And then, naturally, there was the day my perspective on all this underwent a multiverse-shattering shift.
My mother and I had stopped by our favorite little hole-in-the-wall donut shop, conveniently located next door to the shopping bonanza that was the local Goodwill. We ordered our usuals – plain cake for her, pink frosted for me – then waited for the kindly elderly donut shop lady with the comforting helmet perm to bag them up for us. While we were waiting, a hulking, bearded beast of a man lurched over and spat out sentences laced with a kind of gut-level venom I’d never experienced before.
“The Japanese take all our lumber,” he hissed, towering over us. “All of it. Can’t trust them. Japanese.”
I remember being scared in this moment. I remember feeling cornered, hated. I remember a general sense of confusion because, even though I felt his anger, his sentences had a slurry gibberish quality to them that made no sense. I also remember that I looked to the kindly donut lady, expecting her to say or do something: She was our friend, our regular dispenser of sugary carbs. And I remember that all she did was laugh, as if this terrifying giant in front of us was a floppy-eared puppy who’d just pissed – adorably – on the rug.
My mother turned to the kindly donut lady and simply said, in her clipped way, “I won’t be coming here again.”
When we got outside, I unclenched my balled-up fists, the fingertips bright with chipped, ill-advised neon nail polish, and blurted out: “What an asshole.”
My mother met my gaze, her eyes wide and serious – no narrowing, no disapproving eyebrow-raise – and simply said, “Yes.”
Then she took my hand in hers (even though I had long claimed to be too old for that) and we went to Goodwill.
That was the day where I clearly saw, for the very first time, that it doesn’t matter what side of the “vs.” coin you choose when it comes to defining and presenting yourself: I’d never be American enough for hulky bearded man, no matter how many Bop magazines I owned. People will see you however they want, so you might as well be what you want.
I also decided to stick to the stories where Betty and Veronica just went shopping or whatever. For all the times he had to face the “vs.” dilemma, Archie never actually chose. Not really. So why should I?
# # #
After high school, I used my mutant power to escape to college in California. This was where I met Sonjia, a delightfully snarky-mouthed cinephile with little patience for low-level dumbassery. Sonjia was key in introducing me to black-and-white “real life” indie comics where people felt all their feelings and spent multiple panels having moments of extreme honesty.
She showed me Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World one hazy day when I was sprawled on her rickety dorm room bed with my arms flung over my face in a classic “Woe is me over some dumb boy drama” pose.
I immediately loved the way the book honed in on the simultaneous importance and non-importance of tiny moments between two aimless girls, the way the fragility of friendship was captured in lines like, “I just totally hate myself.” My favorite panel in the book featured Enid and Rebecca, our compelling teenage misanthropes, slumping into each other on a lonely-looking bench, looking utterly defeated. It’s right before their friendship’s about to implode in on itself and it’s the quietest, truest punch to the gut you’ll ever feel.
Upon graduation from college, my obsession with the more minutiae-laced corners of the Marvel Universe helped me land my first big job: writing and editing for a major geek-centric site about television, movies, and, yes, comic books. I was one of two female editors site-wide – and the sole female editor on my section.
I still remember one of the marketing people chirping at me, “How cool are you? A girl who likes all this stuff. That’s so... different.” I suppose that sentiment seems downright quaint now, in an era where we have, oh, I don’t know – an entire anthology dedicated to women writing about comics? But this was a decade ago: the gender breakdown at San Diego Comic-Con still erred heavily on the testosterone side, and I do remember being on the receiving end of various levels of “hey, a unicorn”-esque fascination from my male counterparts.
Because of this, I felt the need to define myself, loudly and clearly, as a certain type of geek. And when you categorize and label in geekdom, you usually do it by declaring which pop cultural products you most enjoy. When asked, I streamlined: I was a geek, man. Different, like the marketing lady said! I liked Deep Space Nine and didn’t know how to put on lipstick! Indie comics didn’t come up, cause those were, like, girly or something. If I wanted to be accepted as one of the uber-nerd tribe, I couldn’t muddy the waters by sharing all of my likes. Superheroes all the way! What’s Ghost World?
This, of course, had to shift. And this time, the shift came when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. When it happened, it was too late, a mere matter of counting down the horrible days. I found myself unable to vocalize this to people, because saying it out loud made it real. The words wouldn’t form, wouldn’t make themselves known. But maintaining a daily veneer of “everything’s fine”-ness sapped my strength like nothing else – I still remember bursting into tears in aisle fourteen of the grocery store cause I couldn’t decide which mustard was the absolute right mustard to buy, the one that was going to make me feel normal.
I started telling people. And the first person I told was Sonjia.
I remember her eyes getting big and glassy, like buffet dinner plates that have been washed into shiny oblivion. I remember that she didn’t say “It’ll be okay” or “I’m sorry” or any of those prepackaged statements that sound nice but ultimately don’t mean anything. And I remember that she squeezed my hand and asked me a few questions and then took me back to where I was comfortable, talking about other things. We shared stories about hanging out with exciting post-collegiate groups of people, at new jobs and internships.
“It’s nice to make new friends, isn’t it?”, she said.
I said, “Yes,” and secretly thought, “But none of them are you.”
Later that night, I thought about moments of extreme honesty. Moments like Enid and Rebecca on that sad bench. Moments like me finally breaking down and letting the words come out and telling Sonjia about my mom. Moments like her perfect response to my confession.
If moments like this are what we’re always chasing, then why did I keep trying to stuff myself into a confining little “vs.” box? Playing up one side of myself over the other was far more work than just being honest. So I stopped. At my job, I still wrote about superheroes, but I also wrote about Strangers in Paradise and Lynda Barry, and the entire circa 2000 output of Oni Press.
Shockingly, no one doubted my nerd cred: that was a perception I’d built up in my own mind, a barrier I crafted out of my intense fear of not being taken seriously. I was glad to be done with it.
I even got a couple of my dude co-workers into Ghost World.
# # #
I did not have a conclusion to this piece until two days ago. In theory, I know why I’ve been able to fully move on from “Who would win in a fight?” Even though the Internet is often still home to these battles, it’s also connected and opened up fandom in such a way that the pressure to box yourself on one side or another doesn’t seem as prevalent. Now I know other mixed race kooks who once dreamed of having mutant powers. Now I know plenty of ladies who follow Terry Moore and Batwoman with equal gusto. And now I know that championing one thing by denigrating the other is almost always harmful – and a bad argument to boot.
I became aware of my distaste for the idea of “vs.” when faced with Lois Lane vs. Oracle. But the thought of actually rejecting this idea didn’t fully solidify for me until earlier this week, when I was sitting on a stage being filmed for an episode of ComiCenter, a web show dedicated to discussing issues in the comics industry and fandom. I had been summoned there, along with three other nerdy ladies, to talk about some recent controversies in geek girldom.
One of the hosts said something about how a ce
rtain prominent geek girl TV host should be “the standard” for geek girldom and then contrasted her with another female host who he apparently found lesser in some way. The four of us nearly jumped out of our chairs, pointing out that pitting women against each other in some kind of “vs.” match isn’t cool – and besides, we’re all very different and proud of it.
There is no standard. There shouldn’t be.
One of us is a self-described Sith who cosplays as Lady Vader. One of us has an extensive collection of swords in her home (and at least two lightsabers in her car trunk). One of us threw an elaborate Firefly-themed birthday party and transformed her living room into Captain Mal’s Serenity. And one of us really wishes there was an X-Men storyline wherein Jean Grey and Emma Frost became best friends and went shopping together (a la Betty and Veronica).
Sitting on stage alongside one another, we were all willing to share these things, to be nothing less than ourselves. There was no downplaying different pieces of our fandoms or personalities because they might not fit with what people perceive as “geek girl.” There was no dissing each other because we might disagree on which Star Wars comics are the best. There was no “vs.,” no “Who would win in a fight?”
Instead, we all presented ourselves on our own terms. And we all won.
A Road that has No Ending: Revenge in Sandman
Sarah Monette lives in an 105-year-old house with a great many books, two cats, one grand piano, and one husband. She has published more than 40 short stories, and has two short story collections out: The Bone Key (Prime Books 2007, with a shiny second edition in 2011) and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (Prime Books, 2011). She has written two novels (A Companion to Wolves, Tor Books, 2007; The Tempering of Men, Tor Books, 2011) and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace. Her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, will come out from Tor under the name Katherine Addison. Visit her online at sarahmonette.com.
There are many reasons I love Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: the depth and richness of the world(s) Gaiman and his artists create; the characters, both human and otherwise, who are by turns wise, funny, sad, and sometimes breathtakingly stupid; the delicate intricacy of the plots, both within issues, storyarcs, and within Sandman as a whole; the way in which ideas, themes, problems may be put down for a while, but are never entirely forgotten. I love the vast scope of the material he uses, from classical mythology to John Aubrey to the Chordettes. And I love Gaiman’s intense metafictional awareness of the story he’s telling and the genres he’s using to tell it, the way that his stories always comment on storytelling. I love that Sandman is morbid and that it is gruesome and that neither of these qualities interfere when it decides to be heart-rending.
There are also many reasons I love revenge tragedy. Revenge tragedy is a genre of play that flourished in English theaters between, roughly, 1592 and 1642. It’s not actually the kind of thing you think of when you use the words “tragedy” and “play” in the same sentence; you’ll get much closer to the distinctive flavor of revenge tragedy if you think of it as horror movies for the stage. Like horror movies, revenge tragedy is in love with the grim, the ghastly, the grotesque; people drop like flies in revenge tragedy, and the bloodier and more exotic their deaths, the better. Characters die from kissing poisoned corpses in revenge tragedy.
These would be some of the reasons I love it.
Which, I suppose, would lead you to wonder about me and whether I am safe to sit next to.
I’m a horror writer, among other things, and one of the things horror writers have in common is our taste for the morbid. (“I have the heart of a small boy,” Robert Bloch once said. “I keep it in a jar on my desk.”) As far as I can tell, this propensity is in-built; certainly, in my case, it was deep-rooted and blooming great carnivorous flowers well before I reached puberty. The first story I ever tried to write was a horror story.
I can’t explain the well-spring of my love for horror, but I can suggest some reasons why – while its popularity has ebbed and flowed over the course of human civilization – it never entirely goes away. At its root, horror is about the fear of death, which is something we all have to contend with. But more than that, horror gives us access to a part of our psyche we normally keep bricked up (like Fortunato from Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”). We have to keep it bricked up, or that human civilization thing I mentioned would never have gotten off the ground, but at the same time, it’s not a good idea not to go down there into the cellars and talk to it occasionally. Sigmund Freud said some very stupid and toxic things, but one thing he got right was the idea of the return of the repressed. The harder you try to bury something, the more it tries to claw its way out of the ground.
There’s a lovely meta encapsulation of horror as a genre in the sixth issue of Sandman, “24 Hours.” When John Dee forces one of his victims to tell the truth about herself (“Hour 12: It Is Time For Them To Get To Know Each Other Better”), the story that this nice, middle-class woman – a woman you’d think had no darkness in her soul at all – tells is a horror story. All the gory trappings of horror, the monsters and the madmen and the heart-pounding fear, are a way of forcing us to face up to the part of ourselves we keep bricked in the cellar. Revenge tragedy knows this, and Sandman knows it, too.
I was introduced to Sandman before I encountered revenge tragedy, thanks to my first boyfriend’s evangelical fervor. He adored comics and in his whole-hearted, geeky desire to share his passion, he would tell me for hours about whatever comic he’d been reading most recently. He told me more about Justice League 1990-1992 than I and the entire Library of Congress ever needed to know. But he also told me about Sandman and – greater love hath no man – let me read the issues that he had. Justice League didn’t click with me, but Sandman did. Although I never collected comics, I bought the Sandman collections as they came out, and two of my dearest possessions are A Game of You and The Kindly Ones, which Neil Gaiman signed for me.
So I loved Sandman, but it was revenge tragedy that, for a time, took over my life. The more revenge tragedies I read, the more I loved them: their moral ambiguity, their morbid ingenuity, their shameless wallowing in gore. In the intensely respectable field of early modern English literature, revenge tragedy capers like a demon toddler, smearing blood on the walls and shrieking with half-hysterical laughter. I realized I could write about horror, which is possibly my truest, deepest love in all literature, and yet write a dissertation that was impeccably academic. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on ghosts in revenge tragedy, discussing plays like The Spanish Tragedy, The Changeling, The Revengers Tragedy, The Atheist’s Tragedy. And, of course, Hamlet, which might have been devised as a blueprint for how revenge tragedy should run: complicated plots, madness, multiplying revengers, and – the thing that everyone knows about Elizabethan drama – the stage covered with corpses at the end. It’s gruesome, but it’s also an integral part of what makes the genre tick.
Revenge tragedy’s point is that murder is a contamination; the more people you kill, the more people have to die. The saddest characters in revenge tragedy are those who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like Ophelia. Loki says to Carla at the end of Part Five of The Kindly Ones, “And do you know your tragedy, Carla? It’s that, for all your goodwill, for all your willingness to help, you never knew what any of this was about, what was going on. You don’t know how it ends. And you’ll never get to find out.” Carla’s horrible death marks the genre she has become trapped in; like Ophelia, Carla dies for someone else’s revenge.
It doesn’t take much to see that The Kindly Ones is a revenge tragedy. Lyta Hall gets her revenge on Morpheus, and in the process destroys the Dreaming and everything she cares about. She is a revenger. She is also, like Laertes in Hamlet, a patsy, a puppet for forces which she cannot understand – and which she makes no effort to understand. The tiny pocket universe in which Lyta and Hector live
in The Doll’s House is a perfect symbol of Lyta’s own mind: closed, airless, and impervious to reality.
(I am not a fan of Lyta Hall.)
But at the same time, Lyta could not achieve her apocalyptic revenge if Morpheus had not also played into the hands of the Eumenides, the “kindly ones,” those terrible personified forces out of ancient Greek mythology and tragedy... and the truth, of course, is that tragedy and mythology, in ancient Greece, were very nearly the same thing – as are tragedy and horror. And Gaiman does a brilliant thing, because Morpheus’s hamartia (to use a word from Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, a word which can be translated as mistake, or flaw, or sin) is the same as Lyta’s.
Morpheus cannot forgive.
Morpheus, too, is a revenger.
We see this immediately, in the first issue of Sandman. The first thing Morpheus does when he escapes imprisonment is to take his revenge on his captor, Alex Burgess. We see it again and again throughout Sandman’s run. He revenges and he does not forgive. Richard Madoc, Nada, Orpheus, Lyta herself. Morpheus is capable of compassion, although he’s not very good at it, but he does not, cannot forgive. In the end, he cannot forgive himself.
When Abel says, in The Wake, that what they’re mourning is a point of view, I think it is this, specifically, that he means. The point of view that was too rigid to bend, that could only revenge, not forgive. The point of view that was Morpheus and not Daniel.
And it’s interesting that it’s Abel who says it, not only because it’s a secret, but because Cain and Abel are themselves a revenge tragedy that never makes it past Act I. Over and over, throughout Sandman, Cain kills Abel, and Abel comes back to life. Over and over, Abel fails to take, or even contemplate, revenge. One may think – as Cain says loudly and often – that Abel is weak and stupid, but we see the obverse side of Abel’s forgiveness when Cain, prickly and pompous and bullying, comes to Daniel to get Abel back. And when bullying won’t work – Daniel is gentle in a way Morpheus never was, but he’s not weak – Cain actually begs, and we learn that, as necessary as Cain is to Abel, Abel is no less necessary to Cain. Where revenge begets nothing but more revenge, Abel’s forgiveness is recognized and returned as a kind of love.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 22