Gods and Monsters: Authorial Creation in Gaiman’s Sandman and McCreery and Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare

Abstract

In this article, I explore images of Shakespeare and his characters in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (1989–1996) and Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s Kill Shakespeare (2010–2014). Gaiman’s series follows Morpheus, the personification of dreams, who endows Shakespeare with creative power he comes to regret. Alternatively, in McCreery and Del Col’s series Shakespeare simply is a god, but one who shuns his creations and regrets his creative power. Worshipped and relentlessly sought, this Shakespeare is the mythic engine of a series that follows characters from across his plays who speak in a pastiche of Shakespearean lines through alternate story lines. I demonstrate that Shakespeare’s coexistence with his characters in both series complicates our collective idealisation of Shakespeare in the contrast between a playwright-god and his monstrous character-creations through their problematic construction and shifting images as gods and monsters within and across both series. Illustrating the limitations and possibilities of divinity and monstrosity allows them to shift from creation to destruction through the multimodality of graphic novels, and the pitting of gods against monsters common to fantasy and science fiction. Through images of shifting power and frailty, both interrogate these constructions, and ultimately, question the consequences of our historical Bardolatry.