Pricks and Predators: Neil Gaiman and Art in the Age of Arseholes

Your problematic faves aren't just problematic anymore

There are, at the time of writing, 267,739 monthly listeners of Lostprophets on Spotify. R. Kelly has 4,667,120. Both Lostprophets lead singer Ian Watson and R. Kelly have been convicted (publicly, loudly) of sex crimes against minors.

And millions of people still listen to their music.

Most of us, I’d bet, have at least a couple of ‘problematic’¹ artists of one stripe or another whose work we consume. I listen to The Beatles, despite believing that John Lennon was a bullying, abusive partner. I listen to a bit of Bowie, despite allegations against him of statutory rape. I wouldn’t seek out a Michael Jackson song, but I didn’t skip ‘Thriller’ when it repeatedly showed up in a halloween playlist my daughter was listening to last October.

I don’t ever listen to Lostprophets, though, despite believing (in my early-00s, alt-rock heart) that ‘Last Train Home’ is a banger.

I’d watch an episode of Parks & Recreation with Louis C.K. in it, but I wouldn’t watch one of his stand-up shows.

I’ve chosen not to let the late Meat Loaf’s warm-ish views on Trump bother me, but I find them hard to stomach in Kelsey Grammer.

Such is cultural life in 2025. A series of difficult, sometimes contradictory decisions on when and how to compromise your morals. If you truly believe, deep in your soul, that you’re not compromised in some way or other, good for you. But my guess would be that either you’re fooling yourself or you’re living your life like a monk in a hairshirt.

Such is life under the harsh light of digital media. Such is life under late capitalism. Such is… people, really, unfortunately.

If you thought I was selling moral clarity here… sorry? Spoiler warning: there’s no such thing.

Just complex, mysterious, difficult-to-resolve moral accountancy. Questions we might ask ourselves when deciding whether to engage with the work of a given artist could include (but are not limited to):

• What are they actually accused of?

• How credible are the accusations?

• If the thing they’ve done is take a controversial position on a particular issue, do you actually disagree with them?

• Does engaging with their work mean making them richer?

• Are they dead? (It really helps if they’re dead).

• How many other people were involved in the creation of the work?

• How tired are you?

• Did the creator break the law?

• How strongly do you identify with the victims of the bad behaviour? (Are there, in fact, any victims?)

• Is the creator (really, honestly) sorry?

• If not, do they at least pretend to be sorry in a way that lets you believe that at least some sort of vague social norm is, in some way, still intact?

• Can you, in fact, engage with the work without a gut-level sense of unease or disgust, regardless of what you ‘think’?

• Did/do you have a parasocial relationship with the creator in question?

• Did/do you already love the work?

• How strongly can you hear the creator’s voice in the work?

• What do your mates reckon?

• Can you credibly pretend you didn’t know?

• Is the creator’s writing a foundational part of a body of work you’re discussing for your newsletter project?

Really, the decision about what to do with a horrible artist whose work you like is a lot like any other kind of decision—a multidimensional thought object comprised of many, many datapoints with shifting weightings that are so difficult to quantify that you just fart out a gut response and pretend it’s the product of careful reasoning.

Except, of course, making a decision about whether to engage with a ‘problematic’ creator might feel like it has much higher stakes for your self-image, your social standing, society and culture at large, than ‘what should I get in my Boots meal deal?’

All of which is to say, I don’t know whether you should engage with that work. I don’t expect you to have a particularly strong sense of it, either. Personally, if you want to quietly re-read your old copies of whatever-it-is, I don’t care that much. You’re not causing harm in any meaningful sense.

(Though if you want to publicly go out to bat for someone who has actively hurt other people so that you can live with the cognitive dissonance of enjoying their work, I might care a bit.)

I get it. It’s difficult. You are, in fact, exhausted by the simple fact of living in the 2020s. We, as a society, have to decide what to do about bad people in powerful positions. You, personally, do not. Your gut instinct is as good a guide as anything. People might want to tell you that your choices around a given creator are wrong, but they won’t be right.

Neither will you.

If this all feels like cowardly moral relativism… sure, I get that, too.

To me, this is more an acknowledgement of our daily reality, of the ongoing difficulty of existing in the year 2025, and an assertion that we should be kind to ourselves on knotty moral problems that no-one has a good answer for.

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Which brings us to (alleged) sexual abuser Neil Fucking Gaiman.

Honestly, I thought I had months before I’d have to write about him. I’m currently reading Swamp Thing comics from 1985, and Black Orchid didn’t come out until 1988. And I didn’t think the world needed to hear from me on the subject. I don’t think anyone cares how what he’s done affects this newsletter.

But he just keeps coming up.

Two weeks ago I didn’t mention that when I think of the Vertigo walk ‘n’ talk, it’s Sandman and Books of Magic that spring to mind. I was being a coward on that one. This week, I read an issue of Swamp Thing that had regular Sandman fixtures Cain and Abel in it. Gaiman pre-haunts the entire Vertigo project. I can’t keep avoiding the subject.

So:

I consider the allegations made in the Vulture piece, ‘There is No Safe Word’, and Tortoise Media’s podcast, Master, to be credible. (If the allegations are news to you, you can find the Vulture piece here, but be warned that it’s a tough read containing graphic descriptions of sexual assault).

What he’s done is horrible, unforgivable, disgusting, heartbreaking.

So:

I won’t be writing about the contents of Gaiman’s Vertigo work in the same way that I have Swamp Thing. Where it intersects with other work or the history of Vertigo, I’ll acknowledge it, but he will be known as ‘(alleged) sexual abuser Neil Gaiman’ and there will always be a link to the allegations.

Could I swear to you that this position is morally and critically correct? No.

But it’s where my gut leads me.

The Vertigo Weekly Reader, as well as being a critical project, is at least to some degree a celebration of the work done under the Vertigo imprint. Neil Gaiman sure as fuck doesn’t get celebrated here.

And I’d hate for anyone who has suffered the kind of abuse that Gaiman has (allegedly) perpetrated to read one of these newsletters and be hurt because it appears to minimise his crimes in favour of a good read.

And I just don’t want to spend time on his work.

Maybe at some point I’ll come up with an approach to his writing that considers it sensitively in the context of his conduct. If I do, I’ll let you know.

And at some point we’ll reach the work of Warren Ellis, who has been accused of wider-ranging but less severe bad treatment of a lot of women, and the maths may be different. I don’t know yet.

I’m figuring it out as I go, just like everyone else.

If you want to let me know how you navigate the work of pricks and predators in the comments, I’d be interested to read your thoughts. If for some reason you want to debate Gaiman’s guilt, please take it elsewhere.

Normal service resumes next week.

1. Those quotation marks are to say “‘problematic’ doesn’t come close to cutting it for some of these guys”, not “I don’t really think they’re a problem”.