Vertigo Preview: "Fear of Falling"

Neil Gaiman and Kent Williams

• Originally printed in Vertigo Preview
• First story reprinted in trade paperback Fables & Reflections
• Audible Act III Chapter 2

Note: This stand-alone story appeared as an extra in a preview of DC's Vertigo titles, when the imprint was newly launched. With the exception of Dream and Matthew, all characters have not appeared before or since, although a somewhat similar movie writer-director is the central character of Gaiman and Dave McKean's Signal to Noise.

Page 1#

• Panel 1

  Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak appeared in an Alfred Hitchcock movie, where the plot hinged in part on whether or not Novak's character was dead and impersonated or amnesiac. The name of the film was Vertigo, the dizziness often associated with the fear of falling.

• Panel 5

  The play's name is apparently The Typhoid Mary Blues.

  Typhoid Mary is the appellation given to Mary Mallon (?-1938), an infamous carrier of typhoid (a fever-causing intestinal disease) in the early Twentieth Century. Mary is infamous primarily because she kept getting jobs, under false pretenses, in the food preparation industry, and thus kept spreading typhoid to her customers.

  The blues is a colloquial name for a generally depressed state of mind, or for a style of music (arising from American black traditional music) generally characterized by melancholy. Either usage is appropriate here, although Janet's comment about "stupid songs" suggests the former, with a nod to the latter.

• Panel 6

  "What's Entertainment?" is a reference to any one of a number of television show which give "news" about entertainment and entertainers in a jazzed-up Nightly-News format - possibly a parody of "That's Entertainment!"??. Of these shows, "Entertainment Tonight" is the most well-known.

Page 2#

• Panel 1

  Broadway is the street in New York which has most of the most significant theatrical productions. Off-Broadway is an expression for the second tier of theatres in the New York area; the usage is commonly extended, as Janet does, to off-off-Broadway and further down the line, till you're doing dinner theater in Sarasota.

• Panel 4

  St. Patrick's Cathedral: A New York Roman Catholic church. Many Catholic churches have so-called "parochial" (from "parish") schools for their members.

Page 4#

• Panel 3

  Irony.

Page 5#

• Panel 4

  Note the F on Todd Faber's shirt.

• Panel 6, 7

  This is a description of Sleep Paralysis - a condition where you are awake but cannot move or speak while waking up or falling asleep. It may also cause hallucinations or a feeling of suffocation. It is a type of parasomnia, which are abnormal behaviors during sleep. It is not harmful, but it can be scary. It affects about 8% of the general population, but it is more common in people with narcolepsy, anxiety, or irregular sleep patterns.

Page 9#

• Panel 3

  Roadrunner cartoons: Warner Brothers' stable of animators did a series of cartoons, primarily directed by Chuck Jones, featuring a road runner chased by Wile E. Coyote. Wile E.'s elaborate schemes always failed, and usually resulted in his being blown up, squashed flat, or, as relevant here, falling long distances off cliffs. Often, Wile E., in fact, was blown up, squashed flat, -and- fell long distances off cliffs.

Page 10#

• Panel 3

  Obviously, Todd's play is allegorical, with all his various characters standing as symbols. God is the traditional Judeo-Christian father-deity; Sappho was a female Greek poet from the island Lesbos, and the inspiration for the term Lesbian; The Hanged Man is one of the Major Arcana from the Tarot deck, signifying spiritual growth and passage or the reverse, depicted as a man hanging upside-down in a "yoga-like" posture, a man with no apparent fear of falling; and The Slave of the Lamp is the genie from the Aladdin myth.

• Panel 6

  On the subject of the third option, in Douglas Adams' Life, The Universe, and Everything, (the third Hitchhiker's Guide book) it is said that:

  "There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
  

Credits

• Originally collated and edited by Greg Morrow.
• Thanatos tgt33358@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu identified the Stewart-Novak film.
• Tami Dawn Kimmel tamora@owlnet.rice.edu provided many details about Typhoid Mary.
• Gary Hoo gary@futon.sfsu.edu took exception to my characterization of the blues and edited my statement about Chuck Jones.
• Jonathan Petersen jcp@trident.usacs.rutgers.edu corrected my reference to the Tarot.
• Timothy Hock Seng Tan: the best page number counter there is.
• Ralf Hildebrandt added more details and made edits
• Richard Munn noted Todd's childhood sleep paralysis, and noted the possible Hitchhiker's Guide reference.

Last modified by Richard Munn on 2023-09-07 - Updated the Cathedral reference, and noted the Sleep paralysis mention
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