Neil Gaiman: "Lookin' like a Gothy Bob Dylan"

Neil Gaiman

Lookin' Like a Gothy Dylan

Photo by Eric Ogden

(Image from The New Yorker)

Some scholar over at the Milton List alerted us (an ecletic group of misfits) to Dana Goodyear's New Yorker piece on Neil Gaiman, "Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's fantasies."

Goodyear's is a mostly engaging portrait of Gaiman that incidently also alerted me to the news that Gaiman probably has more women fans than male readers. I'm not sure what that says about me, especially since he's particularly popular among female Goths, starting with his early career as a DC Comic-book writer:

"Young women dressed in black and black eyeliner would walk into the comic store and pick up 'Sandman' and just walk out."

So says Karen Berger, Gaiman's editor at DC Comics, back when he was writing the Sandman series. I've still not read The Sandman, so I suppose that I'm not yet one for eyeliner. About Gaiman's career as a comic-book writer, Goodyear quotes another writer:

"He's got incredible storytelling drive," the novelist Michael Chabon, who has written extensively about comics, says. "The stories just exfoliate off each other, and mythology and folklore are so confidently and freely appropriated, with such chutzpah."

Goodyear doesn't bother to identify Chabon because she assumes that all readers will recognize the name. I do, because my oldest brother gave me his well-read copy of Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but I couldn't dredge up his 'unpronounceable' (for me) name the other day when I was alone in Seoul's biggest bookstore. Chabon tells us how to pronounce it:

"Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi."

Thanks, man. How are those pronounced? But I'm talking about Gaiman, and so is Goodyear, who opens her portrait with this gambit:

In "The New Mother," a children's story published by Lucy Clifford in 1882, two previously well-behaved little girls turn so bad -- dousing the fire and breaking the clock and dancing on the butter -- that their mother is forced to go away, and a new mother, a demon with two glass eyes and a horrible wooden tail, comes to take her place. At the story's end, the girls flee to the forest to live; they miss their mother terribly and long in vain for the chance to redeem themselves. Sometimes, at night, they sneak back to their old cottage, where through the window they can see the glint of the new mother's glass eyes.

Gothic horror was thoroughly out of fashion in children’s literature when, in the early nineteen-nineties, the writer Neil Gaiman began to work on "Coraline," a book aimed at "middle readers" -- aged nine to twelve -- in which he reimagined Clifford's demon as "the other mother," an evil and cunning anti-creator who threatens to destroy his young protagonist. "The idea was, look, if the Victorians can do something that deeply unsettles kids, I should be able to do that, too," he told me recently.

I've read both stories but never made the connection, just as I didn't notice that The Graveyard Book is a retelling of Kipling's Jungle Book. I'm suddenly struck as I write this by how 'Calvinist' Clifford's story is -- it's about damnation, expulsion from the 'garden' with no means of redemption for the preterite. Gaiman's Coraline, on the other hand, is about self-redemption by outsmarting the demon. Children love the book:

Gaiman reported to the nursery, where there was a long crafts table covered with bins of pompoms, googly eyes, and crayons . . . . Gaiman stood at one end of the table.

"I wrote 'Coraline,'" he said.

"Yay," a few of the children said, mechanically.

Gaiman ventured that some of them might have seen the movie and been frightened.

A tiny five-year-old in a cape looked up. "I was scared by it," he said. "I was really scared."

"My cousin, who's one, she was screaming," another child said.

Well . . . maybe not all children love the story, unless a wildly screaming one-year-old means "I like this very much!" I ought to say, children who can read love the book. I can read, and I loved it.

But I've said enough. Go forth and read for yourself -- and discover why Milton fans like Neil Gaiman. Meanwhile, a special Gypsy Scholar award to the reader who can identify the quote in today's blogpost heading . . .

Geoff Boucher on cartoonist Jerry Robinson's "serendipitous meeting"

Jerry Robinson

(Image from LA Times Blogs)

The Korea Herald had the above photo of cartoonist Jerry Robinson in its weekend issue, along with an article so interesting that I had to find the original in the Los Angeles Times, but I found the even more original in the LA Times Blogs, where Geoff Boucher has posted his full article "'Joker' creator Jerry Robinson reflects on Gotham and the golden age" (and see a video on Boucher's interview with Robinson).

One thing that caught my attention was Boucher's reference to a book that I read last year:

Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Joe Shuster, Mac Raboy, Lou Fine and Robinson are some of . . . young Jewish artists who became the basis for the ink-stained dreamers in Michael Chabon's wistful, Pulitzer-winning novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay."

Readers may recall that I referred to that novel on this blog some time back, though I never wrote a full review.

But something that struck me even more powerfully in Boucher's article was the significance of chance occurrences in our lives. Robinson was 17 in 1939, had just graduated from high school, and was working so hard at earning money for college by pedaling around as a bicycle ice-cream salesman that his mother -- alarmed that her son weighed under 90 pounds -- insisted that he take a break at a resort in the Catskill Mountains. He took her advice and went to the resort, where he relaxed by playing tennis. The weather must have been cool, for he was wearing a white painter's jacket decorated with his own cartoons while warming up on the court:

"That was a fad then, kids would get these linen jackets with all the pockets and personalize them with all this razzmatazz," he recalled. "I was wearing mine as a warm-up jacket and someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked, 'Hey, who drew that stuff?' It was Bob Kane, who had just finished the first issue of Batman [which was "Detective Comics" No. 27]. I didn't even know what that was. He showed me the issue that was on sale there at the local village. I wasn't very impressed."

Robinson, however, was impressed with Kane's offer of a drawing-table job in New York. The teenager had been accepted at three universities and had planned on Syracuse, but after the serendipitous meeting, he phoned Columbia in the city and said he was on the way.

He certainly was, for he became so involved with the Batman series that he is often credited with creating the Joker . . . though this 'origins-story' remains disputed in its details.

At any rate, I was impressed and showed the Korea Herald's copy of Boucher's article to my daughter, who tells me that one of her three career choices is to become a cartoonist. I told her, "You've got the talent. Now, you've just got to get some luck."

Looking back over my own career, I can't identify any lucky moment, but I had an even more serendipitous meeting that utterly transformed my life . . . so I can't complain.

The Escapist

The Escapist

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some alert reader might have inferred from a reference in "Dreams of My Absent Father" that I'm reading Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

That inference would be correct.

Among the amazing things that Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman do is to create the Escapist, a comic-book superhero with the ability to escape all sorts of dire circumstances, not just the chains that you see him breaking out of in the image above.

Although the Escapist uses his powers for good, I'm reminded of that prototypical 'escapist', the superantihero in John Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan, who escapes from his chains on the burning lake, then escapes further through the Gates of Hell itself on his mission to thwart God's purposes.

But that's probably a stretch, even though Chabon does delve into religious traditions and also note the flawed character of some superheros, including that of the Escapist himself, for the Escapist is a reformed cad, whereas Satan in Milton's epic is well on his way to achieving the apotheosis of cadhood. I mean, look how he treats Eve! Just out and out abandons her! And when he re-encounters his first love, the no-longer-lovely Sin, he doesn't even recognize that paramour!

But to be serious for a brief moment, I'm really enjoying Chabon's book and even learning a lot about American popular culture of the 1930s through 1950s. For instance, just yesterday, I happened across a news article by Joseph B. Frazier on David Hajdu's book The Ten-¢ent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. If I'd not been reading Chabon's novel, I'd not have known the historical reference in Frazier's headline "When comic books were under attack."

I have yet to finish Chabon's novel, and with the Kyung Hee semester beginning today, I feel the bonds of duty tightening, limiting my freedom to read leisurely, leaving me wishing that I could escape...

Dreams of My Absent Father: An Anecdote not on Race but Inheritance

Kavalier and Clay?

Well, every boy loves an adventure...

(Image from Wikipedia)

My Uncle Cranford was three years younger than my father, so they shared their boyhood years together and were close, providing Cranford with a perspective on my father that I never had due to his absence from my life.

Yesterday, I received from Uncle Cranford an interesting email relating an anecdote about a memorable Christmas around 1945 that he shared with Bradley on the isolated family farm on the edge of the wild:

Christmas didn't start out very well. The week previously our mother had to go to Little Rock for an "operation," -- I'm not sure which one, but believe it to be a cancer surgery. She took my younger sister [i.e., Virginia] with her to my aunt Cora's (paternal aunt) to keep her during the surgery and recuperation.

The rest of us kids still at home were scattered among various relatives, except for Buel who stayed to tend the farm. Bradley and I were farmed out to my aunt Bertha (maternal), her husband Earl Harbor, and their four children, all older than we two. During that pre-Christmas time they treated us well, fed us apples from their storage basement, and we were having a good time.

Bradley (age 9) and I (age 6) would look at the big Christmas tree, glistening with ornaments, and piled high with presents, and imagining what was there. We just knew at least one each of them would be for us. After all, Santa wouldn't forget good little boys. I will now let Bradley tell what happened, as he related it to my wife Linda Gay, a few years before he passed away.

"The days before Christmas we would look at that big, beautiful tree and all the pile of presents, and Cranford's eyes would shine as he dreamed of what his would be.

Christmas morning after breakfast, aunt Bertha said, 'Come in children, and see what Santa brought us.'

I held Cran on my lap and everyone except us was opening gifts -- lots of gifts, and the pile kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Pretty soon there were just two left, and I thought 'There's nothing for us.'

Sure enough, the last were opened and we didn't get a thing. I looked at Cran and big old tears were filling his eyes. I thought of our tree at home, and just got madder and madder. I said to Cran, 'Get your coat, we're going home.'"

Here, Uncle Cranford picks up the tale again:

We got our coats and started for the door. Aunt Bertha asked, "Where are you boys going?"

Bradley, my big brave brother said, "WE'RE GOING HOME!!!! WE'VE GOT SOME PRESENTS THERE!!!!"

She tried to talk us out of it, but away we went. As we were leaving, I heard her say, "We should have gotten those boys something."

Away we went, walking the six miles home, happy about going home and finding our two gifts.

When we walked in the door, brother Buel was sprawled out on the couch with his feet propped up, with a big box of mom's candy in his lap. He said, "What are you boys doing home."

Bradley said, "We came for our presents."

Buel asked how we were going to eat. Bradley told him he could cook. Buel said, "Well, you guys can do the chores too, I'm going to my cousin Ordean's," saddled up his horse and left.

For two glorious weeks we did the chores, played with our toys (airplane & cap pistol each), ate lots of scrambled eggs, sausage, gravy and homemade biscuits (and anything else we could find), made popcorn balls, played checkers and Old Maid, went hunting when we wanted, ate all the Christmas candy mom had stashed away, got up when we wanted, went to bed when we wanted, and no one to tell us what we could or couldn't do.

Uncle Cranford then comments:

My wife cried when Bradley told that tale, with a lot of flair and emphasis, not expressed in my recital here. I learned a few truths from this incident. First, I could trust Bradley to do anything he set his mind to do, then as long as he was with me, everything was right in the world no matter what, and last of all, Santa brings better gifts to folks with a little money than he does to poor folks. I guess he likes them better.

This is a touching story of two brothers devoted to each other, and it raises a central question in my mind: What happened to that 9-year-old Bradley? Where did he go? If he had been the father to me that he was the brother to Cranford, I'd have similarly good memories of closeness. I have a few good memories, but none of fatherly closeness or real trust.

I'm not saying that he did nothing for me. As I've noted once before on this blog, he did realize, when I was about a year old, that if he and my mother tried to keep me on the baby formula any longer, which I could not keep down, then I'd starve to death.

As he once explained to me, he'd said:

"'I believe that boy's starving to death,' so I threw out the formula and fixed you a big plate of scrambled eggs. You ate them all and cried for more, so I fixed more . . . and more."

From mere skin and bones, I grew fat -- not obese, but fat like a baby should be.

Without Bradley's decisive action, I might not have survived my infancy, so I perhaps owe him my life . . . but I don't remember that incident and only know it from the retelling.

Sometimes, the moments most crucial to our lives lie outside our memories. In Michael Chabon's novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, one of the two main characters, Sammy Clay, is sitting in a shvitz -- which seems to be Yiddish for "sauna" and perhaps is related to the English word "sweat," but don't quote me -- with his immigrant, largely absent father during one of the man's brief, very infrequent visits home, and after a long silence, his father suddenly speaks:

Then his father said, "I know you had polio." Sammy was surprised; his father sounded extremely angry, as though ashamed that he had been sitting there all this time when he was supposed to be relaxing, working himself into a rage. "I was there. I finded you on the steps of the building. You were pass out."

"You were there? When I got polio?"

"I was there."

"I don't remember that."

"You were a baby."

"I was four."

"So, you were four. You don't remember."

"I would remember that."

"I was there. I carried you into the room we had."

"In Brownsville, this was." Sammy could not keep the skepticism out of his tone.

"I was there, god damn it."

Sammy's father insists on the truth of his story, but for Sammy, it's an abstraction, even if true, because he remembers none of it.

Sammy Clay is a fictional character, of course, and thus has only paper memories in a paper existence, but he feels more real to me than my father Bradley does. Perhaps Barack Obama also feels similarly toward the dreamlike stories about his own father, abstract anecdotes despite Obama's search for the roots of identity in his father's Kenyan family.

Roots are important, but the present demands our attention, and the future beckons.

As I once told my mother following a long talk about Bradley, herself, my brothers, and me, I summed it all up in a banal but largely apt remark: "Life goes on."

"Yes," she agreed, "it really does."

And that is good...