Gaiman's The Sandman series is the only comic/graphic novel I have ever read - and it was fantastic. His book Coraline, which became an amazing film, is also among my favorites.
An excellent interview with an amazingly talented person.
Read the whole interview.Myth, Magic, and the Mind of Neil Gaiman:
A CONVERSATION WITH THE DREAM KING
“If you need me, Neil and me will be hanging out with the Dream King. Neil says ‘hi’, by the way...”
— Tori Amos, “Tear in Your Hand” on Little Earthquakes (1992)There is an undiscovered country we’ve all visited. A place where memories of our travels are often blurred and we are only left with impressions and half-recalled scenes. This is where angels tread and demons dwell. This is dreamland — and this is Neil Gaiman’s world.
In Gaiman’s world, where creatures light and dark make their home, gods and demons and friends and foes emerge from the hidden corners of the mind. They glide through the streams of our subconscious as we make the journey with them in this shadow land that exists between the realm of night and day; and the real and surreal.
Neil Gaiman
Gaiman is the pathfinder here — returning to us with dreams and nightmares, fables and fairy tales, and magic and myth.
For Neil Gaiman, this journey began a little over two decades ago... His graphic novel, Violent Cases, created in 1987 with artist Dave McKean, marked the beginning of a career that has spanned two decades of groundbreaking achievement. His Sandman series from DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint changed the aesthetic landscape of comics. He has won Hugo, Nebula, Eisner, Quill, Bram Stoker, and Newbery awards among many others for his novels and graphic novels. His work regularly ascends the New York Times bestseller list in the form of novels, graphic novels, and children’s books.
In addtion, Gaiman’s feature film, Mirrormask, created with Dave McKean for the Jim Henson Company was released by Sony Pictures in Fall 2005. The film Stardust based on his novel of the same name and starring Claire Danes, Robert DeNiro, Peter O’Toole, and Michelle Pfeiffer opened in theaters August 2007 (see the trailer). Gaiman wrote the screenplay for Sony Pictures’ Beowulf (see the trailer) starring Crispin Glover, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Jolie. Gaiman's 2002 book, Coraline (see the trailer), also made its way to the big screen in February 2009 in a stop-motion film directed by Harry Selick. One of the Dream King's most celebrated Sandman spin-offs, Death, is also currently in development with Death and Me.
Please visit NeilGaiman.com for more information about Neil, his journal, and selected short stories and book excerpts.
Neil Gaiman graciously took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions. Please join us in welcoming him to the pages of the Wild River Review.
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WRR: In your body of work — from Violent Cases to The Sandman to Signal to Noise to 1602 to The Eternals — you’re recognized as a master in the craft of comics (while eschewing the more august term of “graphic novelist”) and have created some remarkable achievements that have essentially redefined the boundaries of what many thought possible in the medium.
What is it about this medium that allows you to tell the stories you tell — and does it, in fact allow you to tell those stories better than other forms of storytelling?
I don’t know that it is better, but I know for me, at least, one of the joys of comics has always been the knowledge that it was, in many ways, untouched ground. It was virgin territory. When I was working on Sandman, I felt a lot of the time that I was actually picking up a machete and heading out into the jungle. I got to write in places and do things that nobody had ever done before.
When I’m writing novels I’m painfully aware that I’m working in a medium that people have been writing absolutely jaw-droppingly brilliant things for, you know, three to four thousand years now. You know, you can go back. We have things like The Golden Ass. And you go, well, I don’t know that I’m as good as that and that’s two and a half thousand years old.
But with comics I felt like — I can do stuff nobody has ever done. I can do stuff nobody has ever thought of. And I could and it was enormously fun.
But, you know, the truth of the matter is what I like best of all — is being allowed to do anything. What I like best is the fact that I can do comics and I can do novels and I can do children’s books and I can do movies. And nobody seems to mind that I’m appallingly unfocused. I’m quite committed to go off and do this stuff, which makes me very happy.
WRR: Comic books, particularly American comics, feature an assortment of larger-than-life heroes who represent specific archetypes and engage in conflicts between the forces of good and evil. Are comics the conveyors of new myth — American myth?
Oh, I think so. Definitely, Superman and Batman have to be a very specific kind of evolution of myth. A friend of mine pointed out to me recently that if you combine DC Comics and Marvel Comics, or even look at them individually — they are probably seeing that all of their stories are theoretically within a coherent universe. You’re looking at the largest story ever told.
In the case of Marvel, it’s forty, forty-five years? In fact, if you go back to the 1940s Marvel stuff — which they do now — in each case you’re looking at seventy. That’s one hundred forty years of storytelling between DC and Marvel in one giant coherent universe — which I love. I love the idea that you have this ocean of story to swim deeply into.
WRR: You’ve been a long-time champion for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF). Can you share with our readers about the importance of the work that CBLDF does?
Well, of course, and with pleasure. The problem that comics have, which is a very specific problem, is that there are battles that have been long since won in fields such as art and literature. If not won, at least we know whose side we are on, which have not yet been won in comics.
Especially because, well, comics for adults have been done as long as comics for children. But, comics still get perceived as being a children’s medium — which means that you get somebody doing something with adult content. That is immediately followed by a TV journalist turning up in a comic store standing in front of the Archie and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shelves saying, “You think this is what your children are reading. But actually comics are filled with this.”
And you know what? No they are not. Actually you got that comic from the 18 and over section. And so on and so forth.
But comics for whatever reason, wind up being an easy target for prosecutors and police and people in search of easy headlines or whatever. And the truth is that most comic stores are one-man operations, undercapitalized. They’re small. They can’t afford legal representation. They can’t fight a long battle with the state or with the local authorities. No more can comic artists.
So far in the last 20 years — the thing about the legal defense fund is that we win battles and we lose battles. The ones that we’ve lost have been heartbreaking. We lost with a guy called Mike Diana in Florida who had been writing and drawing a comic, a little thing called Boiled Angel. We flew in people. Art Spiegelman came down. Peter Kuper, some major artists... all these guys came in from New York. People came in from the Comics Art Museum in San Francisco. And the local attorney stood up at the end and he said the standards of Pensacola, Florida are not those of the crack alleys of New York or the gay bath houses of San Francisco. At which point we sort of knew that we lost that case.
Mike Diana became the first person to be convicted of obscenity for self-publishing his own work. And he also wound up convicted to three years suspended sentence, a $1,000 fine, he wasn’t allowed within 20 feet of anybody under the age of 18. He had to get psychiatric treatment at his own expense, the cost of journalist ethics at his own expense, and he was not allowed to create art any longer. And the local sheriff’s office was actually told that they had to make periodic spot checks to make sure he hadn’t drawn anything.
I think that freedom of speech is purely and simply the most important thing we have.
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