Weaving New Dreams From Old Cloth

This chapter discusses the significance of Gaiman's creative disruptions of scripts and schemas in two of his visual retellings for young adults: The Sleeper and the Spindle (2014) and the graphic novel The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999). By weaving the old, well-worn cloth of fairy tale narrative scripts together with new schematics, Gaiman and his collaborators present sometimes radical ideologies clothed in the comfortable garb of rehearsed, longstanding traditions. As much as this action masks the changing cultural attitudes represented by the "new cloth," Gaiman's weavings also reveal to careful readers how narratives become ubiquitous and achieve metanarrativity. To understand how our minds interpret scripts, schemas, and metanarratives, this chapter will bring to bear conceptual blending and schema theories on my examination of the verbal and visual interplay of source texts and Gaiman retellings

Queering Space in Neil Gaiman’s Illustrated Works

This chapter investigates the queering of space in Neil Gaiman's illustrated works, and the recurrent centrality of the liminal nature of places in these works. Liminal spaces are symbolic of two or more conflicting categories at the same time, and they may offer possibilities for subversion of imposed binarisms. In Gaiman's work these spaces are most often contiguous, sharing a permeable border. These spaces offer opportunities to examine asymmetrical relationships and structures of power.In order to explore such liminal spaces in Gaiman's works and how those spaces may, or may not, queer binary categories, we shall borrow from Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia. As the analyses throughout this chapter will try to demonstrate, heterotopic spaces in Gaiman's works are represented as sites that are rife with the potential for queering binarisms.

Liminality and the Gothic Sublime of the Sandman

This chapter explores how liminality and subliminality interweave in Gaiman's seminal work, The Sandman, infusing the text with fantastic opportunity and subversive potential. The series presents an overlap between the dreaming and waking worlds, dissipating clear distinctions between reality and fantasy. However, when there is an overlap between the dreaming and the waking worlds, the border is dissolved and humans too become liminal figures who navigate both worlds. The infinite possibilities that emerge when concrete and fantastic worlds collide make the series evocative of the sublime. Gaiman and his illustrators use liminality and the sublime throughout the series

Inverted Spaces

This chapter analyzes how specific spaces function in Gaiman's mirror-worlds in Neverwhere, MirrorMask, in conjunction with the main characters in each. A brief theoretical framework compares the general aspects of the two texts, and then moves forward to explore what space does in Gaiman's narratives along with how the main characters interact with specific, unique spaces. The results show impossible, almost unmappable spaces are the places where otherwise distinct and problematic characters can best thrive.

At the Edge of the Barely Perceptible

In this chapter, Christopher Kilgore analyzes venomous and abusive masculinities as drawn-out temporal trauma in some of Gaiman and McKean's darker works, Violent Cases and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch. The chapter goes on to argue that the strange temporalities in these two books portray and critique a hereditary culture of domestic and public masculine violence, putting Gaiman and McKean in line with other critical work of the 1980s and '90s graphic narrative renaissance and at odds with the traditional masculinities prevalent in mainstream comics.