Why I like The Sandman

Why I like The Sandman

1) I fell into Goth quite by accident. I was in my teens, hanging out with a bunch of angry suburban punk kids, and slowly figuring out that I didn't really fit in with them. I was getting into Vampire: the Masquerade and I was checking out vampire books and movies by the dozen. They opened up a Hot Topic at the Serramonte shopping mall in Daly City, and I talked my mom into buying me a big black vampire tee-shirt and some black jeans. I wore them with pride the following day and one of my shitty punk friends snorted that I looked like a Goth. I had no idea what the term meant, but I liked the sound of it. I bought the Goth Rock 2 sampler CD from the used-CD store near campus, which lead to zines, which lead to concerts, which lead to clubs, and the rest is history. 90s-era Goth comes with a reading list. The Sandman rests pretty high on top of it.

2) Calling The Sandman horror is a little reductive. While the series was marketed as a horror title early on ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust") it grew to encompass all manner of speculative fiction. Most of my favorite issues -- especially the serial killer convention -- fit squarely in the horror genre, but the book is really a meta-story about storytelling itself.

3) The Sandman is about Dream of the Endless, a personification of dreams, imagination, fantasy, and storytelling that threads through all creation. He's a Byronic hero, constantly brooding and taking himself far too seriously. The book starts with him being taken hostage by an Aleister Crowley-esque occultist. The experience traumatizes him so deeply that he spends the rest of his series pushing against the boundaries of his responsibilities. It ends with him either dying or recreating himself into a more compassionate incarnation. Despite the wild digressions, the book really centers around the character of Dream. Every story presents a new facet of his personality and the strain he's under, until the tragic ending seems both inevitable and self-directed.

4) It seems like the most popular character in the series is Death, Dream's older sister. Unlike most incarnations of the Grim Reaper, The Sandman's Death is a chipper Perky Goth with a positive attitude on life and boundless reserves of compassion. My own opinion has changed on her has changed significantly over the years. At first, oh my god, I luuurved her and we should be best friends. As time went on and I had my own experiences with people passing, I got angry with how flip the Death character came off. Death is the root of all horror in existence, so the idea of making it into a goth version of every Connie Cheerful Church Camp I've ever met made me very angry in a way that now feels like I'm projected my own fears onto the character. I've eased up some, and I've come to love Death's compassion for her charges, but I still feel like I have a different experience with the character than a lot of the fans of the book.

5) There are lots of fantastic moments both great and small in the book; Dream's dinner with his brother Destruction, the lovely African story of two lovers separated by fate, a weary yet still deadly Lucifer, the long-lived oaf Hob Gadling, the Lovecraftian dreams of cities, the illustrated difference between the fantasies of girls and boys. My favorite was the aforementioned serial killer convention. I've seen dozens of serial killer stories in my time, but I've never seen one that so viciously attacks the self-aggrandizing mythologies that serial killers create for themselves to justify their behavior. Dream seems to take a swipe at the very concept of turning the serial killer into dark heroes and it works beautifully.

6) My friends and I tried to record a Sandman podcast recently, but we got tripped up on technical issues. As the conversation grew, I was impressed that there was so much stuff to cover: so many great moments and fantastic ideas, each of us with our own interpretation of the story. People gravitate to different elements of The Sandman and each experience has it's own rewards.

Conclusion: The Sandman is one of the best stories I've ever read. I return to it from time to time. Like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, it's a barometer for seeing how I've changed over the years.

I promised myself that the first money I ever make selling my fiction will go a statue of Dream than I can put on my writing desk. Gaiman taught me that stories are sacred and I'm honored to both draw from and add my own small contribution to the Dreaming. 

Why I like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

Why I like Johnny the Homicidal Maniac

1) There's truly nothing like it anywhere else. Jhonen Vasquez's uniquely personal creation is a fusion of video game-inspired design, Lovecraftian monsters, 90s Goth (yeah yeah, he hates the term) aesthetic, Kafka-esque isolation, artistic insanity, and good ol' fashioned misanthropy.  

2)    Johnny is a compelling character. His persecution complex made him sympathetic to my younger self and increasingly frustrating to my older self. He's been the barometer I've used to measure my maturity, and I'm happy that the work remains compelling after all these years. 

3)    Johnny C.'s world is a fascinating place, all sharp angles and suburban decay. Massacres happen in grubby strip malls, decisions of life and death are debated over slurpee machines, bored Gothlings snipe at each other, and a cartoonishly cheerful sun smiles idiotically down on everyone. 

4)    There is a cohesive story underneath it all, with enough revealed to satisfy while still retaining the mystery necessary for Nny's world to function. 

5)    There's a real intelligence underpinning the material. Nny isn't a typical narcissistic serial killer in love with his inflated power fantasy. He's terribly fragile, terribly weak, and ultimately more pathetic than anything else. It makes what he does ultimately less glamorous. Most of his victims are cardboard-cutout morons, but the rare occasions Johnny converses with another intelligent, sensitive person shows just how pitiful his impotent rampages really are. 

6)    JtHM has an excellent supporting cast, from the malevolent Doughboys to the girls that get away, the people at the fringes of Nny's work as signifiers for the character's development. One of them even reveals herself to be a more psychologically stable version of Nny, and successfully overcomes the force that once enslaved him.

7)    I got into JtHM at the same time I got into the Goth scene. I discovered the comic through Carpe Noctem, a dark arts magazine that Hot Topic used to sell. I've never entirely lost my love of the scene and revisiting Johnny the Homicidal Maniac feels like going home.

Conclusion: While I've outgrown a lot of the misanthropy that initially attracted me to the character, I've been really impressed by how well JtHM has held up over the years. It's still a unique and fascinating work by an extraordinarily talented young artist.

 

The Crow

I've seen The Crow so many times that I never need to watch it again. I've internalized it. It's a part of me.

It is a beautiful film. There isn't anything like it, beyond Alex Proyas' follow up Dark City. It also carries an extra edge because the film's star, Brandon Lee, died making it in a horrific shooting accident. Fourteen-year-old me was a martial arts movie nut. I'd been studying shotokan karate for a year or two and I became one of those white kids who wore Bruce Lee tee-shirts. I'd seen Brandon Lee's big premiere Rapid Fire and I was excited to see what else he could do. I was devastated when I heard what happened. I bought every magazine covering the story, from People Magazine to Black Belt, and I devoured every scrap of information on what happened, as if information could provide control over grief. By the end, I came to the conclusion that it was a dislodged shell casing propelled by the gunpowder from a blank, plus it was the dark juju from a film featuring such dark subject matter, plus it was the secret masters of the martial arts world getting revenge on the Lee family for Bruce introducing martial arts secrets to the world.

The Crow came along during the right time of my life. I was really into horror and the occult. I was creeping into my goth phase. I had a headful of fairy tales, an angsty heart, no sense of scale or irony, and a mean streak fused with an adolescent's desperate desire to be loved.

The movie is a fairy tale. After a couple are murdered for nebulous reasons involving fighting tenant evictions and slum lords, the boyfriend comes back as a half-insane revenant. Guided by his spirit-crow, he butchers his assailants more-or-less effortlessly before returning to the grave with his angelic girlfriend. It's a story of True Love. Eric and Shelly are Meant To Be Together and they can't rest until he Puts The Wrong Things Right.

I'm not entirely sure when the film is supposed to take place but I assume it's one of those five minutes in the future kind of things. The Detroit in the film can't exist in real life. It's always night and the city is almost pure obsidian. Everything is wet and dirty and broken. The people are either junkies or sociopathic thrill killers or Ernie Hudson. The crime lord behind it all reminds me less of Scarface and more of the myth-speaking douchey yoga teachers in my neighborhood. In other words, it's stylized beyond reality. It creates a world of its own and works brilliantly within its own context. In a weird way, The Crow is an inversion of the Warren Beatty film Dick Tracy, which is another neo-noir set in its own unique world.

It's impossible not to be on Eric Draven's side. He's a walking raw nerve. He can brutalize a corrupt pawn broker and heal a junkie's poisoned body. He's pain and rage and empathy incarnate. At his most insane, he reminds me of Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. There's a scene where Draven interrupts a gang meeting looking for his last victim. When the Amazing Interracial Gang cut him in two, he recovers and massacres the room to My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's song "After The Flesh." Midway through the massacre he stops, picks up a sword, and says "you're all going to die" in a dead man's ice-cold voice. It thrilled me in a way I can only describe as visceral.

Yet, as influential as the movie was to my younger self, I I think I outgrew it.

The big issue I have with the movie is the whole idea of True Love. Eric and Shelly were perfect in every way. We see less than five minutes of their entire relationship and it consists of them being adorable, her smiling down on him like an angel, and the pair of them goofing around with masks and burned food. We never see them disagree or doubt or fight. In other words, we never see them act like two human beings in a real relationship. These days, I think it's interesting how we never really learn anything about Shelly. She's a cypher. She exists to be perfect, to be raped and murdered, and to be the ideal that inspires an ultimately horrible massacre. She isn't a person, she's a statue on a pedestal.

I don't have a lot of patience for avengers these days. There's always something patriarchal about them. You sullied my woman/family and took them away from me, so I have a man's right to do whatever horrible thing I want to in order to avenge it. I'm also too old for fairy tales. I'm too old for simplicity. "True love" doesn't exist. Real love is lumpy and complicated and painful because people are lumpy and complicated and painful, but there's an authentic beauty in that fragility. It has more weight because it has more humanity.

If I were rewriting the screenplay of The Crow, I'd make it abundantly clear that it wasn't Eric Draven running around in the tragedy mask. Eric Draven remains moldering in the ground. The thing moving through the city butchering people is an idea, a figment, and it commits atrocity because it's a broken thing created by pain. In other words, it's a slightly more noble version of the girl from The Ring.

I am looking forward to the remake, if it ever actually comes into being. There's a lot of meat on these bones. Grief and anger are central human emotions and, in many ways, The Crow is one of the purer revenge stories. Because Eric Draven is unliving and insane, he is Vengeance Incarnate. There's a line in the comic that always stuck with me (yeah, I know the comic is significantly different) where he asks a person if he sees Eric's smile. It's sad and evil. Sad because he's utterly alone. Evil because he's dead and he still moves. You see? A dead man visits you.

My Favorite Vampires

I've always wanted to do one of these.

Every Halloween, and probably now after every Twilight movie, damn near every entertainment website publishes a list of their favorite vampires. As a complete...um...sucker for these kind of light articles, I always wind up a bit disappointed afterward. The lists are basically the same. It's the guy from Near Dark, the guy from Lost Boys, Edward, the kid from Let The Right One In, and a bone thrown to Count Orlock from Nosferatu as the scariest vampire ever captured on screen. By and large, these vampires tend to fall into two categories: the tormented creature of the night and the overenthusiastic predatory date rapist.

Don't get me wrong, the lists are usually pretty good. But there are a lot of great vampires out there that don't get a lot of recognition. So, without further ado, here's my favorite vampires:

Dracula


My elementary school had a deal with Scholastic books where they sold tons of young adult books at discount. I'd bring their catalogue home and my parents, indulgent creatures that they were, bought me everything I wanted. Among the little treasures I picked up were kid-friendly versions of classic novels like Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula.

I loved those books. They introduced me to the fog-swept streets of Victorian England and the monsters that lurked among the cobblestone streets and tastefully-appointed drawing rooms. The books were wonderful gateways to imaginative fiction and classic literature. My favorite was, of course, Bram Stoker's immortal Dracula.

I loved the creepy Transylvanian Count, the decaying old keep on the mountainside, the sexy vampire women that inadvertently ushered me into puberty, the polite first meetings with the Count, Lucy wasting away, the chase across the mountains, and the exciting final battle between hero and monster. That shit was FUN.

The Count was cool. He was elegant and predatory and threatening. He hadn't been shellacked with that layer of romantic angst that vampires would pick up in the following years. Reading that book was a wonderful introduction to the character and it left a lasting impression on me. I have a copy of Dracula I picked up from my trip to Transylvania, I have a piece of masonry from Vlad Dracul's actual castle a few inches from me as I write this, and I've collected a bunch of goofy memorabilia. Dracula always was and will be the man.

Louis and Lestat


The whole romantic vampire thing started here. After Interview got published, vampires became less about monsters and more about power fantasies. Still, I have a lot of fondness for the silly, soppy little vampires of Anne Rice's tales.

I first encountered Lestat and Louis during my freshman year in high school, when I was all Gothic and susceptible to flowery prose. Until that point, vampires were undead soulless things, but getting to see history and morality from a vampire's point of view was fascinating.

I empathized more with Louis when I was younger. While all the superpowers and glamor sounds fun, I would have shared his distaste with hurting people. As time went on and my morality crumbled like a sand castle in a tsunami I came to love Lestat's "gentleman death" vibe. I didn't stick with the series long enough for him to become a Jesus allegory and I have come to understand that Anne Rice has since renounced her earlier work after her return to Catholicism. But I still greatly enjoyed both Interview and The Vampire Lestat.

Morbius The Living Vampire


Among my many nerdy obsessions, I was a huge comic book geek. I started reading during the late eighties, when dark-tinged supernatural heroes like Ghost Rider were big. Marvel, seizing on the popularity of the character, created a crossover series called Midnight Sons, reintroducing classic horror heroes into their own series. The best of all these books focused on Spider-Man's former vampiric nemesis Morbius The Living Vampire.

Morbius was unique in that he was not a supernatural vampire. The product of a botched medical experiment aimed at saving him from a life-threatening disease, Morbius developed powers and limitations suspiciously similar to a traditional vampires. While compelled to kill by a near-overpowering thirst, he was horrified by his actions.

One of the things I liked about Morbius was how intensely he struggled with his need for blood. Vampires are often a metaphor for addiction, though many romantic vampires jettison this aspect of the mythos. Morbius was a good man brought down by his curse, and the only way he reconciles himself with his needs is to prey on killers and other urban scum. He straddled the line between morality and damnation, and was pretty damn entertaining because of it.

Alucard


Do you guys remember the third Castlevania game? In it, you could pick up one of three allies in your quest to take down Count Dracula. The most useful one was undoubtedly the wall-climbing pirate guy, but if you were willing to to cross the map you could enlist the assistance of Alucard, Dracula's estranged vampire son.

I loved the notion of playing a vampire. Sure, he didn't really do much beside change into a bat, but it was still a cool idea. Konami later expanded Alucard's role into a full game, the cult favorite Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Alucard was elegant and cool, and the notion of a son slaying his father for the greater good made for some interesting drama.

Drusilla


I'm not the world's biggest fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but they did get some things right. One of them was Drusilla, the mad seer vampire.

I loved Drusilla. She was gorgeous, she wore clothes and hairstyles from a different age, she spoke in delusion-fuelled poetry, and unlike most of the Whedonverse's vampires she never stopped being a nasty piece of work. Many of Whedon's vampire antagonists eventually came over to the light and often became diluted and boring but Drusilla remained a monster. She's one of those characters I'd like to transport into other horror stories because she shines a dark little light whenever she appears.

Cassidy


Garth Ennis's Preacher series, a cross-genre Vertigo series about a supernaturally-gifted preacher's search for God, gave us Proinsias Cassidy, Irish uprising volunteer turned vampire. He was one of the richest characters in comic history. Cassidy avoided the classical tropes of vampire. He didn't have fangs, he wasn't particularly elegant, and he was selfish and irresponsible. Unlike ninety percent of vampires-both good and bad-he was defined by who he was rather than the rules he had to live by.

I really liked Cassidy's backstory, particularly his involvement in the 1916 Easter uprising and his chance meetings with several historical and literary figures of Ireland and America. Vampires have the advantage of immortality and have the opportunity to witness history in the making. Most writers treat this aspect of vampirism in a very glib, shallow manner, but Cassidy's experiences are all cleverly filtered through his hard drinking, party-boy lifestyle. His wry observation on Brendan Behan's drinking and social habits are worth the price of admission alone.

Cassidy's lifestyle of overindulgence, fuelled by his body's ability to take whatever punishment life can throw at it, made him into a selfish, immature, weak person. He betrays his friends, sinks into drug addiction, hurts the people who care about him, and leaves a trail of ruined friendships in his wake. After burning every bridge and pissing away any shot at redemption, he reaches out to his last friend, trying to dig his way out of a very human damnation. Cassidy was a shit, but he's one of the best characters I've ever spent time with.



Bunnicula


Hm. I was a little kid. I like vampires. I like bunnies. Just ask Professor Demon Bunny.

Therefore, I loved Bunnicula.


Blade


Remember that scene where the guy winds up in a strange dance club underneath a meat warehouse? He's in a weird crowd, enticed by a mysterious girl, and suddenly blood pours from the sprinklers. He screams, everyone cheers, and he realized they're all vampires. He runs away in terror, stumbles to the floor, crawls to safety, and just when all hope is lost...

Blade.

Another one of Marvel's Midnight Sons characters, Blade really came into his own after he got into the movies. His world was dark and exotic, full of hedonistic vampires and the trappings of extreme wealth. Blade and his blue-collar operation wreck havoc on the vampire's ordered little world. It's all muscle cars and shotguns and harsh language, a far cry from Van Helsing's genteel efforts.

Invincible super-killers tend not to interest me, but Blade has some depth to him. As the series goes on we get the sense that Blade's quest borders on the fanatical He's at war with his predatory nature, he hates the vampire community yet he doesn't seem to like humans all that much. He exists in a terrible outsider state, orphaned and alone, turned cruel by his quest. Even when he's reunited with his supposedly dead father figure, the coldness Blade shows to the man while trying to figure out if he's turned reveals just how disconnected he is. It's a lonely life and Blade struggles to get by. He's just plain cool, and he is the obvious inspiration for Blacula Hunter Jefferson Twilight from The Venture Bros.



Eli


I have covered Let The Right One In at length before, in one of my better articles. The same stuff still holds true. I loved Eli's relationship with Oskar, I loved the weird combination of regret and viciousness that characterized Eli's personality. I loved the savage brutality of Eli's feeding, which is about a million miles away from any sexy neck nibbling. Like Cassidy, Eli works primarily because he/she is a great character. I am absolutely terrified about how bad the upcoming American remake will be.

Vampire: The Masquerade


There are two articles sitting on my blog dashboard that I haven't figured out a way to complete yet. One is on chilling Slave Labor Graphic mini-series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and one on the now-defunct White Wolf RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Both works had a tremendous impact on my adolescence.

V:tM is a game about secret societies of vampires operating beyond human awareness. You create a vampire and attempt to negotiate the Byzantinian politics of supernatural society, committing evil deeds while attempting to hang on to their last shreds of humanity.

V:tM worked because it covered every possible variation on vampirism. There were elegant vampires, thuggish vampires, exotic vampires, saintly vampires, devil vampires, and everything else in between. You could have a lot of fun creating an alternate persona for yourself. The system wasn't perfect and the mythology crumbled under its own weight, but it was a fun world to game in.

Nothing


Back in the harsh and angst-ridden years of my mid-adolescence, I got involved in the Goth scene. My entire wardrobe went black, my music became much more down-tempo, and my hair got longer and very multi-colored.

I went to a small-town high school without much access to a counter culture, so me and my few "babybats" had nothing but the internet, some CDs, and old copies of Propaganda and Carpe Noctem magazine. We passed these little items back-and-forth between us and they lead us to the work of Gothling writer Poppy Z. Brite.

At the time, Poppy Z. Brite was famous in the Goth scene for writing Lost Souls, a vampire novel full of Goths, violence, New Orleans, and gay sex. Lots and lots of gay sex.

Seriously. Lots.

Obviously, this isn't a bad thing. Reading Poppy Z. Brite definitely broadened my mind. Once my frail little Catholic boy brain recovered from the shock, I found a really great story. Nothing, the moody protagonist, mirrored the isolation and impatience I felt from being a little odd in a square community. His slow awakening into his vampire heritage is fascinating to watch, and Brite is very good at painting Southern Gothic decay. It's a great book and writing this blog post has compelled me to re-read it.



Anyway, those are some of my favorite vampires. I hope you dug this list, and I'm sure I'll come up with a few more right after I publish this. In the meantime, enjoy the deluge of vampire romance.