MYTH AND FABULATION

IN THE FANTASY FICTION

OF NEIL GAIMAN

Academic essay (critical analysis of novels, short stories, comics and films written by Neil Gaiman mainly, but also of works by  Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Lovecraft, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Roger Avary  and many others). The original was released in October 2018 and adapted from my doctoral dissertation. This self-translation into English was published in August 2026.

Back cover:

Available in English for the first time, this wide-ranging critical study examines Neil Gaiman’s fiction through the lenses of intertextuality, metafiction, and cultural context. Informed by comics, novels, short stories, and film, Camus situates Gaiman’s oeuvre within a literary network that includes Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, and Winsor McCay. The study explores how myth operates across Gaiman’s fiction as both an inherited narrative and an evolving cultural practice, shaping the meaning and structure of his works.

Through both theoretical perspective and close analysis of sources, the book posits fabulation as a form of mythmaking, through which Gaiman’s works both expose and participate in the mechanisms of fantasy. Central to the argument is the stance that Gaiman’s fiction stages itself as a pseudo-myth, using self-reflection to reveal how fantasy partakes in both the construction and renewal of authority, tradition, and belief. The updated English translation is augmented with additional commentary and a new preface that traces the book’s research as well as recent accusations against Gaiman, situating the study within more contemporary contexts.


The book's page on the publisher's website:

https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/myth-and-fabulation-in-the-fantasy-fiction-of-neil-gaiman/

TRAVEL WRITING AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

This multi-authored collection, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing on August 29, 2023 and edited by Françoise Besson, contains my paper "How Bugs, Monarchs and Trees Shape Human Fate and Experience in Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca and Ruins".


This article focuses on the relationship with the environment (sometimes "anthropocentric", sometimes "biocentric" or at least "lococentric" (notions borrowed from US ecocritic Lawrence Buell)), which is developed in two graphic works that American comics author and cartoonist Peter Kuper created about his stay in Mexico from 2006 to 2008: the real-life sketchbook journal Diario de Oaxaca (2009), and the fictional graphic novel Ruins (2015).


This reflection involves, among other things, an analysis of images, and in particular the use of graphic saturation, particularly on a thematic level (with the role given to animals and plants in general, to “bugs” in particular) in two graphic narratives aimed at immersing the reader in the colorful and vibrant and teeming world of Mexico as Kuper experienced it.


The book’s page on the publisher's website:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-1287-0


Diario de Oaxaca’s page on its publisher's website: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=894  


Ruins’s page on its publisher's website:

https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/ruins



MIRANDA


REVUE PLURIDISCIPLINAIRE DU MONDE ANGLOPHONE

MULTIDISCIPLINARY PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD


Issue 22

2

The spring 2021 issue of the journal Miranda, contains, in the section Reviews (edited by Candice Lemaire and Isabelle Keller-Privat), my review of two fascinating Alan Moore-focused books by Pádraig Ó Méalóid: Poisoned Chalice: The Extremely Long and Incredibly Complex Story of Marvelman (and Miracleman) (devoted to the inextricable legal battles that have prevented the continuation of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman et al.'s comic book series Miracleman for almost three decades, and Mud and Starlight. The Alan Moore Interviews, 2008-2016, which is, as its subtitle suggests, a collection of the many interviews with Alan Moore carried out by Ó Méalóid over the years. 
 
The article is, like the rest of the issue, available online at the following address: https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/38271 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Poisoned Chalice: https://www.lulu.com/shop/padraig-o-mealoid/poisoned-chalice-the-extremely-long-and-incredibly-complex-story-of-marvelman-and-miracleman/paperback/product-23858084.html?page=1&pageSize=4 
 
 
Here is one of the addresses where you can get Mud and Starlight: https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/p%C3%A1draig-%C3%B3-m%C3%A9al%C3%B3id-and-alan-moore/mud-and-starlight-interviews-with-alan-moore-2008-2016/paperback/product-6744gq.html?page=1&pageSize=4

CALIBAN N°54

FORMS OF DIPLOMACY (16th-21st CENTURY)
Formes de la diplomatie (XVIe-XXIe siècle)
This Nathalie Duclos and Nathalie Rivière de Carles-edited Caliban issue contains, at the end of the issue, off topic, my brief critical review of Le Croquemort, le clochard et l'assassin, by Frédéric and Julien Maffre, the first album in their series of western comics albums Stern, published by Dargaud.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:

My text (as well as the whole issue) is also readable online, at this address:

Page of the Stern comic book series on its publisher's website:

The Stern comic book series' Facebook page:
MYTHE ET FABULATION DANS LA FICTION FANTASTIQUE ET MERVEILLEUSE DE NEIL GAIMAN
Academic essay (critical analysis of novels, short stories, comics and films written by Neil Gaiman mainly, but also of works by  Alan Moore, Shakespeare, Borges, Lovecraft, Philip José Farmer, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Roger Avary, and many others). Released in October 2018 and adapted from my doctoral thesis.

Back cover: Neil Gaiman’s fantasy works are often deemed postmodernist since they experiment with self-reflexivity and mix it with a supposedly antagonistic impulse towards popular fiction. Typical postmodernist works mostly emphasize their attacks against the fictional illusions of referentiality, character or plot. On the contrary, Gaiman’s works unapologetically remain within the bounds of fantasy, a genre in which imagination and storytelling are paramount–along with their related issues: characterization, plot, emotion and suspense. Thus, Gaiman’s fiction is not experimental fiction enhanced with elements of popular fiction, but actual popular fiction made self-reflexive. Thanks to that peculiar mood, studying Gaiman’s work is a very fruitful means of investigating the distinctive features of popular fiction, and its inherent emphasis on storytelling–or, as Henri Bergson called it, “fabulation.” Both Bergson and Frank McConnell focused on this notion which they saw as the essential link between ancient mythmaking and today’s fiction writing. Gaiman’s fiction mostly relies on such a dialectics between myth, popular fiction and storytelling or fabulation. His fantasy stories constantly rewrite ancient, religious myths, modern myths or the “myths” of popular fiction, and feature many fictional and historical writers, traditional storytellers, or Gaiman’s own personae, so that in paratext as well as in the heart of a narrative, in the quiet and supposedly reliable words of an introduction as surely as on the most striking comics panels, fiction is portrayed as myth, writers as mythical avatars of some archetypal storyteller, and storytelling as the one, quintessential human act.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:
CIRCULATIONS ENTRE LES ARTS
Interroger l'intersémioticité
This collective collection published online on December 4, 2016, and edited by Muriel Adrien, Marie Bouchet and Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud, contains my article "The collaborations of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean", adapted from a communication bearing the same title, and presented on January 29, 2009 at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, as part of the ARCA seminar (Atelier de Recherche à la Croisée des Arts) by Marie Bouchet.

The article deals with various works written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by the experimental artist Dave McKean, from modernist comics Violent Cases and Mr Punch to the fantasy comics series Sandman whose covers McKean designed, to children's books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls, and the film MirrorMask (screenplay by Gaiman, direction by McKean). The analysis focuses on the theme of mixtures between art forms, which is recurrent in these works, creating a mirror effect in relation to their form, since McKean systematically has a hybrid approach to visual arts, always mixing painting, computer graphics, photography, etc.

The article is, like the rest of the collection, available online, at this page:
STUDIES IN THE NOVEL,
Vol. 47, N°3
Special issue: the graphic novel
On February 3, 2012, the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès organized  a one-day conference entitled "Passages", and supervised by Amélie Dochy, Céline Rolland and Damien Alcade, during which I presented a conference entitled "Sandman, by Neil Gaiman: passage du temps, œuvre-passage (du comic book au roman graphique").

In the collective collection of articles pictured opposite (a special comics-focused issue of the American journal Studies in the Novel, edited by Timothy Boswell and Stephen E. Tabachnik and published in the fall of 2015), there is my article "Neil Gaiman's Sandman as a gateway from comic books to graphic novels", which is an adaptation and an English translation of the aforementioned lecture.

The article and the lecture explore how Sandman was a catalyst for the development of the concept of the graphic novel, both in aesthetic terms (that is, in terms borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin by Andrés Romero-Jodár: a change of chronotope model in relation to comic books' serialization paradigm) and in terms of editorial practices (studied in the light Jean-Paul Gabilliet's work on the comics industry in his compendium Of Comics and Men).

Studies in the Novel issue page on Project MUSE: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/32409
 CALIBAN N°52

CALIBAN AND HIS TRANSMUTATIONS
Caliban et ses avatars
This collective collection of article was published in 2014 as the fiftieth anniversary issue of the journal Caliban. It was edited by Françoise Besson, Philippe Birgy, Roland Bouyssou, Jean-Louis Breteau, Jean-Paul Débax, Albert Poyet and Marcienne Rocard, and it is about the thousand reinventions of the character Caliban, and of Shakespeare's play The Tempest in general, in world culture. It contains my article: "Calibans for the 1990s and 2000s: Shakespeare and Fantasy in the Age of 'Professional Fan Fiction' and Integrative Fiction".

The article studies the rewrites of Caliban and The Tempest in various parodic works or various crossover works of literature and comics belonging to the genres of fantasy, fantasy and/or science fiction, and published in the 1990s and 2000s (specifically: Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics series, Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics series, Nigel A. Sellars's short story "The Confessions of Caliban", and the novels Caliban's Hour by Tad Williams and Iliad and Olympos by Dan Simmons).

Page of the book on the publisher's site:

My article (as well as the whole issue) can also be read online:

 SHOFAR
An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Jewish Studies
Vol. 29, N°2






&

VISUALIZING JEWISH NARRATIVE
Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels
My article "The 'Outsider': Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament" was first published in the winter 2011 issue of the American journal of Jewish studies Shofar, by Purdue University Press in Indiana. The editor of the issue was Derek Parker Royal.

The book Visualizing Jewish Narrative, published in June 2016 by Bloomsbury and also edited by Derek Parker Royal, contains a reprint of all the papers from the original Shofar issue, plus many other articles on the same themes (comics and Jewishness). My article is therefore also reprinted in it.

"The 'Outsider'" studies the radically different effects obtained through the references to the Old Testament in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and in Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (a multi-authored collection of underground comix parodying the Old Testament, published by Knockabout Comics, and six stories of which were written by Gaiman).

The Shofar issue's page on Project MUSE:

The Visualizing Jewish Narrative book's page on its publisher's website:

The article is also available in an abridged version on the website of artist-interviewer Mia Funk, who published it online alongside her interview with Neil Gaiman:
STUDIES IN COMICS
Vol. 2, N°1
On the weekend of 28-29 May, 2010 the University of Northampton held an international three-day conference on Alan Moore, entitled Magus: Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Work of Alan Moore. This collection contains articles adapted from the various lectures delivered during this series of conferences. So it contains, among other things, my article "Neil Gaiman: Portrait of the Artist as a Disciple of Alan Moore", adapted from the lecture of the same name given in Northampton on 29 May, 2010. The collection was published in 2011, as an issue of the British journal Studies in Comics, and it was edited by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse and Mike Starr, who were also the organizers of the conference.

My article explores different facets of the influence exercised on Neil Gaiman by Alan Moore, particularly through the various continuations and expansions of Moore's ideas that Gaiman has engaged in throughout his career (with Miracleman, which he took over as script writer after Moore, with Sandman and Black Orchid, both of which draw much material from Swamp Thing, and with Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, which positions itself as a restropectively  complementary narrative to Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?).: 

The article (and the rest of the issue) can be bought and read from this address:
OTRANTE
ART ET LITTERATURE FANTASTIQUES
N°27-28
Forêts fantastiques
This double issue of the journal Otrante, published in the fall of 2010 and edited by Lambert Barthélémy, contains my second article "Forêts symboliques de la bande dessinée américaine contemporaine".

This article studies the links between Alan Moore's run for the DC Comics series Swamp Thing (1983-1987) and Neil Gaiman's DC limited series Black Orchid (1988-1989), and the way they jointly shape a symbolic treatment of forests, much different from the marvellous and 'elfic' topoi of Tolkien and his epigones' heroic fantasy novels, and also much different from the usual, Gothic treatment of forests in horror comics (from EC Comics on), that is, merely as a quintessential "frightful setting". Moore, through the changes he brought to the characterization of the classic DC horror/superhero comics protagonist Swamp Thing, contributed to the introduction of such aspects as spirituality and numinous, as well as ecological concerns, in this weird mix of horror and superhero fiction. The forest, in Moore's Swamp Thing has gradually become a metaphysical concept, of which physical forests are avatars. While commissioned to merely re-vamp an old and unsuccessful superheroine (Black Orchid), Gaiman has actually used the potential of DC continuity in order to expand the sylvan mythology roughed out by Moore. At the same time, Gaiman's miniseries has developed the symbolic value of the forest, notably through artist Dave McKean's graphic experiments.

Page of the book on the publisher's website:
MOUNTAINS FIGURED AND DISFIGURED IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD
This collection edited by Françoise Besson and published in March 2010 includes my first article, "Fantasy and Landscape: Mountain as Myth in Neil Gaiman's Stories", which contains analyses of  passages from novels, short stories and comics by Neil Gaiman revolving around mountainous settings, raging weather, and the notion of myth.

The article examines passages from the novels American Gods (2001) and Stardust (1997), from the short story "The Monarch of the Glen" (2004) and the Eternals comic (2006-2007). It discusses the use of the mountain motif, analyzing several occurrences of mountainous landscapes, the sublime/Gothic mood some of them help to create, and the way most of them are integrated into the intertextual and mythological systems that structure these stories.

The book's page on its publisher's website: