Review: Joseph Michael Sommers & Kyle Eveleth (eds.), The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows (2019)

Fig. 1 - Joseph Michael Sommers & Kyle Eveleth (eds.), The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows (Mississippi: The University Press of Mississippi, 2019).

Neil Gaiman should be a familiar name to aficionados of speculative fiction. His oeuvre is characterised by its variety of written forms and its tendency to draw on anything from whispered urban legends to ancient religious texts, and from Victorian high literature to 1980s pulp fantasy. Gaiman is also known for grappling with themes as disparate and interconnected as quantum physics and human sexuality, godhood and childhood, werewolves and pet cats. He is a rare figure, a living author who has been critically and commercially successful in multiple formats, and whose work has been re-imagined across screen and page. This presents a rich opportunity and a serious challenge to any attempt at a cohesive critical response to his work; there is an awful lot to investigate. Accordingly, the editors of The Artistry of Neil Gaiman (2019), Joseph Michael Sommers and Kyle Eveleth, try to balance the scope and depth by imposing a flexible theme on their volume of collected essays and supplementary material (Fig. 1). 

Weighing in at 271 pages (including index and bibliography), The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows is a collection of essays that provides a panoramic view of the author’s career. Its thirteen essay chapters, each separately authored, show a broad interpretation of ‘artistry’, extending their analyses to subjects as diverse as the mechanisms of writing-as-image, writing-with-image and writing-for-image, multimedia communication, film adaptations and paratexts. The book is capped off with bonus material in the form of several interviews and a personal essay. Under the umbrella of general interest in how Gaiman’s words and narratives have been visually augmented, translated and illustrated, the chapters manage to be both disparate and sometimes slightly repetitive, and the overall product is something of a mixed bag in terms of ambition and depth of analysis.

First, the good. The stronger chapters show internal coherence and, while the volume is not intended to look specifically at theory, it is perhaps telling that some of the more ambitious works incorporate theoretical frameworks throughout. For instance, “Dreaming the Universe: The Sandman: Overture, Creation Myths, and the Ultimate Observer” by Kristine Larsen, is both persuasive and grand in scope. Her work unpicks the threads of myth and quantum physics that weave through the Sandman series and rebraids them. “At the Edge of the Barely Perceptible: Temporality and Masculinity in Mr. Punch and Violent Cases” by Christopher D Kilgore is an equally substantial and engaging discussion, in which a sharp critical scalpel is used to separate the layers of patriarchal brutality packed into, and implicitly criticised by, the eponymous works. 

One of the particular highlights of the volume, Danielle Russell’s “Damsels in Deep Rest No More: The Coalescence of Light and Dark in Blueberry Girl, The Wolves in the Walls, and The Sleeper and the Spindle” is a compelling discussion of the interplay of illustration and text, layered meanings and female agency. According to Russell, Gaiman constructs realisations of female identity and agency in ways that are challenged and augmented both by the written narrative and by the accompanying illustrations. In doing so, the textual and paratextual elements work dynamically, with one aspect sometimes straightforwardly reinforcing the other, but sometimes working in counterpoint: both revealing, obscuring and adding nuance. In her analysis of Blueberry Girl, Russell observes that this disconnection between image and story can often be more fruitful and full of meaning than the perfect alignment. This carries through to her discussion of the Wolves in the Walls, where the illustrations dampen some of the disturbing home-invasion parallels, and the illuminations of The Sleeper and the Spindle, which are complicit in maintaining and then subverting the fairytale motifs of the story. Though the discussion moves between texts and paratexts, it is always underpinned by an awareness of feminist theory and how the female self is constructed in Gaiman’s work.

In contrast, there is a tendency, in some chapters, to provide observations rather than analysis, and to sacrifice depth for breadth. “The Shadow or the Self: The Construction of Neil Gaiman on Social Media” by Lanette Cadle, which begins with an interesting (if arguably contentious) discussion of embodiment, provides, in the end, a series of loose evaluations of social media use, including raw statistics, rather than a comprehensive analysis of content (text, audio or images) and its role in the construction of the mediated self. Tara Prescott’s essay “Perspective, Empathy and Activism, Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats” begins the collection and makes for lively reading. It covers a lot of ground, and therefore acts as a good entry-point to the bulk of the book, but in doing so it does not provide much detailed textual analysis. This absence might be explained by the anticipated presence of detailed textual analysis in chapters that follow, but that is not always the case.

Out of these less satisfying chapters, Krystal Howard’s essay is emblematic. Her discussion of speech balloons and the leakage of comic book paratextual elements into picture storybooks in “Comics Grammar in Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s Picture Book Collaborations” is quite technical and, while the descriptions of page layout are clear and numerous, the article would benefit from illustrations to aid clarity. Moreover, this emphasis on description threatens to drown out understanding; her analysis is often not followed through to a conclusion (notably, this is not the only chapter to exhibit this issue). This leads to some moments of near non-sequitur, where a visual phenomenon is identified as a point of interest, but its significance is not explained beyond the rather general conclusion that provides the spine of the essay, which is that Gaiman and his illustrators expect their readership to engage in complex interpretation of text and images. The chapter is filled with paragraphs like this:

The full-page illustration on page 15 is an amalgamation of visual media in McKean’s signature collage style: the figure of the mother with her back turned, scratching her head, is centered on the page and surrounded by scraps of postage stamps, photographs, as well as envelope, letter, and newspaper fragments. This image is contrasted to the facing page, which includes two panels that span the width of the picture book page. The collage from the previous page spills into the gutters of the comics-style page. The collage illustration suggests a myriad of possibilities of meaning for the young reader and his/her chaperone. The collage reflects the maternal figure’s scattered thoughts: her body as seen from behind is surrounded by postage stamps, a partially obscured photograph of a child, and a variety of textual documents containing numbers and text (25).

Frustratingly, we are not given space to explore this “myriad of possibilities”, and the affective and narrative nuances of this kind of visual representation go undiscussed. Any analysis of this image, which might perhaps warrant an entire essay in its own right, ends here. However, insights do emerge later in the essay: the discussion of a character’s ‘physical’ movement through panels in The Wolves in the Walls and its connection to her emotional journey is perceptive and it left me wanting more.

Fig. 2 - MirrorMask (Dave McKean, 2005)

There are some other issues with the collection. Several essays make throwaway references to theory, particularly feminism. This gives the impression that some sections of more than one chapter are unmoored from their surroundings, their observations more of a side note than a concept fully integrated into the argument. In “The Shadow or the Self”, by Lanette Cadle, this takes the form of a one-page digression into a feminist theory which is not revisited elsewhere in her discussion of Gaiman’s construction of a social media identity. Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem’s discussion of spaces and places within Neverwhere (1996) and MirrorMask (Dave McKean, 2005) (Fig. 2) includes a late and brief reference to gender and spatial creation at odds with the rest of her essay which is ambitious and, appropriately, opens up space for further discussion. Likewise, Darren Harris-Fain’s “Neil Gaiman and the Multifarious Approach to the Superhero”, which provides a taxonomy of the kinds of superheroes that appear in Gaiman’s work, lightly probes the deconstructive potential of what he calls “revisionist superheroes”, which includes a few comments related to feminism while devoting more space to questions of violence. This is not an explicitly feminist collection, but it is as though, because the focus is Gaiman, who is, as Cadle suggests, “critically positioned as a feminist author” (153), feminist theory must be crowbarred into discussions which do not, for the most part, centre on feminism. In addition, the volume offers an almost universally un-critical sense of appreciation for Gaiman’s work, which threatens to tip into outright veneration here and there. Those chapters that engage with notions of gender inequality or other problematic aspects of master narratives Gaiman subverts tend to present the author as unassailably radical. Only one chapter, “Queering Space in Neil Gaiman’s Illustrated Works” by Renata Lucena Dalmaso and Thayse Madella, notes a tendency of some of Gaiman’s work to uphold rather than challenge existing cultural norms. 

Despite this, taken as a whole, The Artistry of Neil Gaiman does offer something of value to scholars of fantasy and animation. Liminality, identity, intertextuality, genre subversion and genre-blurring all recur as themes. Much space is also given to the dynamic interplay of text and image, and the reinterpretation of text through image and adaptation. This provides an impression of stratification as successive essays add new perspectives or different insights to the foundations provided by previous chapters, although there is occasionally a sense of re-treading old ground. The non-academic chapters, which include a Q&A with artist P. Craig Russell, who worked on The Sandman (1989-1996) series, as well as Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008), and a short interview with Neil Gaiman himself, add a little extra added value on top of this. However, a reader would have to be a superfan or a Gaiman-focused career academic to justify buying the pricey hardcover edition, which is why the volume will most likely find itself accessed through a library loan.

**Article published: July 9, 2021**

Biography

Dr Rhian Waller is an early career researcher who lectures in Journalism at the University of Chester. Her research interests include fantasy, the Gothic, depictions of mental health and ecocriticism. She discovered Neil Gaiman as a teen after picking up a copy of Neverwhere during a caffeine-fuelled sleep-over. It made her week when the author replied to her message on Twitter.