#sandman

[kiddmandu1]

"It's just the beast under your bed. In the closet.. in your head"

[rehsturridgethordean]

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[presidentpoppy]

doodling while my dad put aaron blaise tutorial videos on. me and also sandman

[mask131]

Hello again, I’m the anon asking about Gaiman. Thank you for the long answer. I simply went to Gaiman’s blog and put “Tanith” in the search bar, which returned this ask: neil-gaiman[.]tumblr[.]com/post/630462353462427648/recently-i-bought-some-old-daw-books-editions-of

Thank you very much for sharing it in return! Indeed I had never seen that one before - but one of the reasons I dropped of following Gaiman (among others) back in the days was just how MUCH asks he answered each day which clogged my dashboard. (*sweat as I say this when I post like 20 posts each day*)

So... The very interesting thing is that he says "I do not think so". It is not an outright refusal. I don't want to be some sort of pseudo-analysis, but I suspect he leaves it open because he isn't quite sure himself if it was an inspiration or not. As he confesses at the end, he is aware of her short fiction (which clocks given their short stories ended up posted in the same anthologies), so he is familiar with her work... Which leaves open the whole "Snow, Glass, Apple" debate. I guess he leaves open the "accidental influence" thing, which is something I tend to see a lot with older authors (like Pratchett) who confess they do not remember themselves at one point how much they were influenced they read or not... But still it is such a strange way of wording it. Especially since he then says Lee probably "read Jack Vance and Zelazny" too. Which is a weird thing to say considering Lee's works - so either he is blatantly unaware of what "Flat Earth" is like, either he purposefully tries to blur the lines by playing the klutz and throwing two of his old claimed inspirations there... (Did Tanith Lee ever spoke of Jack Vance or Zelazny though? I don't know)

All in all it is so... weird. Because again, when we consider the Sandman thing it goes like this. To the claim "Is Sandman born out of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth", the obvious answer is no. Sandman started as a literal continuation of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, this is what you can actually call the "rip-off" which Gaiman building the series out of Moore's concepts - though how much of a "rip-off" can it be when he literaly sold the concept to DC as "I will copy and continue Moore's Swamp Thing" (see the proposition draft he sends). The plot and world of Sandman has very little to do with Flat Earth except for the concept of the Lords of Darkness - who indeed echo strongly the Endless, though they are very different otherwise.

It would be very legitimate to defend that the Lords of Darkness partially inspired the Endless - partially only because Gaiman lists his many other references in the Companion, and we know the concept of the "Endless" started out of him playing with the Latin gods' family (Sleep brother of Death and with Fate as part of their family) when trying to create a "Swamp Thing for fiction instead of plants" and taking inspiration from the way Zelazny depicted gods in his novels (especially in "Lord of Light", which he credits as where his thought process for the Endless started). The parallels are quite obvious... But ONLY and ONLY by the time of "Delusion's Master" and "Delirium's Mistress". That's where the full "Endless" vibes kicks in - because before these books, there was not so much of the anti-family motif and there was not such a D insistence...

So if we choose to believe what Gaiman implies (that he did not read Lee's "long" fiction and is unfamiliar with the very first books of the series), we could put it onto another one of those "accidental re-creations" that occured all around Sandman. We still have the famous story of Gaiman almost not publishing the "Game of You" story because he discovered the plot was reused by "Bones of the Moon" of Jonathan Carroll - and how it was only published because Gaiman contacted Carroll, who encouraged him to still go forward with it. It is things that happen (mind you, I only heard Gaiman's version of the tale, never heard if Carroll ever spoke about it).

But we can also very well choose to believe Gaiman was very aware of Lee's Flat-Earth, used her Lords of Darkness as a basis or influence for his Endless family, and then chose to not speak about it. (Because at this point, with so much talk of the Endless' inspirations, it would not be an accidental forgetfulness, it would be a deliberate refusal to acknowledge her)

It is all very hard to tell from my point of view... I personally lean more on the idea that it was a partial inspiration he refuses to admit for one reason or another (maybe he forgot? maybe he had a beef with Lee? I don't know), but I do not have enough evidence to fully conclude it because other incidents (such as the "Bones of the Moon" one) proved that Gaiman had this tendency to form "echoes" of parallel works by "accidents". Which could lead us to the Coraline versus Thief of Always debate - I know people have brought the idea of plagiarism, Gaiman always denied that his Coraline was inspired by ToA, but I don't know if Clive Barker ever spoke about the matter, and we do know that they were friends (or at least hanging out with each other) for a while, enough that (to stay on the Sandman line) Gaiman could reuse some of Barker's dropped ideas (Gaiman credits the idea of naming Desire's domain the Threshold as it being a pun Barker created for a story he never wrote).

And I just remembered that there is also the problem of Pratchett - because in Sandman Gaiman reused, sometimes exactly word for word, concepts and lines used by Pratchett in his early Discworld novels, and yet he never listed Pratchett as an inspiration or source anywhere in the Companion... Because he didn't deem it necessary because they were now friends and collaborators when the Companion was published? Or because he wanted to hide the fact he re-used the concepts of a then-beginning and not-that-well-known author?

It is such a confusing puzzle I honestly do not try searching for any "plagiarism" or "copy" anymore. I just search for direct parallels and obvious influences.

[beobhcm]

Unity and Desire dynamic in Harry Potter AU=)))) Unity is always top to me

Commission from my friend: https://www.facebook.com/kumiho.tsubasa?

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[kiranas-47th-cashew]

is the sandman nation still around