Neil Gaiman’s Wanda Mann

 

Stuff I know about Neil Gaiman:

 

He's British, messy, wears any colour as long as it's black. Notoriously possessed of a "long and prolific literary career" and a "very large... vocabulary". He has written stacks of amazing comic books, novels, short stories, and episodes of long-running British science fiction television shows about mad men with boxes. Is married to Amanda Palmer, who is gloriously queer and draws her eyebrows on with liquid eyeliner, which is a bonus. Apparently he loves vegemite.

 

Also just happens to have an amazing abundance of queer characters in his work and doesn't even care. If most queer characters by mainstream creators (if you can call Neil Gaiman that, which I'm not sure you can, as the thing that made him famous was a series of comic books about "a goth who is the anthropomorphic personification of Dreams [who] decides to commit suicide and takes a really long-ass time doing it. All of his relatives are also goth, except for his brother who is a lumberjack," according to quicksummary on tumblr) are queer because their creators thought, "hmm, the LGBTQ+ community doesn't seem to be too happy with the lack of homosexual characters in my works of literature, I better make this character a lesbian just to keep them from getting upset and boycotting me," which a lot of people seem to be doing, then Neil Gaiman is making his characters queer because "SCREW THE POLICE THIS CHARACTER IS QUEER."

 

I apologise profusely for the long and tiring run-on sentence that last paragraph turned out to be. Bad at grammar is me.

 

Anyway. I recently managed to pay off all hundred dollars of my library fees and borrow my favourite Sandman book (the aforementioned book about goths and lumberjacks) from the public library. I did this partially because I hadn't read it in a really long time due to that pesky hundred dollar library fee, and partially because I remembered that I needed someone to write about in this blog and I couldn't think of anyone aside from the entirely wonderful Wanda Mann, a main character of Sandman Volume Five: A Game Of You.

 

As I mentioned before, Wanda isn't the only queer character in Neil Gaiman's books. In fact, she isn't the only queer character in A Game Of You. She lives in the same building as Hazel and Foxglove, a lesbian couple who end up naming their child after Wanda (at least, if you think about it for a while). She is my favourite, though, and because I may not always be right but am never wrong, she has to be your favourite too.

 

Wanda is the best friend of Barbie, the main character in this particular Sandman story. She's a stylish, bitchy (but in the awesome, empowered way!) transwoman who loves Hyperman comic books, especially the Weirdzo universe - a homage to the Superman Bizarro universe, which is pretty cool in itself - and is deathly afraid of surgery. In one terrifying scene, she dreams that her hair has been cut and her clothes have been ripped off by the Weirdzos, and they are taking her away to give her The Operation with an oversized hammer and a rusty saw. "So what you am? A man or a woman? Whatever you am, we make it better."

 

It's a little unsettling how many of these blog posts end up with me talking about "that time I cried over something stupid," but you know what? I don't care. I'm not a cry baby, I'm THE cry baby, and I totally cried at the end of this book. (And from now on I'm just going to hope that everyone who reads this assumes that there is a huge red "spoilers" sticker slapped on the front of it.) Wanda dies . Not through transphobic violence as you'd probably expect, but because of something that's a little bit like magic and a little bit like a storm and a lot terrifying and horrible.

 

That's not the upsetting bit, believe it or not.

 

Barbie goes to her funeral, where Wanda's parents have cut her hair short and dressed her in a suit and put the name "Alvin" on her tombstone. (This isn't the part.) Barbie waits until after the service, then scribbles it out and writes "Wanda" over the top in bright pink lipstick. (This isn't the part, either.) Then, right at the very end of the book, this happens:

 

 

And then I cried almost as hard as I did at the end of the Iron Giant when there's that flashback of Hogarth saying "You are what you choose to be" and the Iron Giant says "SU...PER...MAN..." and blows up. THAT'S PRETTY HARD.

 

Excelsior true believers, and all that jazz.

 

*stealth Amanda Palmer pun!

Posted by Editor on 01/25 at 08:04am
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