#...kneel gaiman?

[frankencanon]

Just realized that Neil is pronounced the same as kneel...

"Kneel, Neil."

Huh. Never gonna look at that name the same, ever again...

[lystful]

I have something really personal to ‘41’s Crowley.

[vampir3sfall]

neil gayman's parents had the opportunity to do the funniest thing possible. and they did.

[colleendoran]

The Secret Language of a Page of Chivalry: The Pre-Raphaelite Connection

Adapting Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry is a decades-long dream fulfilled. The story as text can be enjoyed on multiple levels, and so can the art. You look at the pages and see the pretty pictures, but the pictures also have meta-textual meaning. Knowing this secret language adds to the experience.

Some people pick up the references quickly, but I’ll share with you some more of what’s going on under the surface.

In Ye Olden Days of Art Making, most painters made pictures that contained visual narrative cues. Flowers in a picture might be heraldic signs that signaled political affiliations, or could indicate purity, anger, or love. Purple was the color of kings. A dog in a picture might represent faithfulness, and butterflies could represent the soul.

There are Pre-Raphaelite paintings with so many symbols and ideas in them that you need a deep working knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian social mores to understand what’s going on.

For example, Ford Madox Brown’s Work, a painting which took some 13 years to complete, was first exhibited in 1865 with a catalogue explaining all its symbols and elements. There is nothing in that picture that doesn’t mean something.

I brought some of that visual meta-textual sensibility to Chivalry, (and I’ve written about the symbolism and meanings in the work in other essays.)

I also brought into the work direct Pre-Raphaelite art references.

From 1868-1870, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones created four paintings illuminating the tale of Pygmalion and Galatea, entitled Pygmalion and the Image, and wrote a poem with each line titling one painting:

The heart desires

The hand refrains

The godhead fires

The soul attains.

A perfect little poem for Chivalry, and I think of it often when some people present me with what I think is a very strange question: why didn’t Galaad just take the Holy Grail from Mrs. Whitaker?

It kind of breaks my heart that people would even ask that.

Burne-Jones painted two versions of this series of which this is the second.

In the first panel of this page, Sir Galaad kneeling before the Grail is derived from the figure of Pygmalion kneeling before Galatea: The Soul Attains.

Sir Galaad’s restraint even in the face of his greatest desire makes him worthy of his prize.

There are two Pre-Raphalite references in this page, the most obvious being in panel 2: it’s Sir John Everett Millais’s 1857 work A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford.

The painting was very poorly received on first exhibition, compelling Millais to redo significant portions of it. It was caricatured and ridiculed, and then ended up becoming influential and popular, and isn’t that the way it goes.

That’s an art career in a nutshell, really.

The Sir Isumbras image also influenced John Tenniel’s illustrations for the Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland novels.

Sir Isumbras derives from a 13th century Medieval romance poem about a good knight whose pride causes him to fail in his Christian duty. He is presented with a series of difficult challenges before he can find happiness again, reunite with his family, and be forgiven his sins. The painting by Millais is based less explicitly on the poem than it is on a later parody of the poem. (It’s complicated.)

My using Sir Isumbras as the base for the shot of Galaad with the children is obvious here. In the Millais painting, Sir Isumbras carries a woodcutter’s children across the ford. In Chivalry, Sir Galaad carries the children of Mrs. Whitaker’s neighborhood down the street.

While Sir Isumbras spent many years learning humility and Christian duty, Galaad has a long quest to fulfill before he can achieve his goal. And on the way to that goal, he’s humble and nice to children, too.

That the Millais painting was such a huge influence on many a depiction of knighthood over the years made it a perfect reference point here, and the story behind both the painting and the poem give it further layers of meaning.

The next panel has a far less obvious reference, but the source is Arthur Hughes’s painting The Rescue.

Arthur Hughes is one of the lesser-known Pre-Raphaelites, but his art is widely seen and influential. He’s certainly been a big influence on me, as many of his paintings appear again and again in Arthuriana references, as he was a prolific King Arthur picture tale teller.

The Rescue (1907-1908) was originally part of a diptych which was separated and sold back in the 1920’s. His style was becoming unpopular by the time Hughes painted the work, and little is known about this work except that one panel was in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber at some point. Maybe still is. Dunno.

Anyway, the diptych depicts a little child kneeling in prayer menaced by a dragon in one panel, and in the next, safely trotting away with a knight on horseback. I like that this is a diptych, a kind of proto-comic art form common in medieval religious art, so this was perfect to use here.

Another reference to Arthur Hughes is in this double page splash from later in the book as Galaad on his quest encounters the Hesperides.

I didn’t set out to reference this Arthur Hughes piece at first, but it’s one of my favorite paintings. When I realized my sketches for this scene kept echoing the Hughes composition, I went with it. The Hughes painting of Galahad is one of the most famous depictions of the character, so it makes me happy to have this referenced in Chivalry.

Kindly ask for CHIVALRY, published by Dark Horse Comics in the USA and by Headline Books in the UK at your local comic shops or bookstore. Written by Neil Gaiman. Adaptation and art by me.

For further reading on this project, go HERE.

HERE.

And HERE.

Thank you to my Patreon patrons for sponsoring my work and this post.

Colleen Doran Illustrates Neil Gaiman will be a solo exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York City this spring. Watch this space for updates.

Have a wonderful holiday season.

[ineffableclassics]

“Ready for lunch?” Crowley drops to his knees to start unbuckling the straps on the basket as though this is something they do all the time; as though he hasn’t just effortlessly catapulted Aziraphale back in time almost fifty years.

“You remembered,” Aziraphale breathes as wonder courses through him. He mentioned something once during an awkward moment, half a century ago, and now here kneels a demon atop a picnic blanket.

“Hmm?” Crowley barely shoots him a sidelong glance as he concentrates on opening the basket.

Aziraphale’s eyes do not move from him. “You remembered,” he repeats, no less stunned. “Crowley, you really didn’t have to.”

Crowley’s hands still. Eventually, his eyes still on the basket, he murmurs, “Well, we did The Ritz, didn’t we?”

Words: 9,355

Status: complete

Rating: General audiences

Art Credit: Sv. Lenart by Albert Sirk, 1947

[joanofart5]

Did I just read the sexiest smuttiest fic I have read in a long time in the middle of a doctors office waiting room? Yes. Was it an advisable thing to do? No. Did I nearly embarrass myself during a particularly obscene part of the fic. Definitely. Do I regret it? Absolutely not.

In case you were wondering about the fic I’m referring to, it is this beautiful masterpiece by @depraveddame

A Great Conjunction (29637 words) by depraveddame Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) Characters: Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale (Good Omens) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - College/University, Teacher-Student Relationship, Professor Aziraphale (Good Omens), College | University Student Crowley (Good Omens), Age Difference, Dom Aziraphale (Good Omens), Sub Crowley (Good Omens), Dom/sub, Gentle Dom Aziraphale (Good Omens), Top Aziraphale (Good Omens), Bottom Crowley (Good Omens), BDSM, Kink Negotiation, Praise Kink, Face-Fucking, Oral Sex, Rough Oral Sex, Oral Fixation, Coming Untouched, Crowley Has a Praise Kink (Good Omens), degradation kink, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Hair-pulling, Finger Sucking, Kneeling, Aftercare, Very Slight Bratting, Brat Tamer Aziraphale, Crowley Is Kind Of A Brat, Orgasm Denial, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Delay, Orgasm Edging, Come Swallowing, Kissing, Rough Kissing, Biting, Marking, Consent, Office Sex, Secret Relationship, New Relationship, Smut, Shameless Smut, The opposite of a slow burn, Wildfire Burn, but even less controlled, Crowley Cries During Sex (Good Omens), Dirty Talk, An Ode To Face Fucking, Aziraphale Is Hung Like A Horse, NSFW Art, Embedded Images, Size Queen Crowley (Good Omens), Safe Sex Discussion, Crowley is a Pain Slut, Pillow Grinding, Masturbation, thigh fucking, Intercrural Sex, Come Eating, Verbal Humiliation, Nipple Piercings, Nipple Play, Sharing a Bed, Being told to get off in front of your professor, Eye Contact, Author is Open to Hearing about Dead Batteries Summary: Astrophysics student Anthony Crowley is purposefully doing badly in his English literature class (that he put off taking until his last year) in order to try and secure an opportunity for extra credit in order to hopefully to meet his professor outside of class; Professor Fell is devastating in every way, and every sense of his submissive self is ignited by and drawn to the dominance oozing from the older man. This starts, as it often does, with a bench conversation, which leads, as usual, to much more. Intensely kinky D/s smut.

[crowleys-hips]

if he reads Neil Gaiman then you can be sure i'll kneel for that gay man send tweet

[julie-su]

They literally named a man Neil Gaiman. Kneel Gay Man?? To do what?? Suck dick??

[recreationaldivorce]

neil gaiman might be annoying on tumblr but he is called kneel gay man so he kinda took the W there

[deadandphilgames]

Okay I know everyone is like "neil was a parallel for dan omg they are so gay stop" but ill be honest that entire video, every time they spoke about neil, I was just thinking about neil gaiman. He reminds me of a version of a young neil gaiman.

when i see neil gaiman i think of that kneel gayman/on your knees slut post and i was waiting for dan to make a "ill kneel for neil" joke

[maryholdenofthevalley]

Good Omens, Season 2, Episode 6 Reaction

(Contain Spoiler)

I did this reaction in a note, because I did not want to see spoiler on Discord. When we need context, I put [context] in the brackets.

1. Crowley fake angel hopping behind Muriel like a rabbit????? SO CUTE

2. WHY KILL ERIC SO MUCH 😭😭😭😭 LEAVE HIM BEEEEEEEEE

3. Michael: lets do this

Gabriel: nu-uh

4. Shax asked if Aziraphale is Crowley's emotional support angel and I can gladly answer her with all the watching-you-eat-cake and I-like-it-when-I-rescue-you thing

5. Crowley's little encouraging hand pump to Muriel. they are so cute together.

6. Aziraphale's little terrified "ahhh" when they throw the books at demons 😭😭😭😭🙏🙏🙏🙏

7. HIS HALO

8. Eric never learn his mistake does he? To touch an angel's halo? Really?

9. ITS A FUCKING LANDMINE???

[Gabriel flashback begin]

10. They took the ineffable bureaucracy ship very seriously it seems

11. THEY REALLY TOOK IT SERIOUSLY

12. Omg they are serious. Is this how a fandom win?

13. Beelzebub likes the song, Gabriel follows, then made a miracle to keep playing it. I serious can't be sane right now.

14. THEY HANDS TOUCHED

[Beelzebub gave Gabriel the fly]

15. This is a fucking romance drama and Im living for it

16. No.

[Yeah Ineffable Bureaucracy held hand. It was not AziCrow scene.]

17. For the record, I didnt see it coming. I mean I kinda see it, but I thoughy its just my fangirl mind being delusional.

When they were going to hold hands I immediately stop and running around the house. Kneeling and crying like a pathetic bitch. I know I really say I was sobbing before but it was just dramatic talk. But I am crying right now. For real.

18. Aziraphale reaching out to Crowley I...

19. Crowley cleaning up the house before his angel comeback is so cute

(This reaction was written after 2 weeks because I have calmed down by now)

20. I kept cursing at those two for the entire confession scene. Then the kiss came and I did the same as 17 for a few minutes before I continue the episode. I was dead the entire time after that, just watching them driving and smiling in the elevator with a dumb face. When the credit end, I threw away the headphone and sobbing for a few more minutes while my family members look at me weirdly (they don't watch it. good for them, good for them). I was never the same after that. I can't focus on any other fandom. I have been dead for 2 weeks, but also making a lot of theories and conclusions. I made a world building sheet for the show. It was fun. I'm not normal yet.

Anyway, thank you Neil Gaiman for making season 2! Now we desperately need season 3! I wish for the strike to go smootly and we all get what we need to get!

[little-engineer-who-cant]

When the past knocks on her door, Silena has to come clean

Part 4 of Sirens Scream Names Forgotten by Tomorrow, Laid to Rest in Infinity

(Chapter 2 under cut)

Chapter 2: Sunrises in Shades of Violent Despair

Summary: Jason stumbles in

“I really don’t know what ‘I love you’ means. I think it means ‘don’t leave me here alone.’” 

- Adventures in the Dream Trade (Neil Gaiman)

There is someone passed out on her couch. Someone who looks like they’ve run into the wrong end of a pile driver, fractured bones, split skin and bruises mottling every visible inch of them.

And there is her, kneeling beside him and staring at a pool of drying blood with a thousand yard stare, a cloth circling mechanically and smearing more blood than it’s wiping away. 

He’s terrified to speak anymore, not when his earlier words sent her down so hard he’d thought she’d go through the floor. Whatever the meaning of this is, it’s an awful one. His eyes flick to the couch again. Vinyl covers, ugly as sin, but she’d always refused to hear anything against them. 

(Easy to clean. Hides blood.)

(Fuck.)

How long has she been taking people in like this? How has he not noticed? Where the fuck has she been hiding all the medical supplies he sees scattered around? What the fuck is going on?

(You ignored all the signs that something was wrong.)

(There has to be an explanation.)

(She’s lying.)

(About what? What the fuck do you think?)

(You’re asking my opinion?)

(I’ve got nothing else.)

(Kill her.)

Jason’s lips curl angrily. The one fucking time he wants the parasite in his head to voice an opinion and all it gives him is the worst fucking option. 

(She lied.)

His hand crunches the bloody rag into a fist.

(She lied.)

He looks at her, maybe his last look at her, taking in the familiar- 

Sitting back on his heels, he blinks at the right side of her face. At the texturing he’s somehow never noticed before. He’s looked at her face how many thousands of times, studied it and memorized it, he thought he’d have been able to pick it out of a crowd. But now? Now, he’s wondering if he’s ever seen her before at all. It’s right there, plain as day because he knows what covered scars look like. There are plenty on his own face he covers when he’s out in civilization. Little nicks from where the crow bar took skin around the most obvious one that caved his skull in, the one he hates with every fiber of his being carved at the hinge of his jaw that no amount of stubble will even try to touch. Like that patch of skin is cursed, defiled, forever unsalvageable. 

(Stop thinking about it.)

(It’s just as cursed as the rest of you.)

She’s tried very hard to make it look natural and gotten impressively close. But not close enough that he shouldn’t have fucking noticed. 

(Did the crowbar take an eye too?)

Reaching towards her shoulder, he expects her to jump at the movement, look at him, react in any way at all. She’s strung tight enough to snap with a feather touch and so hyper aware he thinks a speck of dust could set her off if it moved wrong. If she looks at him, maybe he’ll get a better angle to see exactly how blind he’d been.

But she doesn’t notice until he touches her and a sickening pit of suspicion opens in his stomach when she flinches away. 

“I’m going outside,” he tells her, sounding far away in his own ears. He can’t be next to her without losing either his guts or his mind, both of which will result in him doing something irrevocably stupid and he’s fucked up enough recently. 

(Letting her in at all was the fuck up.)

(I didn’t know.) 

(Because she’s been lying to you.)

(I’ve been lying to her.)

(Not since you showed her.)

(But I never told her the truth.)

(She never asked.)

Walking away from her might be irrational, but he can’t bring himself to empty a chamber into her. 

(Shoot her. Don’t give her a chance to run.)

(She won’t run.)

(You don’t know her at all.)

(Weak. She walked into your hands, end her.)

But she’d smiled at him in sunlight and danced with him even past moon-rise, like the light would never fade. 

(She danced with a dead man.)

She’d laid out his helmet like a welcome mat, helped hold his weary body upright, brushed gentle hands over bruises and run loving fingers through his hair. Cooked dinner with him, sprawled in his lap and made inane commentary to stupid shows, spoken so passionately about stitching techniques he didn’t even begin to understand, listened to him ramble on about engines and complain about fiddly electronics. Normal. Every time he swept through her door, he was normal again. 

He can’t hurt her. Because even when she knew she had a lion in her lap, she loved him all the same.

—

“Do I get any explanation?” He’s not even looking at her when he asks, face obscured and focused on the distant sight of the tower denoting Wayne Enterprises, barely visible from her shitty fire escape placement. 

“How long of one do you want?” she replies, hugging herself as she watches him from the open window. 

“I want the truth.”

“That’s the most dangerous part.”

“It usually is.” Silence falls, his back to her, her eyes burning into the back of his skull. She can’t taste anything but ash and gasoline, the tarry pit of vinegar tinged betrayal, the metallic and rottingly cloying resignation.

“I…” she can’t start. How can she start? The Greek gods are real and it all gets worse from there? It’s the truth but…

“Anna-” There.

“Silena.” Something shatters there, in the silence. She thinks it’s a heart, but if it’s hers or his she has no idea. Maybe both . “My… my name is Silena. Anna is what my father called me when I was little. Easy for me to answer to.” And that one truth is the final crack that brings down the floodgates, that brings everything she’s ever swallowed into the light, look at me, look at this awful thing- “My apartment is a… pit stop, I guess you could call it. A waystation is what it’s actually called. It’s… it’s for other people like me who need help. Other demigods.” Keep going. “The Greek gods are real. They have children with humans. And…” keep going, keep going- “and we’re not expected to live long. Between monsters, gods and others like us, it’s rare for us to see twenty.”

“Why did you lie?” And there’s the kicker, please look at me. If she sees his face, she’ll know what to say, how to say it. His taste hasn’t changed, she’s running practically blind and hoping this doesn’t blow up in her face, you knew the risks when he came to you that night and you’ve let him in every night since.

“There are no meta-humans allowed in Gotham,” she whispers. “So I hide in plain sight. Most don’t stay. They don’t come here unless there’s no choice.”

“Why did you come here?” She closes her eyes. Even if he was facing her now, she’ll keep running blind. This is the most honest you’ve been in years, isn’t it?

“To hide,” she repeats, “in plain sight.” 

A hand touches her chin, making her eyes fly open. He’s so quiet she hadn’t even heard him come close. He stands just to the other side of the crooked, ill hung window frame in her crappy, run down apartment that’s seen too much despair, reaching over the sill and cupping her chin like she’s glass.

“That’s not everything,” he murmurs, his eyes digging into her soul like it’s an open book to him. Maybe it is. Only the gods know what exactly this man is capable of and Silena certainly isn’t one.

“It’ll take a long time to tell you the story of my life.” She doesn’t dare touch him, look at me, look at this wretched little thing before you and see the truth that everyone else ignored, everyone else denied. 

“You would tell me?”

“You’re the only person I know who’d listen.” They stare at one another, deadlocked in an eternal second before he huffs a broken laugh.

“That’s not a high bar.”

“It is for me.” And it really is. Someone who would listen . Even if he hates her by the end of it, Jason will listen. “It is for me.”

[who-dat-homeless]

my tumblr app is trying to gaslight me into believing you're neil gaiman for some reason-

like i keep seeing your posts but the blog name and icon are neil-gaiman

i was incredibly confused for a few minutes lol

Yeah man of course I'm kneel gay man or whatevs u r correct now give me ur gay men I'll devour them

[lalaland-e]

Tumblr is so weird like,

The first thing you see when you log on here is a post with 131.90M notes that just says "Hi. #bd/sm" then you look to it's right and find the next fricken Charles Dickens flagged for terrorism and with -1 notes.

Turn around and find an illustration of Harry Potter eating a quesadilla with Draco Malfoy inside of it next to Neil Gaiman rebloging ducks next to a naked woman telling you to kneel.

On your left is a picture of a cat with the caption "she killed my dad but i forgive her" and on your right is the next Van Gogh talking about starting a rap career in New York.

A group of writers are talking about how hard writing is next to a five year old being bullied for existing because that's really rude of her and they're all protesting about America's government.

I'm fully convinced this platform is held together by a two twigs and a roll of duct tape and even more convinced it's being run by a bunch of dead famous people and a racoon named trashy who likes to chew the wires.

[hellonoblesky]

you're like kneel gaiman

what

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

A Long, Unnecessary Love Letter to Comic Books

I’ve gotten way the fuck into comics lately, ranging from weird titles from publishers I’m pretty sure are defunct (Solar, Man of the Atom follows the ongoing adventures of an energy being whose origin story includes accidentally destroying his own timeline) to unsettling little horror tales (Gaiman’s Likely Stories disturbed me to the point of feeling physically ill once or twice) to big, bombastic superhero fair (just give me anything with Batman). It’s particularly this last category that I want to focus on, because it was while reading the 2018-onwards run of Justice League that I realised why I’ve been getting so into comics at the moment. They’re currently filling the niche that film used to fill.

You see, folks, I have a little problem when I go and see most films nowadays. The problem is very simple. While I still enjoy movies, that enjoyment is somewhat marred by the fact that NINETY PERCENT OF THE TIME I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN! I’m a progressive chap- I’m a commie, a sometime-advocate for fat acceptance (obvs) and I’m viscerally disgusted every time I hear about some fresh injustice perpetrated against non-white ethnic groups by the racist-as-shit American legal system. I’d never call myself a feminist, but I accept that feminism has a point in terms of its broad complaints and aims (I part company from both rad and third wave on a fair number of specifics, but that’s probably just because of my nine foot musical penis). And yet, as most of you already know from my previous spates of bitching and moaning, media wokeness winds me up. It’s not just that it’s obviously insincere and designed to curry favour with an imaginary demographic of humourless wankers- it’s that it also hobbles any story’s ability to surprise or engage meaningfully with its own fictional universe. Give me a list of characters and tell me nothing about them besides skin colour, age and gender, and I’ll tell you who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’ll be permitted a redemption arc, and who’ll turn out to be a ‘twist’ villain (and I use the term ‘twist’ with heavy-duty sarcasm marks). It’s cloying, constrictive and a death sentence for any kind of creativity. It’s gotten so bad that, whenever a movie does manage to pleasantly surprise me, I have to fight back tears of fucking gratitude. Progressive values are all well and good- I actively subscribe to them myself every time I go out and assassinate a member of the fucking Tory party- but modern movies and telly don’t operate from a place of deeply-held progressive values (or any values). The mainstream media’s ‘wokeness’ is just a tired list of boring tropes that cowardly, talentless screenwriters cling to lest creating something original engender cancellation.

And so, we come to comic books (and on comic books, if they have General Zod in them. Kneel before Zod? I certainly fucking will!). I was about type the words ‘even mainstream comic books are great’ but then I started laughing like the Joker watching a snuff movie, because that would have been an idiotic sentence. You see, while Superhero comics are ‘mainstream’ in the sense that they’re the thing people most associate with the medium, they still have a relatively tiny readership. In fact, I suspect that requiring their audience to know how to read is the main barrier to entry nowadays- it seems like something of a lost art.

The point is that I’ve been reading the ‘Justice/Doom War’ arc in Justice League and I’ve noticed something about it. It has a huge, diverse cast of characters from different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, different genders and different belief systems and walks of life… and not even one of them is an insufferable twat defined only by their relative privilege or oppression! To give you an example, Green Lantern John Stewart is a heroic space cop who happens to be black, but the plot never grinds to a halt so he can give us a lecture on race dynamics in modern America. He’s too busy using constructs of solid light to smash the ever-loving crap out of pan-dimensional cosmic monsters. When the plot does slow down to give him time to breathe, we learn more about his conflicted yet complementary history as both a soldier and an architect than we do about his skin colour. I mean, it’s not like it never comes up- the DC universe has some ties to reality and characters do occasionally find themselves on the receiving end of racism, but if it’s not relevant to what’s happening, the story doesn’t bend over backwards to include it. Conversely, Batman is a rich white dude, but the story never feels the need to ‘hold him accountable’. His main arc at the moment is about learning to be a good father figure to a sentient, telepathic starfish who wants to be the next Robin (yeah… the 2018 run is gloriously fucking weird). Hey! Here’s another example! On the surface, Hawkgirl is the epitome of the ‘strong female character’ beloved by modern media: a ferocious, take-no-shit warrior woman with countless lifetimes of carefully-honed experience. But she’s not some bloody sexless, characterless archetype designed as a flag for empowerment rather than a person: she’s a fully-developed character. She has complex internal motivations; she has romantic feelings for Martian Manhunter; she experiences grief and loss and is changed by them; she makes mistakes that she then has to triumph over. She doesn’t get to win just because she’s the first person on hand with a clitoris- she actually has to work and go through a character arc. Surprising and sometimes unpleasant things happen to her, making her a sympathetic and interesting character who I actually want to see triumph.

I could go on… and on… and on… and on… pretty much forever. I could probably write an entire essay just on how Lex Luthor uses his wealth for selfish ends even while purporting to represent a higher cause while Batman embodies an idealised version of how those with power and money should use it for the greater good. I could talk about how Superman is both effectively an immigrant and the most endearingly Rockwellian slice of walking Americana one can imagine. I could write fucking books on what the character of Perpetua says about the modern world’s complex relationship with faith and fanaticism and where the line is drawn.

But the real point is that I don’t know what’s going to happen next! Character who would never be allowed to triumph under their own power in movies succeed. Characters who would never be allowed to fail in movies get broken by horrible events and circumstances. Arcs are never what I expect them to be about, but always make sense when I look back and consider what I know about the character’s personality. It’s wonderfully refreshing in a way we just don’t get to see much nowadays… and I started to wonder why comics are so much better than everything else going on at the moment.

I was recently reading an Editorial in Metal Hurlant (basically the French 2000AD- a comic anthology of sci-fi and horror tales published on a monthly basis). The top brass were bemoaning the niche-ness of the comic book medium, asserting that comics should be promoted in bookstores and literary circles; that there should be a widespread push for them to reach a readership and audience that traditionally don’t engage with pulp culture (my term, not theirs). And what I realised is that this would be a terrible, terrible idea- because the main reason comics are so good is because they’re niche; their small; their disposable. Consider, if you will, the mainstream film industry. A big part of the reason that it mainly produces hot garbage is that it’s too big to take risks. Hollywood (for want of a better catch-all term) has spent its entire life-cycle pursuing larger and larger audiences so it can fund more and more epic blockbusters with bigger names and bigger, bolder FX. It’s a cycle of abuse in which each new generation of films has to outperform the generation before it. Meanwhile, because the audiences have to be so vast, the people making the flicks don’t think of those audiences as individual people with specific interests and ideas and a desire to be challenged and entertained. They think of them, instead, as demographic swathes; undifferentiated and united by broad, base commonalities that each project has to play to. But people aren’t demographics and the movie industry is currently getting a royal drubbing for its decades of ever-increasing contempt-of-the-viwer. Disney in particular is haemorrhaging money because it thought it would be a good idea to make Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and telly shows for a generic set of imagined demographics instead of people who actually like those franchises and are interested in the themes and ideas that go with them. As much as watching Disney fail gives me the warm fuzzies, I have to ask: who in their right mind would wish this fate on comics?

You see, folks, comics do sell plenty of copies- more than enough to justify the fairly modest expense of printing the darned things) but the overall audience for any one title is less than half the audience for any given major film release (I did some research and applied some maths that I won’t bore you with, but the absolute top selling comic books of recent years sold under a quarter million copies overall while an average film from any of the major studios sells around half a million cinema tickets in the US alone- and then there are the DVD and streaming sales on top of that. Notice how the latter number is more than double the former number. Regrettably, data on both films and comics is jealously guarded by vested interests, so I apologise for how ballpark those figures are, mind). Meanwhile the total audience of comics in general is much narrower in certain key respects. Perhaps the most obvious point is this: pretty much everyone who reads comic books is a comic book fan, whereas not everyone who goes to the cinema is a cinephile. But what does that actually mean? Well, for one, it means that comic book readers and writers are more of community- they tend to trust one another more; leaps can be taken that would be considered too chancy when dealing with ‘demographics’. At the same time, however, the writers’ connection to the fans means they have a better sense of when something is going to alienate large sections of their audience or piss people off (something film-makers have proved either bad at or wilfully blind to lately). The result is stories that know what bold ideas they can pursue while also knowing where to draw the line.

I think another reason comics are currently kicking the film industry’s pallid white buttocks in terms of creative merit is that they’re real cheap. Paper on ink is much easier to organise and send forth into the world than a vast audiovisual experience containing hundreds of actors, countless FX and goodness-knows-how-many extras, all put together by an enormous team of people who often never get to meet one another. If I wanted, I could probably write, draw and distribute a limited run of say, fifty comics, for the price of a Payday Loan. I wouldn’t, because it’s not where my talent lies, but the point I’m trying to make is this: companies and distributors are more willing to do interesting things when there��s only pocket change on the line compared to when there’s millions or billions of dollars. It’s why we get comics like Serial Artist (about a dude who claims his paintings are of his murder victims and becomes the centre of a vast government conspiracy) and W0rldtr33 (an ongoing slice of weirdness in which the internet comes to life and starts murdering people). It’s why something comparatively mainstream like Justice League can have an arc about Batman parenting a starfish and why the whole thing becomes Dark Nights: Metal and Death Metal for awhile (the Metal comics are end-of-the-world stuff inspired by- obvs- heavy metal albums… and they’re fucking great). It’s why stuff like Metal Hurlant and 2000AD is given a chance to find readers. So do comics need to be bigger and more widely accepted? Fuck no! The fringe is always where interesting stuff happens and aiming for mainstream acceptability is, it seems to me, a massive trap. The allure of more money and better social status is like one of the bug-zapper lights that draws in the moths and then fries their brains.

But what the fuck is the point of all this rambling? Comics are good- and thank goodness, since a lot of shit isn’t at the moment. There, I got it all down to once sentence, so what was the point of the rest? Well, I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned here. I’m a writer finally starting my career; finally putting work out into the public domain with a real publisher. No, I don’t do comics: I do sci-fi and fantasy books. But the lesson’s still applicable and it’s this: it’s a lot better to be good than popular and sometimes- just sometimes- you really do have to pick between the two.