The Four Color Media Monitor

The disgraced comics, book and screen writer Gaiman is back in the news again, as NY Vulture published a whole article (there's also an archive link here) detailing more of Gaiman's terrible deeds, and it reveals his acts were a lot more graphic and perverse than previously reported. Several parts of what's described is too repulsive to post here, but I'll do my best to highlight some of this. The news now seems to indicate there's 8-9 known victims now. And one of the most chilling parts of the main report has to be the revelation Gaiman committed some of his most perverse acts on his victims while his infant son was in the same room! That's what really makes this whole affair that much more horrifying.

The reporter also tells the following about the 17th issue of the Sandman series and the Erasmus Fry/Richard Madoc story where a female deity named Calliope is kept as a sex slave:

In The Sandman, the DC comic-book series that ran from 1989 to 1996 and made Gaiman famous, he tells a story about a writer named Richard Madoc. After Madoc’s first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can’t come up with a single decent idea. This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years. She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc rapes her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.” Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write them down, let alone profit from them.

As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer, some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc have certain things in common. Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote: first comics, then fantasy and children’s literature. But for most of his career, readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue, but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.

As anybody familiar with more of Gaiman's resume may know, he penned a short story in the mid-2000s titled "How to Talk to Girls at Parties", later adapted to GN format by Dark Horse, in which sexual assault was implied, and one can ask similar questions about whether the character named "Vic" in the story was an allusion to Gaiman as well. Psychology can certainly be a scary thing, and Gaiman's case has got to be one for the books. The writer should've mentioned the 14th issue, which also alluded to sexual violence and minimized the issue after the giant, obese rapist/killer whom Morpheus prevented from assaulting a girl at a serial killer convention at a hotel was depicted dreaming of partying with child victims who forgive the monster for his crimes against them, and other criminals attending the convention in the story were let go without being arrested by authorities either. Even the 17th issue, by the end, otherwise minimized the subject, since Madoc never got arrested and jailed for his crimes against Calliope. It just ended with his lamenting he couldn't think of anything else to write, now that the lady deity was freed from his clutches. That Gaiman took such a bizarrely lenient approach to violent felons in the stories is disturbing, especially when viewed in light of what's known about him now.

Anyway, it's head-shaking why anybody believes people like Gaiman "revolutionized" comics and literature, but not writers like Mike Baron, Frank Miller, or even John Ostrander. To say only somebody as leftist as Gaiman could possibly be credited with reshaping is to obscure anybody else who could've had a potent tale to tell. Far as I'm concerned, Gaiman only got as far as he did based on the politics he espoused, and there were strong hints at his leftist leanings in the Sandman series, along with several other of his writings. And the Morpheus character "charismatic"? Please. The way Gaiman wrote him was more as a grim, humorless protagonist, and again, the way Hector and Lyta Hall were handled was dreadful. How come that never gets discussed by most historians?

People who flock to fantasy conventions and signings make up an “inherently vulnerable community,” one of Gaiman’s former friends, a fantasy writer, tells me. They “wrap themselves around a beloved text so it becomes their self-identity,” she says. They want to share their souls with the creators of these works. “And if you have morality around it, you say ‘no.’” It was an open secret in the late ’90s and early aughts among conventiongoers that Gaiman cheated on his first wife, Mary McGrath, a private midwestern Scientologist he’d married in his early 20s. But in my conversations with Gaiman’s old friends, collaborators, and peers, nearly all of them told me that they never imagined that Gaiman’s affairs could have been anything but enthusiastically consensual. As one prominent editor in the field puts it, “The one thing I hear again and again, largely from women, is ‘He was always nice to me. He was always a gentleman.’” The writer Kelly Link, who met Gaiman at a reading in 1997, recalls finding him charmingly goofy. “He was hapless in a way that was kind of exasperating,” she says, “but also made him seem very harmless.” Someone who had a sexual relationship with Gaiman in the aughts recalls him flipping through questions fans wrote on cards at a Q&A session. Once, a fan asked if she could be his “sex slave”: “He read it aloud and said, ‘Well, no.’ He’d be very demure.”

But there were some who saw another side of the author. One woman, Brenda (a pseudonym), met Gaiman in the ’90s at a signing for The Sandman where she was working. On signing lines, Gaiman had a knack for connecting with each individual. He would ask questions, laugh, and assure them that their inability to form sentences was fine. After the Sandman signing, at a dinner attended by those who had worked the event, Gaiman sat next to Brenda. “Everyone wanted to be near him, but he was laser focused on me,” she says. A few years later, Brenda traveled to Chicago to attend the World Horror Convention, where Gaiman received the top prize for American Gods, the book that cemented him as a best-selling novelist. The night after the awards ceremony, she and Gaiman ended up in bed together. As soon as they began to hook up, the feeling that had drawn her to him — the magical spell of his interest in her individuality — vanished. “He seemed to have a script,” she tells me. “He wanted me to call him ‘master’ immediately.” He demanded that she promise him her soul. “It was like he’d gone into this ritual that had nothing to do with me.”

Well that part of the script in the 17th Sandman issue is now going to stand out as one of the most unbearable parts, seeing how it apparently resonated with him to the point he actually believed being a woman's "master" was acceptable. To be sure, the weakness in many pop culture enthusiasts is that they're so desperate for something to "identify" with, they'll totally throw themselves at the author without taking any time to judge by character. It won't be surprising if there were at least a few victims of his perversions during the 90s as well. Though it sure is puzzling what anybody saw in a tale where a villain describes himaelf as a "feminist writer". If feminism really matters, wouldn't the Madoc character's potrayal be detrimental to the cause of devoted feminists? Hence, it's bewildering how the same people, liberal or otherwise, who backed Gaiman's writings in the past didn't see it that way back in the day.

Now, here's where I'll highlight at least one of the examples given of how offensive Gaiman was towards his victims, and it's as ugly as can be:

A week or so into Pavlovich’s time with the family, their son began to address her as “slave” and ordered Pavlovich to call him “master.” Gaiman seemed to find it amusing. Sometimes he’d say to his child, in an affable tone, “Now, now, Scarlett’s not a slave. No, you mustn’t.” One day, Pavlovich came into the living room when Gaiman and the boy were on the couch watching the children’s show Odd Squad. She joined them, sitting down next to the child. Gaiman put his arm around them both, reached into Pavlovich’s shirt, and fondled her breasts. She says he didn’t make any effort to hide what he was doing from the boy. Another time, during the day, he requested oral sex in the middle of the kitchen while the boy was awake and somewhere in the house. “He would never shut a door,” she says.

This has to be one of the worst parts of the incidents. Gaiman exposed his son to the crude behavior he was putting on display, and even influenced the boy into using the same nasty terminology he was. That's a form of child abuse right there. Considering Palmer has certain responsibilities to shoulder here, we should hope she's filed for a restraining order against Gaiman to prohibit access to the youngster. Because what if the boy grew up to be a monster in the future? Reading this article left me feeling truly awful.

The UK Mail says Palmer, as could surely have been expected, is now facing anguish from the public over how much she could've known of what he was doing while she wasn't home:

...she is facing a mounting backlash in response, with former admirers expressing disgust at the new accusations against Gaiman - and raising questions about how much she might have known.

One fan with whom Palmer had an affair has said she was then passed on to Gaiman 'like a toy' - while former family nanny Scarlett Pavlovich has accused him of raping her in a bathtub at his home in Waiheke, New Zealand.

Jusdging from the responses she got on social media, her career may well be over. Somebody else more prominent who had what to say about the reactions to Gaiman's offenses is J.K Rowling, as the Scotsman reports:

JK Rowling has hit out at fans of author Neil Gaiman in the wake of fresh sexual assault accusations against him, saying they have remained “strangely muted”, despite having “a hell of a lot to say” about Harvey Weinstein at the height of the #MeToo movement.

The Edinburgh-based author said the “literary crowd” were refusing to speak out in support of women who claim to be victims of Mr Gaiman, but had been vocal in their opinions of film producer Mr Weinstein, even before his convictions. [...]

Ms Rowling said: “The literary crowd that had a hell of a lot to say about Harvey Weinstein before he was convicted has been strangely muted in its response to multiple accusations against Neil Gaiman from young women who'd never met, yet - as with Weinstein - tell remarkably similar stories.”

Sadly enough, there's clearly lunatics out there who, despite any and all evidence, will still worship Gaiman, retain ownership of his oh-so precious writings, and the only thing they regret is he finally got caught. That's one of the worst things about the whole affair, along with the double-standard of anybody who condemned Weinstein, but won't condemn Gaiman.

According to Popverse, veteran writer Wolfman of Teen Titans fame revealed at WonderCon that the disgraced Gaiman once asked for approval to use Destiny, a character the former created in the early 70s, in the pages of the overrated 1989-96 Sandman series:

“Neil [Gaiman] very nicely – he didn’t have to – called me up and said, ‘I’m doing this new book called Sandman, and can I use Destiny as a character in that?’ He knew that I had created it, and as I said, DC owned it, and he didn’t have to ask me, but he was very polite and very nice. And he said that if I had said ‘No,’ he would come up with something else, but he really liked the visuals of Destiny. And I was thrilled to have somebody else take my characters and do something with them,” Wolfman explained.

Wolfman created Destiny as the host character of the horror series Weird Mystery Tales, which launched in 1972. The series, which was edited by Wolfman, featured existing characters from DC’s catalog like Cain and Abel. Gaiman’s decision to incorporate Destiny as one of the Endless in Sandman, making him the brother of the protagonist, Dream, is very much in the spirit of Weird Mystery Tales. Characters who may have languished in popularity could be repurposed in all-new stories. This is cemented by the fact that Gaiman also wrote Cain and Abel into Sandman, showcasing the impact of Wolfman’s Weird Mystery Tales.

I wonder how Wolfman feels about it now, after Gaiman was accused of sexual assault? If I were in Wolfman's position and discovered what Gaiman had done, I wouldn't want anything to do with him. I would've firmly told him "no". On which note, I can't tell if Popverse has ever addressed the scandal any more than Comics Beat. And this article doesn't make clear Cain and Abel first appeared in House of Mystery.

And one can only wonder, did Gaiman ever ask Roy Thomas if he was okay with how Silver Scarab and Fury were put to use in the Sandman series? Did Gaiman even ask Bob Haney if he was okay with how he made use of Metamorpho's female counterpart, Urania Blackwell, around the 20th issue? If Gaiman did, I have yet to find clear evidence of that. As I said earlier, I find Gaiman's approach to those characters distasteful in hindsight, and they're just a few in a whole seaful of characters who could use a better rendition, along with repairing any and all damage that was done to them way back when.

Polygon says Gaiman's written up a blog post on his site where, predictably, he denies the accusations. Perhaps it would be best he save the dramatics for court. I don't know if the New Zealand police are still pursuing the case, but another of his victims may have filed a report, and it's to be hoped he will have to attend trial, mainly so his victims can see some closure on the issue.

The Times of India published an editorial about the resurfacing case, and at the end says:

Neil Gaiman’s story highlights a broader reckoning within creative industries. His works remain beloved by millions, but the allegations against him have irrevocably altered public perception. For fans, reconciling admiration for his creativity with the gravity of these accusations is an emotionally fraught task. Much like Lucy in The Wolves in the Walls, the literary world must decide whether to confront these unsettling truths or retreat into silence. Gaiman’s legacy now serves as a stark reminder that no figure, no matter how celebrated, is beyond accountability.

Correct. But, is his work really that beloved? I have seen signs here and there that there are people who aren't charmed by his work, some of it laced as it was with crude violence and other questionable elements. The material I read hardly had anything romantic about it, and what did exist there looked pretty empty and directionless. When a writer puts in as many allusions to sexual misconduct in his writings as Gaiman did in his, something is wrong. That's why in years to come, chances are some people will hopefully reevaluate, and above all, ask whether the frequently dark angle he used in much of his writings is reflective of a healthly mindset.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, Europe and Asia, good writers, history, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, violence