The playful palimpsest of Gaiman’s sequential storytelling

While Neil Gaiman is renowned as a writer adept at storytelling in different media, in this chapter I will specifically explore the manifold ways in which his comic books and graphic novels recall mythological archetypes, iconography and narratives. Because remembering is necessarily selective, I will also examine the ways in which Gaiman deliberately misremembers and forgets the mythological as he deems appropriate to the story in question. My approach examines the extent to which Gaiman’s remembering, misremembering, and forgetting of the mythological is constituted by palimpsestic processes (erasing or scraping off parchment or vellum to allow for reuse), whereby memories – suitably attenuated – are offered up as a means of re-presenting the past in order to understand the present context in which the story has been written. The term palimpsest in its original conception refers to “a manuscript on which two or more texts have been written, each one being erased to make room for the next”.