(Yeah, this is long. I am fully geeking out and pondering a common question)
Yes, Neil Gaiman turned out to be a rapist, a creep, an all-around monster underneath his "enlightened" veil, and very likely he will never get a penny from me for anything he produces going forward.
But. Yeah, I am one of those people who has the ability to separate the art from the artist, at least to some extent. It depends on how good the art is, obviously, and that is the key point. For mediocre stuff that never quite says anything to me in the first place, or what it says is not that essential.
- Some of Kanye West's early work is pretty good actually. An album like "My Dark Twisted Fantasy" (a title as prescient as you'll get) was actually an eye (ear?) opening experience for me in terms of the musical potential of hip-hop. I have a few of his CDs that followed, and then I trailed off, slowly gravitating towards other artists in appreciation of the art form. I haven't gotten rid of his CDs because of where he ended up, but if I wake up one morning and find that those CDs are missing, I'll simply shrug it off and move on. No big loss there.
- I never read Alice Munro, but the story that came out of her daughter makes sure that I will probably never touch any of her books with a ten foot pole. I was never a fan, so I can afford to say something like "I'd never read her books". It's an easy thing to do when you have nothing invested in it.
- And then there is Sandman by Neil Gaiman. To this day, I will claim that it's the greatest comic/graphic novel (truly deserving that label) ever written. True, there is also the work of Alan Moore, most of them absolutely brilliant, but the pinnacle of the art form, to me, has always been Sandman. That was the work that got me back to reading comics after a decade plus in the wilderness. I had the trade paperbacks, and last year (before his stories broke) I bought them in Absolute edition (hard bound, oversized, printed on better paper with colors popping out). And you are taking them away from he only if you can pry them away from my cold, dead fingers, as the saying goes.
And it's not just a passive thing, just me overlooking something here. I will eventually re-read them and I believe I will draw immense satisfaction I do anytime I read something so well written. (His prose book, I can even go ahead and discard. I know he became more famous with his novels and such, but to me there's always something lacking in the Gaiman experience in his regular books.)
So that's the relationship for me. I always believed good art is something you recognize if you saw it in the trash can in the back alley of a gallery, and not dependent on where it's presented, how it's and what statement it makes (a topic I used to regularly argue about with my art historian mother who's specialized in 20th century modern art ... yeah ... all chutzpah on my part). It follows then, that if it is truly a great piece of art, it stands apart from all the atrocious actions that the creator of the art was engaged in at the time, or afterwards. If I ever have grandkids, I am all for them reading Harry Potter as they're growing up, regardless of the depths of respectability that JK Rowlings seems to be determined to descend (I also didn't read those books, but I watched both my kids getting engrossed in them, effectively reading a 1000 page tome then telling me they can't wait till the next book. THAT is something.)
So ... Season 2 is apparently the whole rest of the saga. The first season covered the first two trade paperbacks, plus a couple of stories. The second season seems to cover three volumes plus 5 stories. On the one hand, it will come to an end, suggesting that they started planning the show as they knew this was going to be it. And that's a good thing. "Stories must have an end", Gaiman once said "that's what makes them stories" (my biggest beef with modern television is that they don't ever seem to respect that stories have a natural endpoint at which we need to stop and not demand a season 2, 3, 4, until everyone's sick and tired). On the downside, I fear they will not be able to do justice. There is a stream of events that start with "Brief Lives" that have their precursors in "The Doll's House" that you realize when you look back. The ending of the series is an intricate moment where all bunch of balls Gaiman throws up in the air in his juggling act come together perfectly and stick the landing magnificently, at which point, you realize what the larger story is really about. It's a thing of beauty coming from a massive abuser with psychopathic tendencies, to be honest. So I am afraid if they're not careful ass they rush through those threads they could run into one of the problems that Netflix's 3 Body Problem ran into: compression in story telling is not your friend if you have to ask the viewer to take a leap of faith every fifteen minutes.
So we'll see how it goes. I can't wait for "Seasons of Mist", where Dream is given the key to hell and various pantheons cine to his court trying to convince him that they should acquire that valuable real estate, "Brief Lives" where Dream and Delirium look for their missing elder brother, and "The Kindly Ones" where the price that had to be paid to get there, takes its toll, because there are always consequences (something Gaiman himself should have taken to heart).We'll also see the "The Song of Orpheus", which is critical context to "Brief Lives". We'll get the two Shakespeare pieces "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which should also come very early in the season, maybe even before "Seasons of Mist" and the other one "Tempest" is the coda for the series. So likely the two will be the bookends of season 2. "Tales in the Sand" is the Baghdad story and it was written during the Gulf War. I don't know why "Thermidor" is in that list. An excuse to bring Jenna Coleman back, I suppose.
End of my full on geek out.