing tale, and something tells me this is an exaggeration from a real life perspective, since there were seafaring women in the past, including those who disguised themselves as men, because of silly superstitions that women would bring bad luck on board a ship and become a distraction. So nothing's new about what this tale tells. That the guy with a beard in the comic panels doesn't point that out here actually serves to the story's detriment. In any event, Gaiman's virtue-signaling is why a story like this doesn't wash, even with salt water. Next from 54 is a story starring Prez, a character who was created by Joe Simon in the early 1970s. First: So it looks like the guy lights up when Carter, one of the worst leftist presidents the USA ever had, is cited as an example. Carter did nothing to prevent Iran from being taken over by the ayatollahs, even hurt Israel, and overall did a very bad job as POTUS back in the day. Yet Gaiman sees him as a good example? Good grief. This is one of the most noticeably political moments in the Sandman series, and a blatant one too at that. Then, when Prez Rickard himself comes about: Hmm, so the blatant allusions to leftist leanings continue, as Gaiman basically hijacks the creation of a conservative for the sake of his own liberal politics. And even depicts Prez doing business with Islamic oil barons? And a questionable take on the Cold War and nuclear weapons? Wow. Gaiman's one of the earliest leftists in comicdom to exploit it for the sake of the poorest of influences. Very telling indeed. Next is 56: Now isn't that awfully rich coming from a writer who belittled women in real life regardless of what goes on in the world of literary fiction. And the girl's argument is undermined by the vulgar word applied to her character. Next up is 57, as the story moves again to focus on Lyta Hall, who can't exactly be called Fury in this whole mishmash, and in the following: Now here, they may say more about Lyta's background as the daughter of a character who was a superheroine, and who took up a similar career as she grew older, yet there's still only so much that remains unclear, and Infinity Inc. continues to remain unmentioned, as does Hector Hall's role as Silver Scarab in the aforementioned team title from Roy (and Dann) Thomas. Come to think of it, even the Justice Society/All-Star Squadron/Young All-Stars don't get specified here, nor do Hector's parents, Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders. So what's the point of this futile charade? Tragically, it was all to set up the stage for putting Lyta's son, named Daniel by Morpheus (again, does he have the right to decide the kid's name if he's not the parent?), in the later role as the new lord of the Dreaming. On which note, I would like to point out that, if Daniel was executed by fire when this comic's version of Loki and another character kidnap him shortly after, that was one of the most obscene moments in this tommyrot, even if only implied or off-panel. At this point, after all this grimy balderdash, it's practically hard to care. All I know is that putting this comic in the horror genre is no excuse. Nor is it any alleviation when Daniel appears in the Dreaming and grows to adult status. Now here's a scene from 58: Somehow, the way one of the women here insults Lyta over having a son instead of a daughter also sounds like the work of a hypocrite. One who identified over the years as a "male feminist", lest we forget. And then in 59, as if things couldn't possibly get any worse: This is the first of 2 scenes where Lyta either becomes the victim of sexual harassment, or it's implied. Here, the same nightclub owner who was trying to hire her for a job starts fondling her, but viewed in context of Gaiman's offenses, that's why her backlash falls flat. Regarding her superhuman strength, Lyta only uses it 3 times, from what I could tell, and even then, it's very downplayed, curiously enough. It's disgusting enough that the nightclub owner is depicted causing double distress for a woman who's lost her child. But adding insult to injury is that this represents another of the series' allusions to the leftist notion of "toxic masculinity", and shows how, under the pen of the pretentious Gaiman, even Black men aren't immune to such crude, offensive stereotypes. It also reeks of a cheap excuse to phase out a guest character. Now for 61: This scene has the effect of minimizing whatever allusions previous scenes with Lyta had, by again making it sound like she was little more than a cosplayer. And maybe that was Gaiman's whole intention? And there's not much character development here for Lyta, if at all. Why, now that I think of it, there's no real romance in this series either, save for one story near the end, more on which anon. And maybe that too could explain what's wrong with it in the long run. Now for 62, I'll just provide the 1st following scan via picture host link, because it may be too suggestive, but the point to be made is, it tells a side tale about a man who "loved the ladies", to the point where he "hides the clothes" of a woman who was washing herself in a river, and told her he'd give them back "if she'll be his lady love". That's certainly in poor taste based on Gaiman's real life antics. Here's more: The gay man in the latter panel may not be a pervert, but lest we forget Gaiman's been discovered to be just that by Tortoise Media. Which makes scenes like these all the more pathetic virtue-signaling. Now for 63: This is the 2nd time it's been implied Lyta was victim of sexual misconduct. And that's decidedly 2 times too many, especially in light of the author's real life offenses. And this seems like an effort to insult Lyta, is all. Did I mention the artwork here by Marc Hempel is mediocre, and decidedly uninspired? Here's another political allusion, to the subject of terrorism, all without even specifying anything. So of course, the problems with Islamic terorrism, if anything, aren't solved with this kind of superficial reference. Of course, one can only wonder if Gaiman would even deal with such issues today, with the way things have been going along in the world. As woke as the Sandman comic was for its time, there were still moments where it could be very PC by modern standards too, to the point where even Gaiman himself wouldn't write certain things today, if at all. From issue 64: "Something bigger and older"? Could very easily describe Gaiman himself, again. This text-based panel sounds like it could've been another form of virtue-signaling and self-indulgence. Next is a scene from 65: Wow, another absurd scene involving a transsexual character? More of what we need alright. Then from 66, the following scene is ludicrous: Based on Gaiman's real life offenses, one can reasonably wonder if this was meant as some kind of bizarre minimization of a serious issue, and it certainly is insulting to the intellect. In the former panel, somebody blabbers about "diversity" when it's only the leftist kind, and in the latter, a plane passenger is reading a book by what she refers to as a "dead white male", and stars a man who locks a woman in a cellar and forces her to give advice on what to paint. It may sound close to "racy" but in a bad way, and this is one more bizarre scene that only makes clear Gaiman was also resorting to PC tactics along the way. What does the book author's race have to do with any of this? Was Gaiman making it sound like the author was scummy simply because he was white?!? Good grief. Then, from 67: Considering that the Cain and Abel from House of Mystery weren't anything like the brothers from the Bible, it sure is strange why Gaiman wrote the former making it sound as though he's the same person from said Bible. And then, from 68, this gets really stupefying: Oh man, what a groaner, in addition to being insulting to the intellect. The tale involves a transvestite whose show is being protested by lesbian movements, and he pretends he's a woman, and I guess the whole purpose of this balderdash is to take a negative stance against lesbians offended at the gender appropriation this represents. Well it sure gives a clue Gaiman's not very respectable of lesbians any more than heterosexual women, and it's an early example of what's since become described by the slang "wokeism". What Gaiman did here was also legitimizing gender-based blackface.

Anyway, shortly after these intellect-insulters, Morpheus perishes when the Furies attack the Dreaming, and Daniel, now looking more adult, replaces him as lord of the realm. Whether he's a ghost, it makes no difference; what matters is that this comic was practically a conduit for leftist propaganda back at the time, and in some ways, it's just as bad as what the disgraced Gerard Jones wrote, and belongs right down there along with his shoddy writings too. Lyta is sent back to the waking world, but it doesn't excuse all the bad taste left behind by the circumstances through which Daniel was made a successor to Morpheus. Now from 73, the only story where it looked like there was any kind of romance going on: So the black-and-white couple here discuss the issue of slavery and its history while attending a medival-themed carnival. And what's the guy mean by saying the British were "the best" at slavery?!? Shouldn't that be "one of the most reprehensible" if not the worst? Let's be clear. Slavemongering is a horrible thing, and to refer to slave traders as the "best" minimizes the issue. Of course the UK abolished slavery in 1807, long before the USA did. But it doesn't mean we should take a lenient view of slavery even there. As for saying the Americans "have more to feel guilty about", gee, that sure is avoiding specific issues like how the Democrats in the 18th-19th centuries enabled slavery, were the leaders of the Confederacy and declared war upon the Cavalry side when Abe Lincoln abolished slavery in the 1860s. And then, the British guy says he once had lenient views of slavery? And why the allusion to homosexuality again? Is that to make it sound like a LGBT practitioner knows better? Unfortunately, when one considers where wokeness of the modern era is leading, that's why it's absurd to make it sound like that. The story is correct there were west African kingdoms who sold out their subjects into slavery. But it unsurprisingly ignores Islamic slave trade past and present, which only dampens the point. In any event, Gaiman's real life violations of women destroy whatever point he was ostensibly making in this story.

Now finally, from 75, the finale: "Pretty boys"? Wow, Gaiman sure knew how to inject at least one more fishy line on the way out. As a result, even "pretty girls" is cause for suspicion and concern. And on that note, I must say, for a comic some literary sources may have once gushed over and promoted as supposedly "high class", it sure is one of the most pretentious excuses for leftist ideologies, and may have precipitated the damage we've seen western society experience in the past decade or so. There's a lot of stuff here I'd rather not read again, and I think the whole mishmash did a terrible disfavor to Roy Thomas' 2 creations for Infinity Inc, Fury and Silver Scarab. The latter whose codename, again, wasn't mentioned in the scripts. And lest I forget, what was done to Element Girl was also atrocious.

I guess I'll add a few more panels here now, from the 1989 Swamp Thing Annual 5, the only story Gaiman ever wrote for the series starring Len Wein's famous plant-based entity, since these too, unsurprisingly, had at least a handful of troubling lines: Hmm, this looks like an odd stealth assault on Ronald Reagan. And the guy Chester's talking about is supposed to be a metaphor for a leftist, huh? One could wonder if that was also Gaiman's idea of virtue-signaling when he has Chester say the man was "non-violent", when in real life Gaiman, on the other hand, was anything but. And here, what's the point of talking about terrorism when it's kept that superficial? This was written at the time the Iranian ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa (judgement) against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, and just a few years ago, Rushdie was almost murdered by a jihadist who wouldn't let go of a petty obsession, but neither Gaiman nor anybody else who published this story had any interest in focusing on such a topic. He may have once seemingly offered his condolences to Rushdie following the terrible incident, but that was about as far as it goes in modern times for a leftist of Gaiman's standing. Gee, if Chester was too young - which could've been logical by the time this was published - to have been around to know the awful effects of drug abuse, why's the guy scapegoating him? Eerily, this scene also runs the gauntlet of downplaying the seriousness of drugs by having somebody who could be a baddie be the one to make the case against drugs. Wow, and here, the guy Chester was apparently talking about earlier comes down to earth again, and Gaiman uses this as an opportunity for more anti-Reagan propaganda. Hey, of course Reagan wasn't a saint, but overrated jerks like Gaiman never look for the most plausible reasons to take issue with Reagan, not even whether he failed to stop Iran's tyranny in the long run, nor whether he applied the same standards of anti-communist positions to countries other than Russia. Most peculiar indeed. Ironically, however, something alluding to Islam comes up in a conversation the Floronic Man has with the Parliament of Trees: Now what's this supposed to be? Moral equivalence between the Bible and Koran? Something to consider is that there are followers of the Religion of Peace who wouldn't approve of saying anything negative about cutting down trees to make paper for the Koran, no matter what he says about the Bible simultaneously. That aside, such theater of the absurd how Jason Woodrue implies Mohammed would make use of a dove, long considered a peace symbol, when in the era of the 7th century, he did quite the opposite, and also notoriously took a 9 year old girl, Aisha, as a child bride. It doesn't help, of course, that a character who's otherwise a villain would be the one to spout the mishmash he does here. Amazingly, however one views this story, there's thankfully no allusions to sexual assault in this Swamp Thing tale, one where Swampy himself was actually lucky not to have appeared (if memory serves, he was stranded in the past during the storylines of 1989). But, the political allusions still don't bode well for Gaiman's resume, and that's why, while this may not be the worst of his portfolio, it still doesn't work well.

And that wraps the 3rd part of this study into Gaiman's bizarre mindset for now. I'll have one more entry coming up as soon as I can.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful artists, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, politics, violence