Third paragraph (there are no sections):

And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.

This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.

This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.

It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.

But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.

I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).

I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:

Heart is a traitor even when it breaks.
Love friendship given cannot be returned.
All that I once thought my friend was once has burned
To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes
His sins his crimes are of a piece with all
The things I valued. His embarrassed smile
His weighted pauses. I am certain while
He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall
Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought
Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere.
Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear.
He was extraordinary until caught.
All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack.
Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.

To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.