The Dr. Seuss of Gothic Fiction
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
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You probably don't know this artist. It's time to change that forever.
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The BBC adapted Gormonghast as a 4 part series with Christopher Lee and Richard Griffiths amazingly enough around the same time that LOTR's was being made
Thank you for showing me peak fiction.
You’re so enamored
with your own prose ;
( so worshipful of your
left brain … ) that you
forgot to learn poetry.
@@WheninSedona
Line from book or movie?
I like nebula I just wish there was a way to like videos I felt so strange the first time like I finished the video loved it went to like it and was like oh there’s no like button what do I do now 😅
"Yes, life is terrible. Yes, it is often pointless. Yes, you must live it. Yes, it is worthwhile."
Damn. That's kinda strong.
Agreed
Fun fact, Dr.Seuss made a series of artworks called the midnight paintings which are often darker and more meloncholic.
Was thinking of that too. Makes me wonder where he might've gone if he'd gone further with that; what he might've made.
He definitely wasn't naive as a person. Neither are his stories naive exactly, in my opinion, just that they don't cover the darker subject matter quite so often. They're lighter in tone.
But even Seus showed what happens when corporate greed creates a desolate wasteland. It's one of his most iconic stories! He certainly had a lot to say himself.
Not that that detracts any from the exploration of Peake's work in the video to be clear. Never heard of him until now, but damn I like this guy. (I'm definitely a real sucker for tragedy myself lol)
At least one of them was featured in the video itself
I honestly thought it was That they were going to cover
Benji did not mention how... problematic... some of Dr. Seuss's army propaganda was, nor the political cartoons he drew before the war.
Exactly. We just saw a snippet in the video, but yes he did. They're very interesting
Peake suffered 2 nervous breakdowns, the first of which had him invalided out of service during World War II. He died young while being institutionalized for dementia which kept him from completing Titus Awakes. His wife finished it for him later. Dr. Seuss had much smoother sailing through life.
And yet seuss was an *sshole
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
@@SugarSweetSandStorm It'd have to be a good re-adaptation. I saw it readapted and did not love it. I'm very slowly etching my way into the book but, as this video says, it is VERY dense material. Reading it is like mining minecraft obsidian.
But it has a way of describing characters that illuminates them vividly and etches them into your mind. Despite taking so long a break I literally forgot about it, I instantly knew every single character the video mentioned, and more. If you're the right kind of person its like reading your own stream of consciousness.
and was racist.
@@tsm688The passage they read out in the video was incredibly vivid, I might read this series. I love when a book hyper-focuses on something like that.
Yes, life is hard and cruel.
Yes, at times it is senseless.
Yes, you must live it.
Yes, it is worthwhile.
Words to live by
Yes, you can steal candy from children
now this is words to live by.
...Swaguar
Disagreed.
Literally.
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
what a surprise to see you guys cover Mervyn Peake! The Gormenghast trilogy is quite an undertaking to get through, but I'm fascinated by them. The tone and atmosphere and strangeness of it reminds me so much of experiencing the Dark Souls trilogy for the first time. Thank you for getting the word out on him!
Have you read his short story Boy in Darkness? Kind of an alternate version of the Gormenghast world.
i was totaly gonna say this guy made dark souls 3 before dark souls 3
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
Steerpike is a great mood.
To be honest, as the video began describing the castle, I thought it WAS going to be about Dark Souls.
Petition to have the word "Swaguar" replace the word "Rizzler" in pop culture.
I am begging 😭
I wanna be able to say it and not answer any questions
Petition signed by me, a random person on the internet. But hey, every bit counts.
SIGNED WITH 0 REGRETS
But what about rizz?
@@berniekatzroyindidnt like 'rizz' at first but whenni foubd out it's just short for 'charisma' I was like "Oh actually that's kinda perfect"
The jailor and the jagur is about the similarities on both sides of the law. It is about 2 men who both find themselves having their lives centred around a prison. The jaguar is an inmate and the jailor an officer. Both of them don't like their lives; tjey are cold heartless people who's wives have left them. They seek warmth and security they once had before they became so cold; picking up old memories they loved now tattered and ruined because of their harshness and mistakes. Now they struggle to find happiness at all in their lives, but at least they look put together on the outside, they look fashionable and strong.
Beautifully said. You have a real talent there.
I really liked the ending section discussing the appeal of absurdity and the two extremes with Seuss and Peake. The dichotomy between the two I think is a good example of why I, and so many others, have fallen in love with Gooseworx’s stories. They start off with a sort of Seussian whimsy, only to get progressively weirder and darker until inevitably the universe explodes. It retains the goofy setups of Seuss to draw people in only to morph into the absurdist hellscape of Peake
Or they begin and cut straight to the existential horror...
Little Runmo, for example. It starts off as a whimsical platformer, and ends with you desecrating a corpse and destroying the universe.
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
what I love about you guys is stuff like this. shining light on the shadows. the shadows don't disappear they just become understandable, even lovable, as they retreat behind their true selves.
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
Mervyn Peake, the artist that blurred the lines between Creepy & Whimsy before Tim Burton made it cool
Poetry is the gothic art of giving rhythm to an ahrythmicallh appalling world, as a means to make it make sense.
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
It's like Dr.Suess and HP Lovecraft had a baby and that baby was raised by Robert E Howard and Gustave Dore
I thought the same thing
Pratically a baby made to enter in my favorites
I always found comfort in the art when I was young. Now I love it more. It really looks like an escape from reality. It's like drawing a dream. So absurd and uncanny that it looks like something out from a child's dream.
I must admit I sighed in frustration as I saw this week's episode was gonna be on Dr. Seuss... or so I thought, and then you come out and surprise me with an episode on Gormenghast, one of my all-time favorites! Mea culpa, dear Talebots. Mea culpa.
14:12 this I kind of disagree with. Seuss was as much an avid activist as he was a children’s author. Several of his books even go over serious issues which people of the time didn’t want to talk about. How do you think The Lorax got banned in a few states? The dude wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t afraid of using his books to shine a light on uncomfortable things. Though his efforts were probably a lot more hidden then Peake’s were.
This. It always infuriates me when people look at his political cartoons from his younger days and act like he was some absurd racist. Time and context seem to evade too many people.
@@VeritabIlIti is the comment infuriating or that people forget that Seuss was an activist?
The name Gormenghast sounds familiar but I never read them. I didn't even know what they were about until now. Thank you for giving me another book to add to my ever-expanding reading list.
Same here. So many books to read, so little time.
Honestly if I never knew it was a fictional trilogy, I'd have thought it was a legit castle bc the name itself sounds like the name of a castle.
I just started reading the Gormenghast series a little while ago and I was very proud of myself for calling it during the description in the beggining before you revealed the authors name. Peake's prose is unlike anything ive ever seen, the pictures he paints with his descriptions make everything seem so cartoony but it's all covered in this gothic filter. I found Ghormenghast because I wanted a gothic fantasy to read, I so dearly wished i'd found it sooner, it's such a joy to read.
The gigantic castle ruins are what gave it away. I've never read it, but I saw bits of an adaptation many many years ago and it STAYED with me. It's one of those things...
Off topic, given the way people are nowadays Gen Z and Gen Alpha would probably love Peake's work if it was readapted. It fits the style of today's dark zany characters and movement away from pandering kids.
@@beckstheimpatient4135 I intend to watch the adaptations someday after I finished the books (read the manga before watching the anime, as they say) even though I heard there's a few problems with the last book, cause peake was either hospitalized or died before he could finish the series so a lot of the end was made with the notes he left behind but not written by him personally.
I don't know how reading those is gonna go, it's unfortunate this happens with so many authors, I never read a book written in this context before, I wonder just how big of a difference it will make but I will be understanding, I know they did the best with what they had.
@@SugarSweetSandStorm What I wouldn't give for a stop motion adaptation, Peake's characters need the kind of zany proportions and movement only animation can give, I don't think live action can really live up to it, not without CGI.
Considering that I just saw a "Eye-pop-out-of-skull" gag, except it's goth and a nearly completely incoherent insane man's rambling, I'll take your word for it. I kinda wanna read it now..
Thanks for this. I love Peake. If you ever visit his grave, you can see the landscape of Gormenghast all around you. I love his writing, yes it is hard, but it's beautiful. Made me grateful I had learned to read from Dr Seuss.
Welp, time to go off and read Peake fiction
I love this. Use Dr Seuss to learn to read, so that you CAN read Mervyn Peake.
Earliest I've ever been,, can't wait to see this
---
Oh this is fascinating!! I thought initially this would be about Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror (and others) but this is a great introduction to a new set of stories
Tim Burton has done some interesting dark poems
Really? What poems and where can I find them?
@@kylewoodson it’s called The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. I think it’s the only poetry book he’s done. He also has some very interesting art books. You can find those on his publication site, Steeled Publishing
@kylewoodson I own a torn up little book of poems by Tim Burton. It's called The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy & Other Stories.
If you like weird and fucked up stories and illustrations that somehow manage to be Hilarious, Sad and Scary all at once, I recommend finding a copy.
The titular poem "The Melancholy Death Of Oyster Boy" is particularly fucked up, in my opinion.
What's funnt is I found it in the children's section of my local book store while browsing for my son. Imglad I found it before some unsuspecting child got a hold of it. I would NOT ever recommend this for children.
Poor oyster boy
Voodoo girl is more well known
There's maybe an essay somewhere in contrasting seuss's approach to absurdism with peake's with the realities of the postwar mindset in Western Europe and America - while many Americans were impacted by the violence, it was, for the most part, something happening somewhere else, making a desire for a more Seuss-style form of absurd art feel more comforting. Things are absurd and meaningless, you can't pretend otherwise, but the underlying horror can be kind of set aside for a while, you don't always have to look at it. Meanwhile, peake was British, so even when he left the active theatre of war, he was coming back to a country that was physically deeply marked by the war - many cities had been heavily bombed, and that's not even getting into the damage done to mainland Europe. That constantly being surrounded by the physical reminders of the war may kind of bleed through a little into Peake's absurdism - you can't really escape into whimsy as fully when you're reminded of what happened every time you walk down the street and see the lingering physical damage. It's just a thought, I've not really fleshed it out much, but it's kind of an interesting way to look at the two when they're held up next to each other
8:20 the artwork reminds me more of Shel Silverstein’s books of poems
When they first mentioned "Gormenghast" in the video, that one video Tale Foundry did long prior came to mind
This reminds me of that comic. The one with goblins who write stories, where one is asked why he writes such dark tales, and his awnser is you never know what can help others in worse situations
I'm surprised to learn there was still a gothic writer during the world wars.
I was under the impression that gothic literature had died the day H.P Lovecraft wrote The Alchemist, a goodbye to the genre.
I'm glad to see gothic literature be resurrected like how Murder Drones resurrected cybergoth and rebuilt it into a proper genre instead of just a style of music and fashion.
Such a wonderful, silly, haunting show. Thoroughly enjoyed its final episode
I had no idea Mervyn Peake created art like this. Describing him as a "spooky Dr. Seuss" strikes me as...oddly apt.
I remember watching a mini-series based on the first Gormenghast book a few years back. Still need to read the book proper, but the show certainly captured the gothic Seuss energy you described. Also, it was Spike Milligan's last on-screen performance which, if you're a Brit, probably feels like a perfect wee bow on his entire career.
My good bot, the scars Peak bears and the instruments that made them lay around for all to see, well attested to in history, to then call his Turmoil only inner, is to labor under the misapprehension that 'outer' and 'inner' stay separate like water and oil, when it is plain to see that barrier between is as thin and fragile as foil.
I've actually heard of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast trilogy! But my understanding of them was deeply ignorant, thank you, Tale Foundry. The excerpt was beautiful to me, and I'm looking forward to digesting these books very slowly, word by word, over a couple of years. I'd say _Moby Dick_ is harder to understand.
And, Abbie, the original art for this one is truly inspired... the three images of Peake as a soldier made me cry, and every juxtaposition of Flay with the Cat in the Hat spoke untranslatable volumes, very clearly. It also stands up very well next to Peake's own art!
It feels like a constant struggle to write things somewhere between easy to understand and poetically descriptive beyond normal comprehension. I'm so glad you guys are posting such obscure masterpieces, though! Definitely going to check out Mervyn Peake!
I think now is the perfect time for peake honestly, so many people are looking for the obscure and forgotten people. Thank you so much for shedding light on someone I would have never heard of otherwise.
I'm not sure how long its been since you've been using this intro, but to this day I still love it. The animator(s) who worked on it are fantastic and I hope they know their work is very much loved.
Chef Swealter is the one character who legitimately scares me. The kitchens are a hellscape, and he is the devil. Also he probably diddles kids. They are wildly scared of him.
i'd rather compare the absurdity of gormenghast with tim burton than with seuss, to be honest. but seriously: thank you so much for making a video about one of the greatest pieces of fantasy ever written.
Tim Burton is aesthetically similar but he tends to portray absurdity and difference as bad and to be shut down
I don't usually comment very often, but this video really moved me, theres something very true about understanding the whimsy and absurdity of the world, nowadays, it truly feels like you cannot have one without the other, and so this video has swayed me into looking into peake's work and finally giving it a read, as much as this video may have been a pain to upload and structure, it deserves to be seen by at least a few million people❤
I thought this was a re-upload, but then I remembered that I simply watched it earlier first on Nebula.
You got halfway finished with the monologue and I said “oh gormangahst” out loud
mud huts... hmmm.... Finger to sky??? gormenghast???? scrungly horrible fortress?????? breeding ground of half the world's dust mites??????? my beloved!!?!?!?????
My uncle loved rhymes without reason as a kid, and when he died a few months ago my aunt got a hold of a photocopy of the book and that was my only exposure to Peake until now. It was so surreal hearing his name and being like "why does this sound so familiar?" I'd never thought about Peake's life until now and this has really helped me understand rhymes without reason, and why my uncle liked it. Might have to pick up Gormenghast now in his memory
I have read the first two books and they are wonderful but I've never managed to get more than half way through Titus Alone. I believe it was completed after Peake's death from notes and chapters he left behind. It doesn't have the same feel as the first two.
0:36 for many years now i've often thought of this, and the related paintings that go with it. Escherian with a Seuss twist.
8:13 as an artist let me say, this is not rough around the edges, this is exactly what the art is supposed to look like. this is an art style.
I think he means that it's a rough style?
Gave Titus Peake a swing back in high school and I think I was too preoccupied for the prose; if anyone else had read him, or I’d found my way to the poetry a little whiles later I suspect I’d be evangelist by now myself, really up my alley - keen to dig back in:)
Been a while since I’ve watched the vids friend, so I’m sure I’m late, but AMAZING “new” intro. Love me some tale foundry 👏🏼
God I love this channel
Everytime I was a video I feel like my eyes open even just a tad more. To either the real world, or the world of art and writing.
11:24, The amount of strain and dismay in your voice is amazing!
The passage read at 6:15 reminds me of Lovecraft, in terms of how excessively wordy it is.
I haven't looked into it much, but I know that back in the day authors, especially ones published in serial format, were paid by word count, hence the complex sentences. I wonder if that's the case here
I was half expecting you guys to mention Edward Gorey
me too
Thank you for making this. I remember reading the Gormanghast trilogy as a teenager, and really loved its gothic absurdity. There nwas also a BBC drama adaptation made in the 1980s, starring Sting of all people. You've brought back really fond memories, and a renewed interest5 in Peake.
Hey! I’m the sound designer of the sojourn. Thanks for the shout out, and thanks for the compelling discussion on fiction.
The excitement I felt when I didn’t recognize the author you were talking about is unparalleled. Your taste in horror is very close to mine, I can’t wait to see where this goes.
So stoked! I stumbled across the Gormenghast trilogy in jr high back in the early 70s. I've reread it a few times across the decades.
The intro is still far the best one I have ever seen and heard
I'm very happy to see TaleFoundry talking about Mervyn, I've been interested in his work for quite some time.
will definitely have to read some of this. it reminds me of my recent fascination, a book called "the battlefield where the moon says I love you" by Frank Stanford. its a southern gothic sort of epic poem about a kid in the deep south in the 70s having prophetic dreams. it's written in a sort of similar style, where the words and their format don't matter as much as the feelings they evoke--in fact, the entire book is written without any punctuation--which makes it sound a bit like the ramblings of a madman. and despite the darkness of it, it's also strangely funny sometimes.
unfortunately it's a bit hard to find. i had to purchase a hard copy on ebay, because i couldn't find it anywhere online. but i do recommend it if you can get access to it.
Thanks for releasing this video. I must admit that I had never even heard of Peake before, but it definitely seems to be an artist whose work I could find interesting, if not enjoy.
Such a great video! And amazing framing as a mirror to suess, keep at it.
This channel does a great job at making me interested in the stuff I usually never would find out about.
Perfect - thank you. I remember reading the first book - _Titus Groan_ a loooooong time ago and I forgot the author and title of the book . . . and now - you've given me back my memory - and now off to procure a copy once again.
I thought that I was going to learn about some lost works of Dr. Seuss, but this is so much more interesting
Definitely going to be checking this out! It sounds very reminiscent of A Series Of Unfortunate Events or perhaps Gregory Horror Show, and I am very excited to explore
Ive almost never been so glad to learn of a new artist and writer Id never heard of before.
That moment when you refresh youtube and know this is the video
Why is that actually what I just did 😂
Was half-expecting a clip from the Seuss Cake battle when you mentioned "layer of half-melted frosting".
I am currently working on a piece of literature myself and recently had some criticism on the hook being too vague and or con deluded. Finding this when I did this morning reframed the comments of my peers and now I see. Thank you, sincerely, for your work. If fortune favors ye who are wise in ways of words that entice then immortality has been achieved for ye, my siblings.
I am so in love with your intro you dont even know
I was first introduced to Peake (aside from references to him in reviews) when I was in hospital back around '97. My (now late) brother Karl brought me a copy of _Titus Groan_ to read: it may not have been the best hospital read, but it was interesting.
I had never heard of this writer, thank you for bringing attention to his work!
6:11 "Let me try to read a passage to you:" **RUclips: Yves Saint Laurent perfume ad**
lol mine was a Cadillac ad
The British TV miniseries of Gormangast was fantastic! It kept all the ideas and beautiful art but overcame the weaknesses in the flowery writing. It was beautiful.
I watched the BBC series (and own it on DVD), and read the books after. Enjoyed both, muchly.
The books, tho, you can almost feel the author's decent into mental illness as it progresses. It's facinating, and a little sad.
Rhymes without reason as the thumbnail is so good
Peake was the first author from my mother's SciFi/Fantasy shelf that I struggled with and actually had to put down and try again after several years.
Those same volumes are still proudly on my SciFi/Fantasy shelf today.
I get a strange sense of deja vu with this episode. Not in the more literal sense of "ive seen this video before", but in a more abstract "i cant place the name, but the story and background feel all too familiar; almost some long forgotten memory of a single unit in a random english class in public schooling." None of the information felt new, but it did feel forgotten, like some memory of great impact sealed away until i needed it was just re-unlocked. Have i read any of his past works? I dont recall any particular example, but i also cant confidently say i havent, either. It is a strange feeling.
7:08 reminds me of German.
Infinitely long words and sentences to describe things with a level of detail nobody ever asked for.
Okay, this is wild. I JUST learned about this author while looking up when the 4th Locked Tomb book was due to come out and saw the Gormenghast series mentioned in the "similar to" section of a description.
Thank you for posting this! I'm always looking for realistic absurdism, and it's so difficult to find!
Y'all have had a gift for story telling at last since I've stumbled your way. This one is somehow a cut above your other lofty efforts. It is subtle and ineffable, but it is there.
First time hearing of Mervyn Peake, I honestly thought Edward Gorey was going to be mentioned.
Gormenghast is one of my favourite series ever. I reread it every few years and enjoy it more each time.
Mervyn Peake has one of my favourite descriptions of landscape. Gormenghast is like a rich chocolate fudge in a field of easter egg chocolate. The language is so full of image and beauty that I needed to read it in small portions so I wouldn't get sick on its richness. It's one of my favourites.
Now that kids can't help not only avoiding horrific news, but every single week discover themselves being the recipients of the horrific.
.
.
And the Thots & Prairs roll on.
I was first introduced to Gormenghast through the BBC adaptation. I was about eleven years old, and the amazing, absurdist, Shakespeare-madness wild ride was so fascinating that I watched it again and again.
This is my favorite video of your's I've seen. I'd love to see more videos like this about somewhat obscure but underappreciated authors.
Tbh your reading of those sentences felt sureal. If you think of it from a movie perspetive. You get a sense of special effects. As if their hatred for one another was so fearce that they left their bodies and eminated a almost tangable air. For their hate.
Thank you for this. It seems as though Gormenghast is slowly getting a bit more attention now - and that can only be for the good.
Thank goodness for Tommy because I was looking for something to watch (I came from the discord notification)
Ah, but remember to thank goodness for everyone else in the team, for making such a cool episode in the first place!
Thank goodness for the whole team for making this video too!
Ahhhh it's so good to see someone lifting Peake's unique brand of madness up. I stumbled on Gormenghast as a teen and it completely changed the way I saw writing 🐝
Your intro brings me so much joy
This made me think about Jhonen Vasquez. Humor in dark absurdity definitely seems up his alley.
"Knuckled masonry" gave it away for me. Peake is marvelous. Different in every possible way from Tolkien but he wrote fantasy and boy is it epic in its own way and it is certainly wonderfully entertaining. Highly recommended. I'm 60, first read them at 18, the perfect age for these books, and they are among the great books of my life.
Actually, LITERALLY, Peake Fiction.
Aaand I now have some new books to get to read to my son
Meryvn Peake really excited my teenage love of fiction. Hard to read, but prophetic. Definitely significant in my early development into the lifelong interest in Goth… but never thought of Peake as somehow Seuss-like, but it does make sense.
Awesome video ! It was nice to learn about Peake and I might go ahead and find some of his works to read. The excerpt made me want to know and read more of his work.
In France, we have a children's books' author I'd personally describe as a mix between Peake and Seuss' work (probably closer to Seuss') called Claude Ponti. His drawings, as well as his stories don't quite make sense in the logical sense (very absurd in the weirdest ways), but really interesting to gaze at as they're so full of details.
I was apparently terrified of some of the stories as a child, but bought a plethora of his books recently because I still remember the pictures and overall style fondly, and I quite enjoyed my little nonsensical reread.
I do, however understand why some stories terrified me : a child so ugly he hides under the sink and gets walled in still made me uncomfortable even though it finishes... well? There's no moral to any of the stories, Ponti says he puts himself to a child's level : the stories write themselves, things happen because they happen, each thing more nonsensical than the one before. Which, in my opinion, makes it very interesting to read.
Strangely, Mervin Peake instantly sounded familiar. Honestly, I forget how I learned about him. But his works sounded very interesting and unique. I haven’t read them yet, but I’m excited to. I always have sympathy for tragic artists, those who had so much to give but died too soon.
I wanted to give story making a try. But the only thing I can come up with are six kings and their fates due to their envious greed for control.
10:03 sounds like opening to a banger Primus song
The Grown family! Your intro was tickling my memory and all I could think was that sounds like where the Grown family lives. Couldn't remember the place name.
Rhymes Without Reason seems like the poetry equivalent of surrealism... Intriguing! As a poet myself ill keep that on the back burner (im only 17 but ive already filled a notebook and a half with poems of various degrees of quality)
I think Peak does not belong in the bookstore, but a comic store more. If it had the art as Sandman to go along with it, it would surely thrive. The pictures help people to go through the difficult read, yet can enjoy the deep, whimsical talk.
I agree somewhat but ultimately disagree: I've only read Titus Groan of his, but my favorite part was how the attic would shift in my mind's eye from scene to scene, because the visceral descriptions never quite knit into a three dimensional plan. It feels like visceral emotion warps the materiality, and that's something that's hard to do in a comic. Some parts of Sandman do get close, but I think Gormenghast's in-world static nature lends itself well to imagination, just as the Dreaming's literal madness is best served by visual snapshots.
In no way am I trying to convince you I'm right - I think difference of opinion is Neat, especially when the person I disagree with clearly understands and respects the work. Like I totally get the vibe you see, and I agree with the vibe, and the opposite conclusions are fascinating. Have a good timezone, stranger!
I do not believe I was aware of this author, thank you for pointing them out!