Neil Gaiman Was Always Awful

The boy who’d sell stories grew up watching his father sell Scientology. David Gaiman was the church's chief spokesman in England, defending L. Ron Hubbard while kids got thrown in chain lockers on Hubbard's ships. The elder Gaiman put his son on BBC TV in 1968, age seven, to prove Scientology wasn't hurting children. "When you make a release, you feel absolutely great," young Neil told the cameras.

The son learned his father's rough trade. He learned about fronts and angles. He learned how to sand the sharp edges off difficult ideas and package them for wider consumption. He learned what people would buy.

Comics people still talk about how Neil Gaiman changed everything. They're right, but not how they think. He took the wild stuff the British boys were doing—Alan Moore's mystic swamp monsters, Alan Davis’ pop art chaos—and cleaned it up for American kids who wanted their rebellion prepackaged. His tortured Gen-X Sandman was ripped from the pages of goth fashion magazine. It read like a pastiche of classic literature with just enough sex and death to seem slightly dangerous.

Moore wrote about environmental apocalypse, vast right and left-wing conspiracies, and magical, tuber-based orgasms. Gaiman wrote about Shakespeare and kittycats. Moore, a real-life magic man, kept people up at night. Gaiman sold them naughty PG-13 dreams jazzed up with R ratings that never shook them from their sleep.

The marketing never stopped. He cultivated the image: the wild black curls, the omnipresent leather jacket, the gentle English accent. He spoke slowly, hypnotically. At conventions, women would fall to their knees and weep. He signed their breasts, accepted their hotel key cards. The British gentleman act worked better than his father's hard sell ever did.

The books came faster as the brand grew stronger. American Gods, Coraline, Good Omens with Terry Pratchett doing the heavy lifting. The prose was thin but the packaging was perfect. He knew his market: smart enough to pat themselves on the back for catching a G.K. Chesterton reference, not smart enough to mind reading the same magic trick over and over.

I suppose these books hit a nerve with a certain crowd, the ones too young for Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, or John Crowley's Little, Big. Wolfe, who engineered Pringles potato chips before writing The Book of the New Sun, wrote fantasy that made you work. Gaiman wrote fantasy that worked you over. His was the easier sell—like Harry Potter for people who had gotten a bit too old for Harry Potter. The same old tricks dressed up in black eyeliner and quoted in college application essays.

He married a Scientologist first, then Amanda Palmer, the crowdfunding queen who taught him new ways to exploit people and monetize devotion. Palmer built her career on "messy exchanges of goodwill," turning fans into friends into funders. Together they were digital culture royalty, TED talk circuit rulers, Jeff Bezos retreat regulars.

But there were always the stories. The open secrets at conventions. The young fans. The nannies. The NDAs. The hollow center of the brand finally cracked open this summer when the allegations emerged. Sexual assault. Coercion. Abuse of power. The details read like one of his ever-so-cliched dark stories: bathtubs and masks, masters and slaves.

"I'm a wealthy man," he told one young woman, "and I'm used to getting what I want."

There it was—not the British gentleman but the Scientology kid who learned to sell. The one who watched his father fall when he got too proud, too hungry. "Gaiman required others to look up to him instead of Source," the church wrote when they cast David Gaiman out. The son cast a wide net and found better marks.

The legacy isn't the books or even the allegations. It's how he changed American comics, teaching publishers to sell the writer as brand. No matter how good it was, the art became secondary, perfunctory. The story was all that mattered, and the storyteller mattered the most. He built an industry in his image: all marketing, no substance, rot at the core.

Now the brand’s cracking but the machine keeps running. Netflix has another season of The Sandman coming. Amazon has more Gaiman shows in the pipeline. The content must flow. The dreams must be sold.

The irony writes itself. Gaiman and Potter queen J.K. Rowling built empires selling mealy mouthed, thumb-sucking rebel fantasies to the people most likely to reject them. While Joe Rogan's listeners shrug off controversy the way a duck sloughs water off its back, these two courted an audience that grew up collecting scalps on Tumblr. Rowling dips a toe in the TERF wars and watches her readers burn their books (don’t worry—they’ll buy more copies, they always do). But Gaiman's sins run deeper than bad tweets—he lived the pathetic, penny-ante darkness he sold them in sanitized form. The fans who once wept at his feet now want his head. Like his father before him, he forgot the first rules of selling: never believe your own pitch and never get high on your own supply of content.

That's what the boy learned watching his father sell Scientology on TV. The trick isn't the product. The trick is making them want to buy. I never bought it, but plenty did. The $64,000 question is: Will they keep on paying? We humanzees are nothing if not born suckers, as Gaiman’s story reminds us.