The Sandman, Queers, and Hyperreality

The research hole has been dark and lonely, maybe a little too dark. Now that I have done all this research I will try to adjust my eyes and attempt to piece this all together.  Now that I have the materials to build, it is time to make a blueprint. It is no good to break ground and start the foundation of this paper unless I know where it is going. If I am going to ramble, I need to ramble with purpose. Or else I will end up with rubble.

My topic is the representation of queer characters in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. The research that followed this declaration of topic repeated blew my mind. The ground I needed to cover involved researching and defining of the following terms: queer, representation, spatial narrative.

I am using my definition of queer from Judith Halberstam's In A Queer Time and Place, where she decides to think about queerness as "an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices." So, I am taking this definition of queer and apply it to characters in The Sandman. After defining these characters as queer, I have to examine how they are represented. This led me to having to examine how things are represented in comics and how meaning is obtained from this. In comics, individual panels work together to create a narrative. Simultaneously, what is represented in the panels act as windows into a diegetic world. Because comics are graphic medium, (mostly) everything is depicted visually. The reader sees the characters, the environments, and the settings. However, what the reader sees in fragmented and she must unite the narrative in her mind.

So, comics are a prime example of the modern idea of fragmentation. Along with this, there is a postmodern sensibility in comics, particularly the Sandman, in the form of hyperreality. The Sandman depicts characters that are hyperreal, they appear to represent real people but are created from scratch. In addition, The Sandman contains depictions of fantastic things, borrowing elements of various mythologies to build its narrative. It also includes elements of the characters' imaginations. These imaginary things are twice removed from reality, they are the fictions of fictional characters. 

From the ideas and theories that spring forth from comics, I began to research the structure of the comic. Thierry Groensteen's The System of Comics attempts to work through the tricky structures of comics. His work represents one of the two sides in comics studies, comics are the result of the spatial arrangement of panels. His idea of general arthology states that the spatial-topical nature of the multiframe (his term for all of the frames and panels and pages and hyperframes that are in a singular work) creates a narrative that can be read in any direction.  The story is driven by reading (a problematic term for a medium that consists of a heavy visual component) the panels in the order the author desired. Diegetic Time is therefore subjected by space, because the temporal element of the narrative is moved by the spatial arrangement of panels. The process is complicated because when the reader looks at the page, he sees every panel at once.  Depending on how he focuses on the panels, he can create multiple temporalities of the spatial narrative.  The reader can twist (queer) the narrative by reading the narrative in any sort of way.

Now that I got all that out of my brain, I have to ask myself, what does it mean? My research question is "How might the spatial-temporal narrative of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman be viewed as a narrative of queer geographies?" This is a question of process, what are the processes in The Sandman that lead it to be viewed or considered as a narrative of queer geographies? My question of "what does it mean?" leads into ideas of "what's the point of this research?" and "why are you doing this?" The point is to create discussion about a popular and critically acclaimed comic series where there is none. Usually people only write about The Sandman to talk about how Gaiman uses Shakespeare. That is the point, and that is why I am doing this. Based on what I have done so far in terms of research, I feel confident in being able to write something substantial. 

The research does provide answers to my research question, based on hyperreality in comics, the spatiality of the narrative, and the participation of the reader in forming the narrative lend it to be easily "queered." I think my missing pieces involve geographies. I need to reexamine the text and look at constructions of space and place. After that, I need to make a more formal outline and perhaps a web of ideas in order to bridge it all together.