2019: Endings and All That (2.2)...

Part 2 of 2

The Dreaming (etc)

(Yesterday, what was intended as a short note about a couple of books I’m stepping off as writer ballooned into — well, this. So I chopped it in half. Yesterday’s piece focused on Doctor Aphra, today’s takes a look behind the scenes of The Dreaming: how the project arose and why I’m handing over the reins. With a big dollop of horribly honest brainstuff into the bargain.)

And then there’s The Dreaming.

Something like five years ago, I was asked if I had any ideas for one of several satellite titles intended to launch as part of a Sandman-centric event. Neil Gaiman had provided some seed-notions from which something elaborate was hoped to emerge (at that point I had no idea how involved Neil was to be).

I was, I fully understood, just one of many others asked to pitch. (In fact there was an amusing few weeks afterwards during which every pub conversation with a fellow writer would begin with a fumbling conversational dance to determine, without breaking NDA, whether they too had been invited to contribute. They all had.)

I, being a hungry little shit, replied to the invitation with an interwoven outline for all the titles, offering to helm the whole event. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

As I recall a reply came back along the lines of “wow, we really respond to your ambition”... which is about as polite a way as I can imagine of calling someone an arrogant fuckweasel.

Predictably, I heard nothing further, though the idea sat at the back of my brain like a piece of grit in an oyster.

In late 2017 it turned out the project hadn’t gone away at all -- and I hadn’t, in fact, been relegated to the fuckweasel bench. Legal reefs were being navigated, publishing strategies forged, and a new version of the same project being schemed. That, of course, was The Sandman Universe, and - based on that old, hungry, fuckweaselly pitch - Neil suffered a rare lapse in judgement and asled me to write the flagship Dreaming.

I checked-in on that bit of grit, still stuck in its little psychic oyster, and OMG you won’t believe what etc etc etc.

I’ve said and written plenty about the Dreaming elsewhere. About the profound effect Sandman had on my life, about the surreal privilege of hanging out with Neil and being given permission not only to borrow his toys but to make them our own. I mention the long backstory now merely to illustrate that whereas I’ve been actively hitting keys in service of Dream, Lucien, Merv, Dora, Matthew and all the rest for something like two years, these ideas and their conceptual predecessors have been part of my life for far longer. It’s a little bit heartbreaking to be stepping away.

Being the thin-skinned addict of fakey online validation that I am, it’s been strange following the reaction to the new Sandman titles. There’s little of the familiar modes of comment and discourse one expects of a mainstream big-2 title, at either end of the analytical/shrill spectrum. None of the big spikes in engagement and excitement (nor arseholery and abuse) every New-Comicbook-Wednesday.

Rather, the Sandman fandom is a patient, thoughtful bunch who don’t so much declare their views as matriculate them, often over the course of the whole month between issues, or indeed only after the trade has dropped. They’ve taken us in with gradual (and often cautious) enthusiasm, and have - I hope - been rewarded. They’ve certainly been very effusive, in often downright cerebral fashion, about the work.

My thanks, deeply felt, to them, for helping me get through some fabulously tough writing.

I finish my tenure on The Dreaming at issue #20 . I have done some of the best work of my career along the way. It has never been less than fantastically difficult. And I couldn’t be prouder.

One of the challenges was that it’s the most classically longform version of an “ongoing” comic I’ve ever written. Whereas most monthly books tend to resolve themselves into more-or-less discrete units of story -- arranged so they can be partitioned among collected volumes as satisfyingly self-contained arcs — The Dreaming very much takes its cue from Neil’s Sandman. That is, it wears the outermost trappings of that arc tradition, but extends almost all of its threads along far longer lines than 5 or 6 issues.

All of the big questions we intend to answer by #20 were baked into the pie right back in #1, and although we’ve adjusted our throttle here and there -- even taking the odd sightseeing detour along the way -- we’ve stayed mostly fixed on our course towards the destination.

In other words: it’s been a marathon rather than a connected sequence of sprints. That’s proven a frankly exhausting experience.

Left to its own devices my brain bounces about like a pinball, with each new arc of an ongoing series letting it clatter off in some new direction, staving-off burnout. It didn’t help that at least half the run coincided with some of the worst Black Dog Days I’ve had in recent years. Fellow depressives will know that whereas one can sometimes trick one’s brain into positivity via a parade of beginnings and novelties, being in the depths of a trough is the worst possible position from which to conduct a schlep.

If I hadn’t been so desperately in love with all the characters in our saga, and so excited to finally reach the payoff, and most importantly if I hadn’t been working with such an astonishing artist in Bilquis Evely, I believe I would have stumbled far sooner.

But it was time. We made it, Bilquis.

When I took up this gig, I built my arc around three questions:

1. If you had to, how would you depose the King of Dreams?
2. If you wanted to, how would you hijack his Kingdom?
...and 3. What would you do with it once you’d succeeded?

By issue #18 all three questions will have been answered. By issue #19 we’ll know what happens next. And in issue #20 Bilquis and I quite literally perform a grand magical working to bring this longform spell to an end.

With the benefit of an inbox preview, I can say with great confidence: it’s beautiful.

Over the course of the series I’ve worked with an unforgettable array of talents, and one of the great joys has been tailoring oneshots or two-parters to fit the right mood. Abigail Larson, Dani, my eternal artbrother Matias Bergara, and Marguerite Sauvage: they’ve each gone above and beyond to create some of the most memorable issues I’ve ever worked on.

But let’s be clear. It was Bilquis (more-than-ably assisted by Matheus Lopes), who kept me going.

All comics is collaboration, and all collaboration is strength. I simply cannot overstate what a privilege it’s been to work with a talent of her calibre. I will spend a long, guilty time feeling wretched about the relentlessly difficult pages I kept sending her way.

Without complaint, Bilquis has calmly produced some of the most beautiful work ever committed to comics. And she’s done so over and over and over. She deserves every award there is — and six months of sleep.

Now and then, in this game, a writer encounters an artist with whom they immediately know they’ll continue to work at every possible opportunity (if only because it’d drive you mad to see them slumming it with someone else). Bilquis is one such.

As for why now? Why not spin-out the Dreaming as long as we could? Short answer: Hellblazer. When life offers you lemons, make lemonade. When Neil Gaiman offers you a bucketlist project you spent your whole career waiting for -- one which you know will be massively time-greedy, with exactly the sort of short-arc pacing structure you’ve been yearning for, to keep your stupid miserablist brain giggling giddily for years -- then you start thinking about clearing the decks.

In the Dreaming I’d told the story I set out to tell. With Constantine I will never run out of new ones.

It was time.

2019’s been an oddity in all manner of ways, frankly. Even remaining focused solely on the worksphere, I can’t fail to acknowledge depression was a regular visitor, usually baited to the door by nothing less prosaic than an iterative lack of sleep.

There’s probably a pithy axiom about how no true writer is ever truly working, just as they’re never truly relaxing. (If there wasn’t before there is now.) Depression just fucks the whole cycle up, basically. As I’m a little too fond of saying: you wouldn’t judge an asthmatic for getting breathless halfway through a steeplechase. Those of us with the bite-marks of a black dog on our ankles should likewise not beat ourselves when we slow down.

I’ve written fewer pages in ‘19 than I did in ‘18. Somehow - in as much as these things can be quantified - I’m nonetheless certain I’ve worked far harder. I’ve set up several new gigs about which I’m excited, and that’s a mood to be grabbed like a life-vest.

ALIENATED is the first to be announced, and I’m itching to tell you more about that. There are also - let’s see - three? cool things happening in media spheres outside of comics.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cynic when it comes to this stuff, having seen far too many people shrieking about This Big TV Deal I’m Doing -- only to fall embarassedly silent. Hollywood, and by association all of its flatteringly mimicky adjacents, is extremely good at shouting “yes” when what it actually means is “probably not, but that won’t become clear for at least six months.”

Braggarts brag at their peril, basically. Nonetheless, this particular crop of Maybes seem unusually solid. Time will tell.

On a more human level: I’ve watched my son figure out how to walk. I’ve heard him learn to shout “daddy!” when he’s scared -- scared of something else, I should specify, not me -- where previously he would’ve just screamed blue murder and sharted. I’ve also spent several hellish nights listening to his little lungs fighting for breath, during one of the more egregious of his endless bloody illnesses. It’s all grist to the soulmill, and all chalk powder for the hair.

I’ve learnt to manage on less sleep than I ever thought possible. I’ve done the same 6k run along the same stretch of foam-battered coast twice a week, every week, and watched my average time get longer and longer.

Whether I’m old, or physically shattered, or just too busy watching the sea to care, I don’t know.

And oh, for fuck’s sake, the election. Brexit. Trump. The dumpster-fire that is the world. In a strange sort of way it feels appropriate that the Tories were returned at this point, in the depths of Winter. Like the dying of the crops and the hollowing of one’s belly, the committed optimist can at least say: things are getting simpler.

All that’s left is hope, and that’s a lot.

It’s the oldest story there is, isn’t it? The beaming Sun King -- that lovely child, crowned a year earlier on a Springtime morn, full of ideas and contradictions - is dragged off to the oddly notched stump in the forest by the quiet elders who hide their faces. Perhaps he knew this would happen. I hope he had some eggnog first.

Tomorrow the sun will rise. A new decade begins. There will be new ideas and new stories, new horrors and new resistances.

I’m not sad to see 2019 end. Or, rather, I don’t regret it.

It was time.

ComicsSimon Spurrier19 December 2019Simon Spurrier, 2019, Neil Gaiman, The Dreaming, DC Comics, Bilquis Evely

2019: Endings and All That (2.2)...

Part 2 of 2

The Dreaming (etc)