TV/comics/random art trauma memory

[alibi_shop]

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 perfect, and every fan will have their own thing that they're irritated about it not doing right, but I'm impressed that it's as good as it is (especially since the beginning of the comic is definitely not the best-written part).

** I did wonder for a while, later, whether my memory of Parfrey's book was unfair, like maybe there was something more insightful in it that had just gone over my head at 15; it did have a genuinely good Joe Coleman painting on the cover, at least. But I didn't wonder enough to make me want to actually ever look at that book again. And now reading this retrospective review, I feel like that was probably fine; I particularly enjoyed the massive dry understatement in the phrase "I feel like Parfrey’s mask slipped a bit here." Now that I think of it, that book probably also introduced me to the work of Howard Cruse, so, thanks? Except no thanks, because it was in the context of Parfrey spewing a bunch of homophobic crap about how Cruse's AIDS awareness poster was the most grotesque thing ever and clearly a sign of civilization losing its mind, etc., etc., good Lord man get over yourself, while I was just thinking "wow, that guy can draw really well, and is this kind of uncomfortably hot?"

Comments

[alibi_shop]

A follow-up, now that there's so much other awful context out there for anything involving this or other Gaiman works: I'll add to the chorus of recommendations for Elisabeth Sandifer's long(*) biographical/critical/psychological essay about Gaiman, "The Cuddled Little Vice", which I think does a particularly good job of talking about how a person can 1. be intentionally and unforgivably cruel, 2. have a traumatic background that probably contributed to that, which can be worth understanding not to excuse anything but to work toward a world where others don't go down the same road, and 3. still be able to recognize and make true ethical statements about other people's cruelty that overlaps with their own unacknowledged shit. That last point is the one that's most related to what I was writing about here, although Sandifer looks at it mostly in the context of the character Richard Madoc, who's a popular subject for obvious reasons. I wrote a comment there with some later thoughts I had about why Philip Sitz is in the story, and the complicated (intentionally or not) implications of the whole "Collectors" plot.

Of course, I sure do understand if no one wants to read more about any of that. What I wrote here, I think still makes sense on its own terms since it's more about the experiences of encountering various things as a reader. My last paragraph before the footnotes just reads a lot differently to me now.

(* And I do mean long—it's a full career study, with the personal stuff about the author woven through a deep dive into the works. This is part of what seems to be a staggeringly thorough book in progress about a whole generation of British comics writers who are tangentially connected to Alan Moore and Grant Morrison; I've only gotten through maybe 10% of that so far, and it's fascinating to me, but it's a lot.)