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Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker, eds. Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose (Jefferson: McFarland, 2012, 296pp, £28.50 pbk)
Neil Gaiman is undoubtedly one of the most wellknown fantasy writers today. The criticism on his writings is extensive - recently, even the Open Court Press' Popular Culture and Philosophy series published a volume on his writings (Tracy Lyn Bealer et al, eds. Neil Gaiman and Philosophy: Gods Gone Wild (2012)). The recent McFarland book edited by Tara Prescott and Aaron Drucker discusses Gaiman's works in connection with feminism, which is plausible given Gaiman's roster of women characters. The contributors focus mostly on his comic books and short stories, which mean that, as the editors themselves admit, the film scripts and novels are not well represented in the volume. The upside, however, is that the reader receives a relatively full picture of his comics and several interesting analyses of the short stories.
Drucker and Prescott's introduction gives a short history of Gaiman's graphic books and explains the editors' broad and loosely defined understanding of feminism. Besides lacking a properly defined theoretical framework, what is missed here is an overview of the previously published gender-related research on Gaiman. Although it would be a vain attempt to detail the existing criticism in its entirety, outlining at least those interpretations that involve or clash with the feminist understandings of Gaiman's writings would be sufficient and useful. These two problems are, in fact, occasionally detectable later in the volume: several contributors work with loosely defined theories and quite a few of them fail to convincingly incorporate previous criticism into their arguments.
Rachel R. Martin's 'Speaking the Cacophony of Angels' provides one of the most complex analyses in the volume. Interestingly enough, this is the piece that is perhaps the most critical towards Gaiman. Martin admits that Gaiman challenges the notion that comic books and graphic novels are mainly intended for male audiences, as he 'wrote (and continues to write) for and about women' (11). She also adds, however, that in Gaiman's comics, 'as in all phallocentric discourse, no room abides...