And I think it is not an accident that the way Morpheus deliberately opens the door for his own death is through an act of forgiveness: granting death to Orpheus. Because Daniel, from the beginning of his reign as Dream, forgives. He forgives Alex Burgess. He forgives Richard Madoc. He forgives Lyta Hall. And with each forgiveness Daniel offers, we are shown another place where Morpheus, because he could not change or bend, created a dead end for himself. In the end, we understand that Morpheus had to die, not because the Kindly Ones were pursuing him, but because he had backed himself into a corner where he had no other options. He says to William Shakespeare in the final Sandman issue (“The Tempest”), “I do not change,” which neatly sidesteps the question of can’t vs. won’t. And in the end, for Morpheus, it turns out to be the same thing.
He could not forgive.
Daniel can.
Revenge tragedies do not end on notes of hope, for no one can walk away from being a revenger. The plays end with most, if not all, of the characters dead. The survivors are most often grief-sick, blood-sick, like Horatio in Hamlet, alive only because Hamlet insisted that someone remain to tell the story. They end, in other words, where The Kindly Ones ends, and possibly the thing I love most about Sandman is that it does not end with The Kindly Ones. It talks about what happens after the story is over, both the grief and the rebuilding. It gives us a space to understand Morpheus as well as to mourn him.
The Wake also deconstructs the story of Sandman, as Gaiman has been doing all along. Morpheus has been the central character, but the story does not end with his death; the other characters – his friends, his lovers, his enemies, his victims – all have to figure out what they’re going to do, now that he’s gone. Morpheus chose – and was chosen by – tragedy, but it is not the only genre at work, and Gaiman suggests it isn’t even the most powerful one. Cain can kill Abel, but he cannot make Abel hate him.
“You sought vengeance,” Daniel says to Lyta. “But that is a road that has no ending.” And he gives her the opposite of the Mark of Cain (which we saw perfectly plainly on Cain’s forehead in Season of Mists) – for while, as with the Mark of Cain, Daniel’s mark means that no one will harm her, he also tells her, “Put your life together once again. Go in peace.”
The older I get, the more interested I become in stories that try to talk about what happens after the story is over, stories that understand that all endings are artificial, even tragic ones. And thus the final thing I love about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is that after all the tragedy and catastrophe, loss and disaster and failure... after all this, it ends with a beginning.
Mutants
Marjorie M. Liu is an attorney, and a New York Times-bestselling author of paranormal romances and urban fantasy. In the world of comic books, she is also the writer of Astonishing X-Men, NYX: No Way Home, Black Widow, X-23, and Dark Wolverine. She lives in the American Midwest and Beijing, China. For more information, please visit her website at marjoriemliu.com or follow her on Twitter: @marjoriemliu
I remember, I remember so well – the title, that first page, a splash for the contents of the story to follow, and those words, words that hit my teenage heart a little too close:
My father bleeds history.
My father bleeds. I bleed. We bleed. All of us, together, in that book – the first graphic novel I ever read, and maybe the most powerful novel, prose or illustrated, that I have ever read.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.
My first step. No capes. No powers. Just truth. About the Holocaust and its survivors, and the children of those survivors.
Some stories, some histories, are too awful – too incomprehensibly terrible – to explain through words alone.
This is why I love comics.
# # #
Here, take a moment for a different history.
In the 1930s and ’40s, comic book characters such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman provided escapist, crime-fighting fantasies. Men leapt over tall buildings, caped vigilantes prowled the streets, golden lassos compelled the truth.
Stories, however, changed after America’s involvement in the second World War. Hundreds of thousands of comic books were being shipped to service personnel, and current affairs trickled into the lives of super-powered heroes. No retreat from reality, on the part of the comic book industry. No way to ignore what the world had become.
Even America’s triumph at winning the war was short-lived. We had a nuclear weapon – but then, the Russians acquired one, too. Communists became our new foes, and the Korean War cemented our sense of vulnerability. Comic books offered few escapist fantasies where it concerned the portrayal of American soldiers. On those pages, men dropped like flies, and fears of death were described in graphic detail.
Comic books geared towards the mainstream reflected a society that now dreaded the true, physical destruction of the world – the American world, that is – by nuclear weapons, war, or a foreign power out to conquer.
Heroes were created who could battle the people responsible for these terrible threats – villains who sought to bring about an end, an apocalypse. They told stories from the points of view of a society unwilling to face the end-times. Stories about men and women with the strength to prevent such apocalypses – or survive them with honor.
Even when life is at its bleakest – there is hope.
A hero comes, and we are saved.
# # #
Also, there’s a girl.
There’s always a girl. Only this one is raised in a lab, manufactured by scientists for a single purpose:
To kill.
Imagine that. Imagine the loneliness of that life, and the coldness. No love. No kindness. No compassion allowed. The girl is stripped of her humanity in order to become a thing that will follow orders. She is conditioned to tolerate pain, and abuse, in all its most terrible forms.
Yet, there is a part of her that remains unbroken – that still thinks, and feels. Even if she does not understand those feelings.
The girl wants to understand, and she wants to be free – if she can figure out what freedom means.
She is X-23.
She is an assassin, but there are spies in her world, too – and thieves, and men with claws in their hands, and women who can read minds and walk through walls. Good people. Bad people. Crazy, otherworldly, people. Hundreds, thousands, each one with a life inside a comic book, suffering prejudice and broken hearts, forbidden love, uncontrolled power, terrible danger.
Someone’s world is always ending. Someone’s world is always being saved, against incredible odds. And always, the bonds of friendship become as strong as the bonds of blood, built on sacrifice and hard choices.
This is what I remember when I write. Heroes are those we can admire without apology, and the privilege of participating in their journey, both as reader and creator, is that we are also granted moments when we live as heroes with them.
# # #
Simple, really.
We love stories about heroes.
We talk about how the modern world is an unfriendly place. The world has always been unfriendly. We fear devastation, and yet we embrace stories that show us an endless parade of apocalyptic futures. We fear the end-times, but we create them in our fantasies. We face evil. We search darkness.
And we discover the power that comes from mastering the darkness.
We live with the heroes of those stories, and watch them overcome malevolence and destruction. We become empowered, inspired, through their strength and determination.
If pop culture is an institutional religion reaffirming the values of the masses, then the continued existence of comic books and superheroes, and the resurgence of them on film and television, reflects well on our society – which is so often painted in shades of gloom and doom. Indeed, our obsession with the end of the world in popular media is as much an obsession with heroes.
A reflection on our own hunger to matter, and make a difference.
Life is precious, and precarious. W
e cling to this rock and each other, and dream for the best. We search for revelations – often in what frightens us the most, whether that is the apocalypse or some quieter devastation: isolation, heartbreak, loss.
This is why I love stories.
From a young age, I remember reports about bombs and wars, outbreaks of disease, murder-sprees – leaving me concerned that some force beyond my control would steal away all I cared about most. I took solace in heroes – who overcame, who took control, who did what was necessary – without losing the humanity that made them great.
It will never be the end of the world. Not in the true, physical sense. Not unless some cosmic accident blows our planet to smithereens. Not until our sun goes supernova, five billion years from now. If humans are wiped out tomorrow, the planet will spin onward, and life will keep busy, and another intelligent species will take our place and dream their own heroes.
But the end of our existence isn’t the point, not in any fantasy. It is what we do when it falls apart that matters to us.
What do we do? What do heroes do?
Heroes are varied, some flesh and blood, others who have never existed beyond the page or screen, or some storyteller’s tongue. Some are human, some are mutants and vampires, or aliens. Some heroes are children with quick wits. Throw in a dog or two.
What they all show us is hope. What they show us is that we, as a people who love them, are hopeful.
We can do anything, with hope.
Hope is our superpower.
This is why I love comics.
You’re on the Global Frequency
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo and Sturgeon Award-winning author of – most recently – The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette), Grail, and The Sea Thy Mistress. She lives in Massachusetts with a giant ridiculous dog, and spends rather a lot of her life on planes.
I grew up in Snowtown.
Not exactly the Snowtown of the inside of Warren Ellis’s head – the Snowtown that features as the antagonist in his-and-Ben-Templesmith’s brilliant, intermittent, intentionally low-budget little nine-panel-to-the-page comic FELL – but a real-world version: a little less violent, a little less weird, a little less urban. But just as poor, and just as hopeless, and just as full of people who were going nowhere and didn’t exactly understand how they’d missed the bus to life.
The secret is kind of simple: There are places where that bus doesn’t run, anymore. Or any buses at all – even the less figurative one. Where there are no city services; no social services; where in some places the infrastructure has failed to the level of Elizabethan London, and nobody is coming to fix it.
My neighborhood in Rockville, Connecticut, was one of those places, back when I lived there. Okay, there was city water... but there were collapsed retaining walls and burnt-out houses, as well. A failed municipality, a derelict milltown, it had actually been absorbed by the neighboring town of Vernon. So it was a town that wasn’t even a town, and while it had its better neighborhoods, the street where I lived was, not to put too fine a point on it, a half-step up from a rookery – decaying three-story mill-worker’s housing broken up into apartments, inhabited by the usual assortment of poor families, dysfunctional families, local color, the mentally ill, the substance-addicted, unemployed men cleaning their guns on the stoop on hot days, and people outside of the confines of regular society for whatever reason. (We were the queer family who yelled a lot. You go where they’ll rent to you.)
There are things about a town with a totally collapsed economy that are a bit different from your standard suburbia, but the thing was, those of us who lived there were aware that it was a slum... but we were also aware that it was where we lived. Our neighborhood.
That’s one of the things that I find compelling about FELL. Ellis captures that sense of neighborhood, even in a book that is largely about the horrors of a town that wider society has abandoned. He brings in that sense that it is a community – a community full of people who may be powerless, but that does not mean they do not care.
True, my town was devoid of creepy recurring nuns in Nixon masks – and I don’t think Rockville actually had a malevolent intelligence behind its decay, as Snowtown seems to – but I think that very real tension of people going about their lives and dreaming their dreams in the belly of the beast is symptomatic of the thing I find most compelling about Ellis’s work.
Which is its peculiar, bleak, indomitable humanism.
To stay on FELL – and its titular character, Detective Richard Fell (yes, I rather imagine it’s intentional that his name is also a sentence) – for a moment, this is evident in the unusual nature of Fell’s heroism. He’s tired, and broken, and an egoist, and he’s facing impossible odds in a struggle he seems bound to lose. He’s been sent down from the nameless city to which Snowtown serves as slum and dump and charnel ground for an unnamed sin, which he characterizes as having done a good thing.
He despairs and he’s brutal and he does not play by the rules, because where he lives there aren’t any rules. When Fell arrives in Snowtown, someone immediately calls him “devil cop.” The first person who is kind to him also (literally) brands him – on the neck, with a mystic symbol intended to keep him safe. And this is par for the course in Richard Fell’s life.
In Snowtown, he – and so, we – finds a girl whose physically abusive alcoholic father is the best thing in her life. We meet a police lieutenant who “doesn’t care” how Fell does his job and who “takes a lot of pills.” We encounter a woman distraught because her husband left her for the family dog, and a child whose father keeps her in an attic and injects feces under her skin.
(FELL has a lot of recurring images of fathers and children and the legacies of the former to the latter – almost all of them painfully toxic. Although there is Fell’s not-quite-girlfriend Mayko’s father, who left her a bar.)
This is all part of the normal run of events in this cold city on the borderlands of unreality and Hell.
Fell actually can’t do much about most of this evil: The majority of it is so far beyond his power to affect that the only sane response – the response of just about every other person, besides Fell – is to shrug, feel bad, and move on.
What makes Fell a hero – a “good man” as Mayko puts it – is that he looks at all this world of misery... and he does not look down. He finds ways to fight back, to throw a crumb of comfort and justice to anyone he can. He responds to Snowtown by becoming as arbitrary and unfair as Snowtown itself – but under the circumstances, there is a heroism in that.
Fell keeps struggling to understand the people around him, to help them, to preserve as many of them as possible in the face of more awfulness and indifferent malevolence than any human will can withstand. It is simply – and indelibly – a refusal to surrender to evil, no matter what the personal cost of fighting on.
No matter how tired he gets. Because somebody has to do it. And he happens to be the guy who is standing there.
My favorite issue revolves around Fell’s day off: Having ruined his only two decent suits (through the simple expedient of having been knifed twice in his first two weeks on the job), he stops by a thrift shop. This being Snowtown, realm of coincidence and very slight unreality (and nuns in Nixon masks), the thrift shop is also a little bit of a magic shop. It’s staffed and owned by an elderly woman who is selling, among other things, the possessions left to her by her father (fathers again, and legacies). Which include his suits.
We also learn that Fell has nothing from his own father, because his older brother absconded with it all – not because he wanted it, but because Fell did.
Being taken with Fell (who is both a perceptive and a personable man, in his own quizzical, reactively violent sort of way), she offers him one of her father’s suits to try on, insisting that it won’t matter if it’s a bit too large. “My momma always said, how a man wears a suit is about the man, not the fit.” Which might ser
ve as a sort of allegorized thematic statement for the entire (so far incomplete) work, come to think of it – but more on that later.
Because when Fell enters the changing room, he discovers it is already occupied – by an older gentleman in a plaid shirt with a home-made bomb strapped around his waist.
“I’m a suicide bomber,” he says to Fell.
And Fell, with Midwestern deadpan aplomb, replies, “I can see that.”
The ensuing, more or less eerily calm and reasoned conversation between Fell and the bomber (Jeff) and the elderly woman (Ellen) ranks as one of my favorite moments in all of comicdom. It transpires that Jeff wants to destroy Ellen’s shop (and Ellen) because – as a sort of charitable sideline to the thrift store business – Ellen gives away guns to the elderly and afraid, and one of those guns was used to shoot Jeff’s brother while he was robbing someone’s home. Fell reminds Jeff that he still had everything his brother left him – “the music, the games, the things he touched” – and distracts him sufficiently to pull off a last-minute save that is as elegant in its simplicity – and stupid bravery – as it is in its brutality.
Fell may be a “good” man – but he’s not a nice one. And not everything he does is morally unambiguous. In fact, some of his most heroic acts are also his most indefensible – for example, when he brutalizes a killer, frames him for another crime, and then informs the city of Snowtown itself that for every one of Fell’s it takes without justice being served, Fell will take back one of its.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 23