Once Upon A Time...
Why chicks dig author Neil Gaiman.
      by Tara O'Shea

Master storyteller Neil Gaiman

Last month, a very nice man read me a story.

Several, in fact. As I sat in the dark, a little candle shedding a circle of light in front of me, with the rumble of the elevated train in the background, he read, "Mrs Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat."

I knew this story. The first time I had heard it was in the summer of 1993 at the Chicago Comics Con, when I sat at the same man's feet along with probably at least a hundred others, and he read it to us. He did all the voices. People laughed in all the right places. A few people laughed in places that only they, and the storyteller, knew, but that was all right. I was almost twenty then, and Neil Gaiman had been telling me stories in one way or another since I was sixteen years old.

I had discovered Sandman on the shelves next to the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman comics on which I had been blowing my allowance since I was old enough to walk to my local comic book store. I had come into to the series late -- issue 20 or so, but that was all right because back in those days comics shops had back issue boxes and Sandman wasn't yet so huge that you had to sell your unborn children to afford to read what you'd missed. Fans like me were lucky -- DC Comics had just gotten the idea of releasing certain stories in trade paperbacks and put out the first two story arcs (A Doll's House and Preludes and Nocturnes) within a year of my first picking up Sandman 20 because the Dave McKean cover had caught my eye as I'd reached for my regular copy of Suicide Squad or Adventures of Superman.

Sandman changed the way many people thought about comics. While many critics refer to it as a "graphic novel" in an attempt to somehow make it sound respectable for grown men and women to read "funny books", Sandman was in fact a comic book and the very best kind of comic book. Gaiman and the artists with whom he worked -- Mike Drigenberg, Jill Thompson, Marc Hempel, and Michael Zulli to name a few -- used the unique medium to its best advantage and told stories that could only be told as a comic.

Sandman was a story about stories -- specifically, the Prince of Stories, Dream of the Endless, who had been captured by a Crowley wannabe and imprisoned in a dank English basement for 70 years before escaping and rebuilding his kingdom. As the series went on, readers were introduced to Dream's siblings, the Endless; Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium who was once Delight, and the prodigal Destruction who went off on walkabout for a few centuries and bears a striking resemblance to actor Brian Blessed. From Shakespeare's company performing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to the assembled hosts of Faerie, to the fisherman's paradise taking the form of a ringer for G.K. Chesterton and walking in the waking world, to the dreams of cats and cities, mortals, gods, and fallen angels, readers were captivated by the characters and plots that were unlike anything they had seen in comics before. Over the course of 70 issues, Gaiman's imagination bodied forth tales with their roots in mythology, history, fantasy, horror, suspense, and even the odd comedy or two. But at the heart of the series was the idea of stories and how they feed our minds, hearts, and souls.

The title became one of the best selling magazines in DC Comics history and in 1993 became the flagship title of the Vertigo imprint -- a spin-off from the tights-and-cape mainstream DC Comics -- that featured horror, fantasy, drama and fare aimed at the older comics fans rather than the junior high male audience that had been the comics market mainstay for decades.

People who had never read comics read Sandman. People who looked down on comics as disposable pulp entertainment read Sandman. Women read Sandman. In fact, chicks dig Neil Gaiman. His popularity with the fairer sex has a great deal to do with his talent for writing pragmatic, sensible, and delightful female characters such as the anthropomorphic personification of Death, who -- in marked contrast to her tragic and gloomy sibling, Dream -- has a cheerful, sunny disposition despite her Goth appearance and is the sort of death most people wouldn't mind meeting when their time comes.

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