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Watching the current shockingly well done TV adaptation of The Sandman*, I figured a lot of things would have to be reworked to set it in 2022 instead of 1989; those were mostly handled in pretty reasonable ways. Only one thing has really made me feel old though, and it's this: in episode 9, the creepy serial-killer-fan dude now writes a blog instead of a zine.
It's not that that makes any real difference; it's just that that particular brief subplot always stuck out in my mind due to a combination of two things, which are really one thing:
1. I got very grossed out as a teenager in 1988 by running across a copy of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture anthology—a mishmash of transgressive outsider art and horrible edgelord bullshit, which was framed by pseudo-scholarly ruminations about what it all means, even though Parfrey pretty clearly just thought the horrible edgelord bullshit was cool.**
2. This subplot in The Sandman—where fascist incel ultra-creep "Philip Sitz", author of Chaste, manages to finally meet some real monsters and regrets it very much—is the only bit I know of in the series that's a gleeful Dante-style personal attack on a contemporary writer. That's Peter Sotos, who put out only two issues of Pure in the '80s and then got busted for possession of child porn, but got a worshipful profile and interview in Apocalypse Culture (so it's possible Gaiman found out about him the exact same way I did) and some ironic art cred out of it. Gaiman was clearly not amused.
I'm aware (due to the Internet) that other people figured this out too of course, but in 1990 I felt like that comic book was aiming this inside joke directly at me, in a friendly way, like: "Hey, sorry you had to find out so dramatically early on that there are a lot of unbelievable assholes mixed in with the kind of art-weirdos you're curious about. Would it help if I make one of them ironically die?"
It's not that that makes any real difference; it's just that that particular brief subplot always stuck out in my mind due to a combination of two things, which are really one thing:
1. I got very grossed out as a teenager in 1988 by running across a copy of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture anthology—a mishmash of transgressive outsider art and horrible edgelord bullshit, which was framed by pseudo-scholarly ruminations about what it all means, even though Parfrey pretty clearly just thought the horrible edgelord bullshit was cool.**
2. This subplot in The Sandman—where fascist incel ultra-creep "Philip Sitz", author of Chaste, manages to finally meet some real monsters and regrets it very much—is the only bit I know of in the series that's a gleeful Dante-style personal attack on a contemporary writer. That's Peter Sotos, who put out only two issues of Pure in the '80s and then got busted for possession of child porn, but got a worshipful profile and interview in Apocalypse Culture (so it's possible Gaiman found out about him the exact same way I did) and some ironic art cred out of it. Gaiman was clearly not amused.
I'm aware (due to the Internet) that other people figured this out too of course, but in 1990 I felt like that comic book was aiming this inside joke directly at me, in a friendly way, like: "Hey, sorry you had to find out so dramatically early on that there are a lot of unbelievable assholes mixed in with the kind of art-weirdos you're curious about. Would it help if I make one of them ironically die?"
