Today: Leila Brillson, a writer and strategist who used to work in media and then sold out for entertainment and then became CMO of The Onion.
Issue No. 239Also Neil Is Dead to Us
Leila Brillson
Also Neil Is Dead to UsMy sister, 16 years my senior, is the definition of Gen X cool. She recorded episodes of 120 Minutes, took me to see Bowie when he toured with Nine Inch Nails, and gave me a hot-of-the-presses issue of Vertigo Comics’ Death: The High Cost of Living written by Neil Gaiman. Death, in this story, is the sister of Dream; they are two of seven siblings, each an embodiment of an eternal force that controls humanity, and this is her spin-off. The cover is a stylized image of Tori Amos at her most goth, with pouty black lipstick and a dramatic, smoky cat eye. That one image seemed to give birth to a whole new approach to goth femininity: not the morbidly fuck-you punk of Siouxsie Sioux, but a perky, life-affirming version that found beauty and sadness in the mundane. A manic pixie dream girl, if there ever was one, flavored with angst; a fetishization of darkness, you might say, given the recent allegations against Gaiman. Sam Keith, an artist who drew the first issues of The Sandman and later created cult classic comic book The Maxx, called bullshit on this in his own work, disparaging Gaiman devotees. “They’re all necro-nerds and Sand freaks,” a teenage narrator, Sarah, says of her classmates. “Death is hard and cold and ugly, not some cute chick.” My sister still has those early comics. For me, they started a lifelong love affair with comic books. To be clearer: I would not have picked up comic books, which came to define a portion of my life, without Neil Gaiman. In fact it's hard to think of an author who has had more of an impact on the fantasy and horror scene, or neo-goth, or graphic novel melodrama than Gaiman.  Here I am, dressed as Death, one of his more iconic characters. Today, I texted my sister to ask her if she had read the cover story about Gaiman in New York. She is, like many Gen X-ers, perennially offline. She texted back: “No, is it good?” I struggle to find the heart to tell her, to be responsible for demolishing all the rainy days spent drifting through the dark romanticism of an artist who has been outed as a monster. Let her live in that liminal space before the art and artist become inextricably blurred, unsalvageable. For those who, like my sister, might not yet have run across this story: on Tuesday, New York published a piece by Lila Shapiro, who interviewed six women on the record accusing Gaiman of sexual misconduct, including assault and rape. (Gaiman has denied the allegations, and yesterday took to his blog to assert that he has never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity.) Shapiro’s story expanded on “Master,” a podcast by the British outlet Tortoise, which aired last summer. It is deeply researched and reported and its details are profoundly disturbing. They include the account of Scarlett Pavlovich, who was in her early 20s and working as the family’s nanny when, she says, Gaiman, then 61, got into her bathtub naked and uninvited. Things only got more gruesome from there. “Should I throw away all of his books now?” a colleague asked me, moving aside to show off an entire row on his bookshelf filled with Sandman editions in the back of his Zoom window. “I can’t bear to look at them anymore.” This is a fair, obvious response. The New York Times tracked down bookstore owners who were trying to decide whether or not they still wanted to sell Gaiman’s books. The answer: Maybe? Booksellers were wishy-washy, suggesting that they’ll sell his titles if there is a demand for them. The article also quotes victim Katherine Kendall: “Neil’s works were his bait, and promotional events were his hunting ground.” It is so dark to consider the fact of owning, even treasuring, someone’s rape bait. Consider Gaiman’s audience: Extremely online, delighted by his open, friendly accessibility on social media platforms; queer or queer-supportive and responding to his own inclusivity; a collection of outsiders whom he flattered and encouraged that’d grown bigger and bigger, shifting from bookstore weirdos to Hot Topic Coraline freaks. Social media is flooded with folks grappling now with their own beloved narratives—stories of misfits finding themselves, discovering magic that only they can see. The claims of women who experienced real harm, real pain, are a far graver matter than the disappointment of legions of crushed fans. Yet another truth that has to be grappled with is that Gaiman’s work is sitting on so many of our bookshelves. One can support and empathize with victims, grieve for them, and also acknowledge that Gaiman’s work has enriched and even saved lives. Yesterday I saw a screenshot of an interview with director Steven Soderbergh where he was asked if, in order to be a genius, one must be disturbed. He replied succinctly, “No, I don’t believe that at all. It takes a lot of energy to be an asshole.” And yet so many beloved creators, people whose dreams and constructions shape our lives, turn out to be truly unforgivable. It takes a lot of energy to be an asshole. It takes time to build webs and lure in prey who’re hoping for family, for acceptance, for understanding. Gaiman was so skilled at creating a trustworthy, inclusive, and gentle persona. In particular his openhearted treatment of queer people, and queer women, built trust with readers over many years. That detail is painfully notable. Sandman in particular, but also Death, Good Omens, and American Gods, have strong queer characters, ones without fixed gender identities and sexualities. Aziraphale and Crowley were given plenty of romantic subtext in his and the late Terry Pratchett’s novel Good Omens—which became actual text in Season 2 of the Amazon series, which Gaiman directly oversaw. 1992’s Sandman story, A Game Of You, featured a character lovingly adding a trans woman’s chosen name on her headstone, crossing out her deadname with pink lipstick. My friend Christian, who moonlighted as a marketing strategist for the Netflix production of Sandman, once told me, “I came out [as nonbinary] in part because of that panel. I didn’t want anyone to have to come scrawl over the name on my grave.” When I asked them if they read the New York piece they said no. They were deliberately disengaging with the news, heartsick and disgusted. The stories of powerful men abusing women are painful because they are familiar, so ordinary, and so expected. What makes this one so egregious is that Gaiman so obviously knew better. In the Sandman collection Dream Country, a writer keeps the muse Calliope trapped, raping her to steal the creativity she grants her lovers. Dream, Gaiman’s titular character, frees Calliope and curses her captor with such an excess of ideas that he goes insane. Later, Dream is forced to confront his own abusive past: He travels to hell to free a woman he condemned there for eternity because she had said no to him. From Stardust to Coraline to Death, strong women overpower their captors in Gaiman’s fiction, using their wisdom to deliver cosmic justice. Christian wrote to me, “The betrayal feels particular because he clearly has the empathy and the forethought to carefully consider and depict the lives of others who live outside the lines. And then selectively choose to ignore that insight and sensitivity to satisfy their own need for authority or control…?” Gaiman was able to articulate the poison of being cruel to the vulnerable but then did it anyway. The double bind trapping Gaiman’s victims is that they know exactly how much he has meant to the communities they belonged to themselves. It’s easy to see why victims in their situation don’t speak out. Queer kids, comic book weirdos, outsiders of every kind flocked to Gaiman’s stories, films, and TV adaptations. They listened when he weighed in on political and social questions, giving extra consideration to his opinions. What happens to the value his stories have to his readers’ lives? How does his downfall change Christian’s coming out story? The answer is that it doesn’t. Gaiman’s fall complicates his work, but it doesn’t make that work worthless. It opens the door to what will be a long and painful reconsideration. Equally significantly, many of Gaiman’s projects were collaborations. Hell, the success of Sandman helped his editor Karen Berger to launch Vertigo, which became DC Comics’ most prestigious imprint. In an interview in the Guardian published in December, Tori Amos—a longtime collaborator and friend of Gaiman’s for many years after posing for the cover of Death—grappled inelegantly with the revelations of the “Master” podcast. Clearly shaken, she chose her words over-politically, clumsily. “She says it’s devastating for the women involved,” wrote interviewer Kira Cochrane. Later Amos teared up as she muttered, “He’s godfather to Tash,” her daughter. If Gaiman gave you something of value, don’t let him take it away. Get rid of his books, or keep them: it’s up to you. In his writing Gaiman presented a litany of horrific characters, twisted with cruelty, but always getting their deserved comeuppance. I think he wrote, perhaps unwittingly, the script for his own monstrous story. Monsters are to be excised. Dance on their graves. And if those monsters happen to have made us less afraid of the dark, then that’s our power now. That’s something no monster can take back.
FLAMING HYDRAS ACROSS THE POND Heck yes it is a sane newspaper article Don't miss Emily Bell in The Guardian this week with a powerful and accurate assessment of *waves frantically*
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