Neil Gaiman: Classic Or Dud

No I am not, have never been and never intend to be a goth. Does that answer the second one.

My Modern Novel teacher (Scott Bradfield - a pretty good writer himself; check out _The History of Luminious Motion_) went on a mini- rant about Gaiman one class - pretentious bastard, no-talent hack, bla bla bla. And this was back in 1995! I'd hate to see what he'd say now.

I never thought I was a goth though I was accused of it recently on wearing dark red lipstick and elbow length black lace gloves. No one seemed to realise I was doing eighties revival. Sigh...........

x0x0

Of course Gaiman is a follow on from Moore - the latter was his mentor and I hear that they still send letters under pseudemoms to each other's columns.

David:

The History of Luminous Motion is a fine novel, probably the one I remember most fondly from 1996, but hardly gets Bradfield off the Gaiman hook. Teenagers becoming Warlocks and drawing pentangles on their hands? Neil would have been proud. Where is SB based, by the way? Is it East Coast?

His children's novel was, uh, OK. I bought the special edition for the artwork. American Gods wasn't particularly special, but not awful.

I've never read any of the Sandman/Neverwhere/graphic novels... or really, anything else he's done.

am reading smoke and mirrors right now, will get back to you.

Good Omens is brilliant, and I keep meaning to nick it back off my mate who has had it now for about 4 years.

Andrew - I only bought Kindly Ones as a whole graphic novel, I was a bit of a late starter in the Sandman books. In fact I've only read about 5 so far anyway.

As for his other work, my favourite Gaiman comics are actually Black Orchid and The High Cost of Living. The former is a clever subversion of superhero clichés (better than Frank Miller's attempts to do the same thing), and the latter just sums up perfectly what's good about Gaiman's writing (his endless humanism, mainly). The Time of Your Life wasn't quite as good as the first Death series, and Signal to Noise and Violent Cases were both interesting but somewhat artsy. Gaiman's books are entertaining, but not brilliant.

About Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore: I don't think Gaiman has ever surpassed his mentor. His work has been constantly good, unlike Moore's, but at his best Moore still beats him. Also, Moore is more visually oriented, and his comics are always innovative both on the visual and the textual level. Gaiman, on the other hand, is more of a traditional writer; his work usually has too much text, and that is always a bad thing for a comic.

Well, that and the fact that Gaiman == Gilderoy Lockhart. (truth copyright Angela Cotter)

this is arrant nonsense... well, whatever about the Kindly Ones, the Wake was a long essay in wanky tiresomeness that I only bought for the sake of completism.

no way. kim newman rules. (and you're forgetting the velvet suits and cane).

The last two issues of Sandman (the Chinese story and the Shakespeare story) were unnecessary, admittedly. But being a long time reader of the comic, I couldn't help but be moved by seeing all the series' characters gather one last time for the wake and the funeral. Call me a sentimentalist.

What's Signal to Noise like? anyone?

It's a Gaiman/McKean collaboration, and it's about a dying film-maker who tries to direct his last movie inside his head. It's actually quite good, better than Violent Cases anyway, because it isn't as artsy and pretentious as that one.

_American Gods_ was damn good, though. The best parts of the
book were the parts where the hero was going all domestic,
renting an apartment, going on dates, etc. Neil Gaiman could
write great "normal" stories, minus murder and magic.

Incidentally, according to the TV credits, Neverwhere was based on an idea by Lenny Henry; although the concept of there being a secret underground London is a very old legend, especially the bit about the giant boars. They supposedly escaped from Smithfield market into the River Fleet, and their descendants are down there somewhere still.

the whole thing has an element of Myst/Riven looks about it.

I think it's supposed to be Delirium from Sandman:

http://www.obscure.org/~domino/images/delirium.jpg

...though if I remember correctly, Gaiman denies it in some of his introductions to the Sandman books and says Tori is more like Death. Anyway, the book where that strip is taken from does feature Delirium visiting an S/M club where a Tori Amos song is playing on the background.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/thewire/pip/4uyaw/

no Listen Again link on page but it's here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_promo.shtml
under 'The Wire'

On January 28, 2023, C.K. performed at a sold-out performance at Madison Square Garden.[210] The event was live recorded and aired on his website as the special, Louis C.K.: Back to the Garden.

Again, that's sort of my point - yes Louie CK still gets to go on tour, but he doesn't get anywhere near critical acclaim and popularity he did before he was shown to be a creep. His career is objectively worse than it was before the revelations - and that's good.

there's a difference with musicians and comedians because of the ability to tour. the institutional barrier is removed. it's a lot easier to erase i.e. kevin spacey because he has to find whole film productions that are willing to cast him. authors would seem to fall somewhere in the middle to me -- gaiman can't print physical books at scale w/o a publishing house but he could probably still sell millions of e-books w/o much overhead and could prob find a small press to print some number of paper copies. highly doubt he would see a major film production company adapt any of his work, so that income stream would probably be removed. authors can/do "tour" but not at the same scale as musicians or comedians

xp

Ryan Adams had released seven albums in the ten years before his accusations, and has apparently self-released another dozen in the five years since, so at least has material to play live.

Chris Brown has never stopped releasing records on major labels - ie the type of labels that win Grammys.

Gaiman has not generated anything new in prose in 12 years, and that was his slimmest novel. His short story adaptations of norse myths was his last new book at all, eight years ago. Ten years after Marvel announced they had bought Miracleman and that Gaiman would finish The Silver Age - three issues on top of the three that were completed 18 years previously - Bucky was brought in to "co-plot" the later issues, which finally limped out another five years after that... with writing credits for Buckingham and an announcment that he would be fully co-writing The Dark Age, which was now 30 years late. Gaiman did write a new 15-20 minute sequence in one episode of Good Omens S1, but had to hire Finnemore as co-writer for S2, and for the S3 that he earlier claimed had been plotted with Pratchett 30 years previously.

In the last few days: DC has cancelled a DM "facsimile" reprint of The Sound Of Her Wings; Netflix has announced Sandman is cancelled (with this very funny/sad effort at collateral damage control by Heinberg); the TV adaptation of Anansi Boys has been confirmed cancelled -- and last week Dark Horse (Dark Horse!!!) cancelled the comic adaptation mid-run and announced there would be no collection; Doran and the Pratchett estate announced that "it has been agreed" that Gaiman will receive no proceeds from the extremely-successfully-kickstartered Good Omens GN adaptation, and are offering refunds on full pledges or author-specific stretch items until the 7th; and it came out that Bucky asked last summer to be reassigned to WFH.

It wasn't looking super-likely that he would generate anything new again before this. He will probably have lots more time to try, now, but print publishing is not currently acting like it's looking forward to that return.

Are the exclamations on Dark Horse because it's particularly friendly to abusers, or just that they got the adaptation of a work from a writer so associated with DC?

(or, more likely, something I haven't thought of)

I saw something over the weekend that said Marvel had no plans to take The Dark Age any further at present.

Chris Brown is absolutely the poster boy for this, spent a year or so with his head down then returned straight back as if nothing had happened (an awards show iirc).

the charges against gaiman are too extreme for him to be rehabilitated. it's like cosby not louis ck

Andrew, I assume he meant because Dark Horse has been in deep financial trouble for a while now.

exclamations on Dark Horse because of how many Gaiman adaptations they have published since 2002, let alone the number of OGNs they have picked up reprint rights to

the charges against gaiman are too extreme for him to be rehabilitated. it's like cosby not louis ck

― treeship., Tuesday, February 4, 2025 1:42 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not sure i fully agree with this, but it is accurate in so far as the awful behavior is so at odds with his persona and completely opposite to what was attractive to his audience about him and his work. whereas CK and Chris Brown were already operating in media that are to some degree about being a transgressive bad boy

They had one issue left on the serialisation, and the collection would have been out before the Amazon adaptation put the title in front of tens of thousands of ppl who would not know the author’s name — a different market than their previous 150+ Gaiman products.

there's specific circumstances w/ some of these guys where i would just caution against using them as examples of how people will treat other abusers. bill cosby's lack of rehabilitation, imo, has less to do w/ the nature of the crimes and more to do w/ the fact that he's basically been on death's door for years. if he was 30 years younger and able to do a nationwide tour i'm not sure we'd have the same view on his rehabilitation.

Dude is unfathomably rich, who cares

"Are there any recent examples of this?"

mel gibson! always felt like he was too big to fail. meaning: hollywood makes too much money off of him to forsake him forever.

also "fun" to see will smith for what felt like an hour at the grammys in the tribute to QJ. he's already forgiven. for assaulting someone. in public. too big to fail!

fyi can we rein this in - we’re talking about egregious sexual assault with Neil Gaiman and not slapping someone on an awards show ffs

sorry! it was just weird to see him on another awards show so soon! like nothing happened. because he's really rich.

scott have you read the accounts of the women in these cases

Yeah, there's no comparison here.

no need to pile on scott, the thought-exercise had already been started upthread & he was just joining in — i just wanted to make sure we didn’t get too far astray in a thread that deserves solemnity

But speaking of being back on the awards shows, the other night Amanda Palmer was given an award by the women’s international music network and gave a speech. Which, considering everything, was extremely tone deaf at the very best. I do suspect Gaiman at least is going to pay the price of a ruined career for this one tbh, as noted he’s already been off the radar for awhile and this isn’t exactly going to get him on the comeback trail.

yeah no i was not making a comparison. thinking of mel gibson being accepted again in hollywood after his nazi stuff and the horrible stuff with him and women made me think of seeing will smith smiling like the old days on t.v. and i thought less of hot ones for having him on like it was the old days and they weren't allowed to ask him about the slap. and i for one was horrified by that slap. it was really violent and scary to me. and i do think will smith is an angry creep who belongs to a cult and who wants to rule the world like tom cruise and who started a scientologist school for children and swore up and down that it wasn't until parents started pulling their kids out because of all the pictures of l. ron hubbard everywhere and the school had to close. and i do think there is something going on with those kids of his too...like they know stuff. maybe i'm being paranoid. and there are the diddy party rumors about will smith...but nobody has any real proof of that.

and yeah i read most of the ny magazine piece until i had to stop because it was so horrible. it was not something that i should have read. not so i could ignore it or dismiss it. just for my own mental health. it was nightmarish. i can take horror movies but real life stuff gets to me much harder as i get older and just feel more fragile in general. what people do...is too much for me sometimes.

i would never make light of anything like this. i've been too close to people who have endured horrible things. their survival is a continued miracle.

but you're still talking about the other stuff, on here. And you could... not

(i'm just so sick of rich creeps getting away with stuff because they are rich and make other people rich. i want them all to go to friggin' space forever.)

Read that court filing and it is haunting but particularly:

207. Palmer and Gaiman knew that Scarlett was penniless and homeless.
208. Scarlett could not afford housing.
209. Scarlett could not easily afford transport off the island.
210. Scarlett could not even easily afford food.
211. Gaiman and Palmer did not forget to pay Scarlett.
212. Gaiman and Palmer intentionally withheld Scarlet's pay.
213. Gaiman and Palmer intended to have Scarlett trapped, vulnerable, and penniless.
214. Because that would leave her without a real chance to defend herself or escape.
215. It worked.

I found that format really distracting, I get (or I think I get) why it's like that, but the repetition and "drop-out" lines like 215 did my head in (as well as, rather than instead of, the horrifying content).

I'm not sure how I feel about this (probably not great), but there is a part of me that is horrified that Gaiman is, or is pretending to be for his defence, just another fuckboi dom, just another 20s lad who reads a thing and thinks "Well, I do like hurting women, and I do like it when they don't like that, and this says that there's a name for that, and it's BDSM, and it's its own thing".

I've known one, and known of a few others, who go for the "I'm your master you must obey me", and they don't usually last long (though some do!) but they can do a lot of damage, and of course they pick people with mental health issues in the first place. He says it to Scarlett, so it's not entirely a retroactive defence - though maybe he's laying the groundwork - or maybe it's just easier for him if she believes it. He surely doesn't though - the thing I'm not proud of is that alongside all of the revulsion at the scale and details of the evil, I'm aware that there's a strand of my reaction which is just "That's so stupid!". I appreciated that the Vulture article went to lengths to say "This isn't actually what BDSM is at all. AT ALL."

I completely agree about the content!

to be cynical i'd say that a lot of fuccboi "doms" aspire to be the kind of "dom" neil gaiman was (god help us, _is_).

The author says she broke her NDA by sharing her story with the media, including with New York Magazine. Wallner accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct during the time she lived and worked on his property in Woodstock.

Neil Gaiman Seeks $500,000 from Accuser Caroline Waller

https://bsky.app/profile/vulture.com/post/3lnddrkz57s2y
https://www.vulture.com/article/neil-gaiman-nda-caroline-wallner.html

I am paywalled away from this article so I haven’t read it yet

Gaiman denied that he’d abused Wallner and told New York that it was she who had initiated their sexual encounters, but in 2021, Gaiman paid Wallner $275,000 in exchange for signing an extensive nondisclosure agreement that prevents her from suing Gaiman or telling anyone about her alleged experiences with him. Now, Gaiman has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching their NDA by sharing her story with the media, including with New York Magazine. In his claim, Gaiman argued that Wallner violated the confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions of their agreement and is requesting a full repayment of their settlement amount, plus attorneys’ fees and $50,000 for each interview she’s given to the media. (Wallner’s ex-husband, who signed the NDA as well, is also named in the claim, shared with New York.)

Vincent White, Wallner’s lawyer, was surprised Gaiman had filed the claim against his client. White, an employment lawyer in New York who specializes in sexual harassment in the workplace, said that in his experience, allegedly abusive men only rarely sued women for violating NDAs because the optics were so poor. When you’re trying to silence someone who’s alleging “really heinous acts,” White said, “everyone thinks, Oh, the allegation must be true. I would think he may have come to the conclusion he has nothing left to lose.”

Just an absolutely disgusting human being, I didn't think he could get any lower:

The author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, the potter who accused him of sexual misconduct during the time she lived and worked on his property in Woodstock.

Wallner moved to Gaiman’s property in 2014 when he offered her and her ex-husband, a builder, work as caretakers. The alleged abuse occurred between 2018 and 2020, after Wallner’s marriage had fallen apart and her husband had moved out, leaving Wallner behind to take care of their three children. It was then, Wallner says, that Gaiman began to pressure her for sex in exchange for staying on the property. “‘I like our trade,’” she recalled him saying. “‘You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you.’”

Gaiman denied that he’d abused Wallner and told New York that it was she who had initiated their sexual encounters, but in 2021, Gaiman paid Wallner $275,000 in exchange for signing an extensive nondisclosure agreement that prevents her from suing Gaiman or telling anyone about her alleged experiences with him. Now, Gaiman has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching their NDA by sharing her story with the media, including with New York Magazine. In his claim, Gaiman argued that Wallner violated the confidentiality and non-disparagement provisions of their agreement and is requesting a full repayment of their settlement amount, plus attorneys’ fees and $50,000 for each interview she’s given to the media. (Wallner’s ex-husband, who signed the NDA as well, is also named in the claim, shared with New York.)

So I know nothing about NDAs, but am I correct in assuming they can't bind you once a criminal act occurs? Just typing that out it sounds impossible that this wouldn't be the case, feel a bit stupid asking.

That's my understanding.

Very telling that he's not even suing her for slander or libel or whatever, just for breaking the NDA.

And that said NDA has a "non disparagement" clause!!! Who the fuck feels the need to write a legal contract that says "you cant say I did any bad things" aside from someone whose going to do just that?

2021 was after 2020.

Granted but my point stands regardless (assuming you were nitpicking in my direction)

finally got around to selling off all my sandman TBPs on ebay (including a few hardcovers, the Dream books, and the prequel book)...bottom has really fallen out of gaiman books, I have to say, I got $55 for the lot.

Seeing lots of Gaiman bks in charity shops nowadays….along with plenty of Russell Brand…

they should do a collab

the grifter goths

Put two of his (American Gods, Norse Mythology) in a ferry "leave one take one" bookdrop. They were gone next visit. Have a handful more to donate. Conflicted about passing back Neverwhere (for the story) and The Graveyard Book (for the art), but not as much Anansi Boys and The Ocean At the End Of the Lane.

my point stands regardless

Just noting that the NDA followed the three years of bad things, it did not herald them, and that this pattern is repeated in other testimonies since the July Tortoise report. None of these women had reason to take the NDA as a warning of pending behaviour.

Non-disparagement clauses are standard in settlement agreements like these. Gaiman is a scumbag and predator, but it would be malpractice for an attorney not to include one.

I had to sign one when I got RIFed from my teaching job. I don’t feel good about it but I needed their cooperation in finding a new job so I capitulated. :(

I signed an NDA once for a short-term gig. They asked if I was uncomfortable doing so before I was hired, and I was like "whatever." Luckily it was a great office to work in, they just didn't want people leaking anything sensitive I guess.

TBH I find the whole concept of NDAs rather on the nose.

Wallner's lawyer very otm obviously — trying to enforce an NDA while also trying to claim nothing bad happened is nagl. And also the damaging information is already out there, so it's just punishment, he's mad at her.

Is that so ? I have a hard time thinking suing for NDA breach is not profitable, at least for the lawyers but not only. The reputation damage is already done in the case of Gaiman, so it's not clear him suing makes it much worse, so I'm not sure what the "bleak optics" refer to. In other cases where the optics are also bleak for the perpetrator, it still does not create an incentive to breach (Cassie - Diddy for ex). Morality obviously does not enter into it.