Traveling Through Dreams

Caitlin R. Kiernan

by Christy Kallies (christy@sequentialtart.com)

From paleontology through dark fantasy short stories, novels, band vocals and comics, Caitlin Kiernan has had a varied and busy career. From being one of a number of contributors to the Vertigo series The Dreaming, she has now taken over the title full-time and given it a new cohesion and direction. Her latest work for Vertigo, The Girl Who Would be Death, hit the shelves late last year. Fortunately, Caitlin found time in her packed schedule to talk to Sequential Tart about comics, writing and her plans for The Dreaming.

Sequential Tart: How did you get involved in writing The Dreaming?

Caitlin R. Kiernan: I'd written a short story for the prose anthology, The Sandman: Book Of Dreams, and when Alisa Kwitney, the original editor on The Dreaming, decided she wanted to do a story about The Corinthian, Neil Gaiman suggested that I might be a good choice to write it. So I did a three-part story, Souvenirs (The Dreaming #17-19) and was asked if I'd like to write another story. The title still had its anthology format then. Anyway, my second story, Unkindness of One (The Dreaming #22-24) was a very loose sequel to Souvenirs, and so it began to establish a sense of continuity and to tie it in more closely with both The Sandman and with Swamp Thing. The earlier stories had been pretty self-contained, isolated, and I think a lot of people were glad to see some glimmer of a larger story. At that point, Alisa considered keeping the anthology format, but working with four or five regular writers. Four or five wound up being two, me and Peter Hogan. Peter had written the second story arc The Lost Boy (The Dreaming #4-7).

Then, Alisa wanted a "big event" that would be the focus of the title's third year, that the stories would revolve around, and Neil suggested that we might burn down the House of Mystery. I don't know why Neil wanted to burn down the House of Mystery, but Peter and I saw a lot of potential there and that's how the latest and longest story arc, Many Mansions, came about. Everyone working on The Dreaming had decided we needed to move toward a more traditional, ongoing story, something more like the structure of The Sandman and move away from the original format of disconnected stories that just happened to be set within The Dreaming. I felt very strongly about this. So, we did Many Mansions (The Dreaming #27-34) and, although the initial plan was that Peter and I would split the scripts 50/50, I wound up doing five and a half of the issues (we co-authored #31). Peter had become busy with two stories for the new Sandman Presents title and about halfway through Many Mansions I was offered the book full-time. So, that's how I became involved with The Dreaming.

ST: Now that you've taken over the writing for a more coherent view, what changes have you made?

CRK: How have I changed The Dreaming? Well, I know that I've made it darker, grittier, and I've tried very hard to give it more of the feel that Neil created in The Sandman. I think that was missing in most of the early stories, and I think the readers recognized that it was missing. Writing The Dreaming is a difficult balancing act, because you have to meet the very high and very specific expectations of the readers coming to it from The Sandman, and you have to allow it to become its own comic.

ST: Is there anything else you would like to change?

CRK: Well, I guess it would be having some way to communicate more directly with the readers. Vertigo lost its letter columns a few months ago, so we don't even have that forum now. And I think there's still a lot of confusion about The Dreaming, because it's had a bumpy start. It's important to get the word out that it's becoming a very different kind of comic than it started out to be, but there aren't many opportunities to get that message across. That there's only one writer now, that it isn't an anthology title anymore and never will be again, that we're trying to move back towards the course that Neil plotted in The Sandman, and we're doing it with his guidance and blessings and so on. I want people to know that the story that Neil began in The Sandman didn't end with The Wake. Certainly, Morpheus' role in it ended there, but the story continues, in The Dreaming.

ST: Many people online are expressing distaste for the Cain and Abel storylines. Are they going to stay the featured characters in the book, or are they going to fade into the background for awhile?

CRK: Yeah, I've seen the comments online, and I know there are a lot of readers who are tired of Cain and Abel. But I've really enjoyed doing the Many Mansions arc, and developing Cain and Abel from who they were in The Sandman, and the old DC horror titles, into fully-realized characters. We were already getting the "I'm tired of Cain and Abel" mail before Peter and I started writing Many Mansions, actually, and I suggested that some of the issues in the arc approach the consequences of the destruction of the House of Mystery and Cain's subsequent disintegration indirectly. So, we did issues like Dreams The Burning Dream and Temporary Overflow, that looked at the events through other characters' eyes, and we did London Pride and Dream Below, which were even more removed from Cain and Abel. I think that approach gave the arc a very interesting structure.

But yes, we will be seeing a lot less of Cain and Abel for a while. The next couple of stories focus primarily on Echo (from Souvenirs and Unkindness of One), Lucien, Matthew, and The Corinthian. And I'm starting to think about getting to Nuala again after that. I really enjoyed writing her for the Winter's Edge II story, Marble Halls that I did with Teddy Kristiansen.

ST: Do you read comics? If so, which ones?

CRK: I don't read a lot of comics. I follow a couple of the regular Vertigo titles, The Invisibles and The Books Of Magic. I'm a big fan of Jhonen Vasquez's stuff, Johnny The Homicidal Maniac and Squee and Happy Noodle Boy. I love Jill Thompson's Scary Godmother and Roman Dirge's Lenore, and I try to keep up with Sarah Dyer's Action Girl. I was a big fan of Hate, and I wish Peter Bagge was still doing it. But the main reason I don't read more titles is time. The more I write, the less time I have to read. So I know I'm missing a lot of stuff I'd love to be following.

ST: Do you listen to music when writing? If so, what kind do you listen to?

CRK: I find it virtually impossible to write without music to set the mood, to keep me focused, so if I'm at the keyboard, I almost always have the headphones on. Right now I'm listening to P.J. Harvey's Is This Desire?, actually. Most of my "writing music" is Goth and ambient, darkwave and trip-hop, a little europop now and then, and unclassifiable folks like Nick Cave and Tori Amos.

ST: Neil Gaiman seems to be an influence in your comic writing. Are there other people whose writing influences you?

CRK: I think the strongest influences on my comic writing have come from prose authors, not comic authors , because I'm a prose author first and I've had to adapt my pre-existing prose style to comics. The Modernists, writers like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, have been very important to me, and John Steinbeck - I read a lot of Steinbeck in high school - and, closer to home, Ray Bradbury and Angela Carter and Harlan Ellison. But yes, Neil has been an influence as well, and not only through The Sandman. Since I started working on The Dreaming, Neil's always been there, pretty much in a mentor capacity, and it's made the transition from prose to comics immeasurably easier, I suspect. It's nice having someone who's already made all the mistakes, or at least seen them, to keep you from making them.

ST: How much of an influence does Neil have on The Dreaming? How involved is he in the deciding of plots and such?

CRK: Neil acts as creative consultant for The Dreaming, which means he's there when we need him, to keep things on track, basically. He has script approval, but, at least with my scripts, he's yet to give one a thumb's down. So he reads every script, and sometimes I send them to him before I send them to my editor, so he often has input at a very early stage. And he has had some influence regarding plot. As I said earlier, it was his idea to burn down the House of Mystery in Many Mansions, and I think he also originally suggested a Corinthian story arc, which led to my doing Souvenirs. Having Neil in the background is, I don't know, like having a really good coach. And I think that's the first time in my life I've used a sports analogy. But that's a good way of looking at his role with the book, as a sort of coach.

Every now and then I see a post online or get a letter from someone who thinks that it's disrespectful or awful or whatever, "what we're doing with Neil Gaiman's characters," or something like that, and so I think a lot of those people either haven't read The Dreaming or haven't noticed that Neil's listed as creative consultant in the credits of each issue or have no idea what a creative consultant does. But I'm extremely careful to be sure that Neil is comfortable with the ways in which I develop characters and the direction I'm taking the story. And since we have rather different voices, which can be very tricky sometimes. There are things we'd do differently, certainly, because we're two different people with different outlooks and voices. But I think it's important that people know that the work I'm doing on The Dreaming isn't being done against his wishes.

ST: If there's one thing about the industry that you could change, what would it be?

CRK: I don't think that I've been a part of the "industry" long enough to have any idea what, if anything, I'd want to change about it. I do know it's a very difficult time for comics, and it would have been great to be involved in the boom just a few years back, when there was so much less tension and anxiety, and so a lot more freedom for experimentation. But that was already pretty much over by the time I was approached to write for The Dreaming in '96. Now we have sales declining across the board, we have cutbacks, layoffs, bankruptcies, companies like Kitchen Sink going under, and the "big" companies like DC and Marvel canceling titles that don't meet certain sales expectations.

Everyone is anxious and so more willing to rely on formulaic art and stories, and that's certainly not the sort of climate that's very conducive to creativity.

ST: How would you go about increasing the number of women who read comic books?

CRK: Rely less on action and flash and more on story and characterization, on good art and good storytelling. I don't really see how mainstream comics today could be particularly appealing to women. It's a market that spends so much energy catering to the tastes of men and teenage boys that it almost inevitably winds up alienating most female readers. At the same time, we probably have more female readers than at any time in the past, but they aren't reading mainstream superhero titles.

ST: How do you see the comics industry perceives women as creators?

CRK: Again, I haven't been working in comics nearly long enough to have seen enough to have a particularly informed opinion on a question like this, to be able to comment on the industry as a whole. And it's an important question that shouldn't be answered lightly. However, if you look at Vertigo, we have exactly one full-time female writer — me. And if you thumb through an issue of Previews, you'll see that's pretty much the case with DC and Marvel in general, but as you move over into the independents, there are more and more women creators, and I suspect that says something about the types of titles being published by mainstream vs. independents. Anyway, personally, I've never encountered any resistance from within the industry because of my gender.

ST: When you look at female characters in mainstream comics today, what is your impression?

CRK: Baywatch bimbos in spandex, that's my first impression. Impossible bodies that are designed to conform to a wildly unrealistic "ideal" female body image.

ST: What advice would you give to a girl who wants to grow up to be in comics?

CRK: I came into comics as a prose writer, which I know is very unusual, and so I'm afraid I really don't have much useful advice for girls who want to write comics.

ST: Your comic writing tends to be very dark. Is all of your writing that way? Why do you think it is this way?

CRK: Most of my fiction is a lot darker than the stuff I've done for The Dreaming and The Girl Who Would Be Death. Much, much darker. And I have absolutely no idea why my fiction comes out this way, honestly. I guess it's an inescapable consequence of my being such a terribly cheerful person.

I don't mean to be flippant. Sorry. But it's easy to get tired of that particular question. Here's an easy answer — and to be truthful, there can be no easy answers to a question like this — in a quote from Stephen King, who must get asked this question a dozen times a day. He said that horror and dark fantasy stories "emphasize the light by marking out that spot where the darkness takes over." I think it's a common mistake to assume that because people who write dark fiction focus their artistic energies on the morbid or weird or grotesque; that their aim is always, somehow, to glorify darkness. While there's something to be said for appreciating the beauty of that dark, I think that there's no surer way to draw attention to the sun than to point to the shadows.

Having said that, I think readers of The Dreaming may be surprised, a little farther down the road, to see a bit of daylight creeping into the story. When I began working on the book, what struck me was that you have these characters, Cain and Abel, Lucien, Matthew, Mervyn Pumpkinhead, Eve, Jumella, and so on, and they've all, in effect, just lost the single thing that gave their lives meaning and direction — Lord Morpheus. At the end of The Sandman, I think there's a sense that the bad times are past and now that there's a new Dream things will get better, since Daniel isn't shouldering all of Morpheus' millennia of guilt and exhaustion and bitterness. Daniel is adorned in white, as opposed to Morpheus' black, almost as if the old Dream has been bruised. Anyway, as I began working with the characters, it struck me that, actually, there would be a terrible time of mourning and chaos in The Dreaming, a time of grieving when Morpheus' subjects, who might not be so sure about this new kid, anyway, would be weak and prone to their respective ghosts and anxieties. Dream is a beautiful example of the Fisher King, and The Dreaming of a wasteland that has to be healed by the death and rebirth of its Lord. But, as myths and literature have taught us, that rebirth can be long and terrible.

That's what I've been writing about since Souvenirs, trying to find ways for these characters to come to terms with their loss, and there's still some very choppy waters just ahead, maybe the worse stuff is yet to come, but I, as the writer, am beginning to see the calm at the end of the storm. It's still a ways off, but it's coming.

ST: You sound as though you've read Sandman. Did you also read Swamp Thing? Which storyline in Sandman was your favorite? Whose stories did you most enjoy in Swamp Thing?

CRK: I loved The Sandman. Along with The Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, it's what really first drew me to comics in the late eighties. My favorite story arc from The Sandman? That's easy. A Game of You, about Barbie and Wanda and The Cuckoo and all. That story had a very powerful impact on me. I guess my second favorite would be The Wake, which is such a wonderful lesson in how to end a story well. I didn't read Swamp Thing until I suggested the Unkindness of One story, at which point a friend who runs a comic shop in Athens, GA, loaned me almost every issue of the title, way back to #1, I think and I read them all at once, to get a handle on Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane. Some of it's great stuff. My favorite Swamp Thing stories were definitely the Alan Moore issues.

ST: The Girl Who Would Be Death is a great story so far. Do you have any other mini-series lined up?

CRK: I'm developing a new and very different mini for Vertigo right now, a sort of futuristic cybernoir thing, but I can't get into the details yet. And I've been asked to do stuff for Sandman Presents.

ST: Any other upcoming projects you'd like to talk about?

CRK: Well, my first novel, Silk, is out from RoC, and a chapbook called Candles For Elizabeth from Meisha Merlin Publishing. Right now I'm working on my second novel and my first short story collection, Tales Of Pain And Wonder, which will be released first as a limited edition from Gauntlet Publications in about a year. So, when I'm not writing comic scripts I'm writing short stories or working on the novel. Sometimes there's an hour or two left to sleep or eat or just stare at the walls.

" ... I know that I've made it darker, grittier, and I've tried very hard to give it more of the feel that Neil created ... "

" ... Sometimes there's an hour or two left to sleep or eat or just stare at the walls ... "

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