Shelves of shame
Today: Leila Brillson, a writer and strategist who used to work in media and then sold out for entertainment and then became CMO of The Onion.
Issue No. 239
Also Neil Is Dead to Us
Leila Brillson
Also Neil Is Dead to Us
by Leila Brillson
My sister, 16 years my senior, is the definition of Gen X cool. She recorded episodes of 120 Minutes, took me to see Bowie when he toured with Nine Inch Nails, and gave me a hot-off-the-presses issue of Vertigo Comics’ Death: The High Cost of Living by Neil Gaiman. Death, in this story, is the sister of Dream; they are two of seven siblings, each an embodiment of an eternal force that controls humanity, and this is her spin-off. The cover is a stylized image of Tori Amos at her most goth, with pouty black lipstick and a dramatic, smoky cat eye. That one image seemed to give birth to a whole new approach to goth femininity: not the morbidly fuck-you punk of Siouxsie Sioux, but a perky, life-affirming version that found beauty and sadness in the mundane. A manic pixie dream girl, if there ever was one, flavored with angst; a fetishization of darkness, you might say, given the recent allegations against Gaiman.
Sam Keith, an artist who drew the first issues of The Sandman and later created cult classic comic book The Maxx, called bullshit on this in his own work, disparaging Gaiman devotees. “They’re all necro-nerds and Sand freaks,” a teenage narrator, Sarah, says of her classmates. “Death is hard and cold and ugly, not some cute chick.”
My sister still has those early comics. For me, they started a lifelong love affair with comic books. To be clearer: I would not have picked up comic books, which came to define a portion of my life, without Neil Gaiman. In fact it's hard to think of an author who has had more of an impact on the fantasy and horror scene, or neo-goth, or graphic novel melodrama than Gaiman.
Today, I texted my sister to ask her if she had read the cover story about Gaiman in New York. She is, like many Gen X-ers, perennially offline. She texted back: “No, is it good?” I struggle to find the heart to tell her, to be responsible for demolishing all the rainy days spent drifting through the dark romanticism of an artist who has been outed as a monster. Let her live in that liminal space before the art and artist become inextricably blurred, unsalvageable.
Keep us breathing fire!
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