Neil Gaiman: A Man For All Seasons

Most of the creators identified herein as "comic
book rebels" have bucked the status quo of how comic books
are published and the role creative people are relegated to in
the traditional business structure of the industry. Yet Neil
Gaiman continues to regularly work with established publishers
like DC Comics. How, then, is he "rebel"?

Gaiman was chosen as being representative of a new
order of creators. Cosmopolitan and nomadic, they successfully
maintain their creative autonomy while demanding the respect of
their chosen publishers through a clear sense of who they are,
what they are worth, and a canny blend of independence and
diplomacy. In short, a creator plying the sharpened skills of
both a seasoned professional and the shrewd businessman, able to
freely move between all media, and work with any publisher.

Born in 1960 in Portchester, England, and growing up
in Sussex, Gaiman left school purposely to become a writer. His
first professional work in the early Eighties was as a
journalist, meeting and interviewing many authors and cartoonists
whose work he admired. Alan Moore showed him the rudiments and
structure of how comic scripts were crafted, and in short order
he chose to abandon his early company-owned comics to collaborate
with artist Dave McKean on their first graphic novel, Violent
Cases (Escape, Titan, 1987; reissued in color by Titan/Tundra,
1991).

Soon after, Gaiman and McKean completed the painted
comic Black Orchid (1988) for DC, prompting an invitation to
write a monthly title for the company. Resurrecting the name of a
character created for DC by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the
Forties—but completely creating his own incarnation rooted
in the Dream-lord of myth and folktales—Sandman was launched
in 1988 and continues as one of the finest mainstream comics ever
created. He was Alan Moore's choice to continue Miracleman
(Eclipse, from 1990 to the present), and his other comics
projects include a number of short tales for anthologies like
Taboo (SpiderBaby/Tundra) and the graphic novels Signal to Noise
(Gollancz, 1991, US edition from Dark Horse), Mr. Punch
(Gollancz, 1993) with Dave McKean, and Sweeny Todd, a work in
progress with artist Michael Zulli. Outside the industry, he has
authored or coauthored several books, including the best-selling
collaborative novel with Terry Prachett, Good Omens (1990). He is
presently developing a television series for England's BBC-2.

So how is he a comic book rebel? Gaiman grew up seeing
how previous generations—and his own peers—allowed
themselves to be badly used by the industry. Along with others of
his generation, he is determined to take better care of himself.
Just consider Sandman, which is owned under work-for-hire law by
DC. Gaiman's accomplishments and negotiations after the first
year of its run led to DC's granting an historically
unprecedented (and retroactive) creative coownership and share of
the character and title, including all licensing and foreign
sales—rights and revenue DC had always denied creators.
Having already alienated key creators like Alan Moore, who had at
one time earned considerable money and prestige for the company,
DC has finally begun to realize it is in their own best interest
to nurture better relations with certain creators. Very quietly,
a revolutionary change in how business is done has occurred, a
vital precedent set for this and the succeeding generations to
come. While working with the existing system, Neil Gaiman
continually expands the possibilities of both the industry and
the medium.

COMIC BOOK REBELS: What were the building blocks as a reader
that brought you to comics as a creator?

NEIL GAIMAN: The main one was that I never
discriminated—in the racial sense of the term—between
comics and anything else I read. I was a voracious reader as a
kid; I read anything and everything. And one of the things I read
was comics. I couldn't understand why there was any kind of
prejudice against them; why we weren't allowed to bring them to
school; why was it something everyone sort of frowned on? Books
were considered cool, and yet there was as much thought and
artistry in a lot of the comics that I was reading—some of
Archie Goodwin's work, some of the early DC horror comics. So I
never discriminated; I never felt that comics were in any way a
"lesser" medium. They seemed to be a *more* exciting
medium; I always figured I would be a writer when I grew up, and
one of the things I always wanted to write was comics. And here I
am.

CBR: With your ability to now pick and choose between various
mediums of prose—from short story to novel to
screenplay—why are you still apparently most enamored with
this medium?

GAIMAN: As a creator, I get more of a buzz from comics than I
do from anything else. I cannot go back and look at a short story
or a novel that's come out with pleasure. Rather I look and think
"Oh, God, I should have fixed that." Whereas I can look
at a comic I've done and get a real buzz off it and have a real
feeling of pride. It's always a feeling of surprise to me when
something that I wrote as a script comes out and it actually
*works.* And it's a very pleasant surprise because I didn't
really do it—all I ever did was *write* it. Knowing that the
script for a comic is *not* the comic. The comic is the comic.

CBR: Violent Cases and Signal to Noise are driven by memories
and meditation, Sandman by dreams, and even your work on the
superhero title Miracleman, in a genre traditionally composed of
larger-than-life actions is by nature intimate and reflective. Do
you find comics an inherently introspective medium for
storytelling?

GAIMAN: I don't think comics are an introspective medium.
*They are a medium.* That's all. But, by my nature, I *am* an
introspective writer. My stories tend to be as much about what
goes on inside people as what goes on outside people. I don't
want to sound naïve, but I'm telling *my* kind of stories.

CBR: But don't you consciously reject the traditional comic
book exploitation of action and violence in your work?

GAIMAN: Black Orchid is very much a conscious rejection of the
traditional approaches to these themes. In Black Orchid I wanted
to do a pacifist fable in which acts of violence did occur, but
were unpleasant—a fable in which meditation and beauty
played a very important part. Black Orchid was sort of a look at
things I *didn't* like in comics, and then do the kind of comic I
would like to be out there. In a completely different sense, it
was the same reason I did Violent Cases. Violent Cases was
something we did for people who don't read comics; Black Orchid
was something we did for people who do. But having said all that,
I don't think anything I've done since then has be a
"reaction to" what's out there. What's been done since
then has been done mostly as a combination of terror and
desperation to find the way to the next panel or to the next word
or to the end of the story. And there was never anything in
Sandman where I said "Okay, now I'm going to do comic book
like nobody else has ever seen!" It was much more of
"Okay, *that's* where the story went," so I followed. I
figured sooner or later DC would turn around and say "You
know, you can't really do that," and they never have.

CBR: You're currently best recognized by the public as the
writer on Sandman. Considering you own most of your comic book
material, why did you initially agree to work on a character you
did not create?

GAIMAN: But Sandman very much *is* my own creation. Is it my
own ownership? No, that's due to strange antediluvian business
practices of a gigantic Engulf & Devour style corporation.
But is it my creation—sure! The idea that I'm probably best
known for it has more to do with the fact one gets known for the
largest and most easily followable body of work. And if you line
it up against everything else I've done, Sandman is very
obviously the largest body of work.

CBR: You've said before that Sandman for you is a finite
story. How is DC handling that, since comic book companies never
allow a commercially successful character to be purposely taken
out of circulation?

GAIMAN: This has already been dealt with, pretty much to
everyone's satisfaction. About two years ago, I raised the issue
with my editors at DC, and each of them went pale and said
"Well, this has never been done before, um, maybe, no,
um..." But they've had a chance to let the notion sink in,
and now realize that when I'm done with Sandman, that Sandman is
done. But just because it may mean the end of Sandman, as a
monthly comic book, it does not mean—as far as I'm
concerned—the end of Sandman. There are stories outside the
monthly continuity that I would quite like to do. There's a story
that begins before Sandman #1, which would be the storyline for
Sandman #0. There're a number of myths and legends I want to
write that I'll probably do in a few years time. So there are a
number of Sandman stories yet to be done. Basically, I've agreed
to come back to the characters so long as DC leaves it alone in
the meantime.

CBR: Any downside to the acclaim that Sandman has brought to
you? Creators often get pigeonholed to keep working on the same
series, or at least remain in the same genre.

GAIMAN: I don't know; there is a level that I tend to get
pigeonholed as a horror writer. But then again, anybody who knows
anything about my body of work knows that isn't *all* I do. And
Sandman isn't even particularly horror. So I can't really think
of any way it's affected me adversely. It generates an
interesting body of fans, ninety-nine percent of whom are quiet
wonderful. And the one percent of whom take it all a little too
far and assume that I am privy to a body of wisdom denied to the
commonality of mortals. Now that's a little difficult to deal
with...

CBR: You've worked with an impressive procession of
artist—particularly on Sandman—but your most frequent
collaborator is Dave McKean. What is the bond, and how do you
work together?

GAIMAN: Dave is one of my best friends in the world, and
simply put, a remarkable artist. He's also a remarkable writer,
as his own series Cages demonstrates. It's be a very interesting
and rewarding relationship; comics is just one of the many things
we do, and there are things we do apart. We work with other
people, but we still ring each other up every day. I love the
fact his mind works differently from the way mine does. He sees
things I wouldn't see and I tell him things he wouldn't think of.
By now, we must have worked in every conceivable way that's
possible to work in collaboration. With Violent cases, I wrote it
essentially as a short story and handed over to him and said,
"Okay, now run with it." With things like "Hold
Me" [Hellblazer #27], or the story I wrote for Outrageous
Stories from the Old Testament, they were written as formal
scripts. You know, "Page one, panel one." While Black
Orchid was scripted like a movie, and Signal to Noise was written
in some strange bastard from that only myself and McKean could
understand a word of. The script would be completely meaningless
to anyone else, because they would ignore the fact that we'd been
talking on the phone about this for a month and a half, and are,
in a way, telepathic. It's a relationship in which we trust each
other implicitly. That's why I love working with Dave on the
covers for Sandman. I trust him. What he wants to do is okay by
me.

CBR: You mentioned Violent Cases being written in short story
form. Any plans of adapting your short stories or novels into
comic book form? Clive Barker, for example, has done quite well
with the adaptations of his prose work into the comics medium.

GAIMAN: Mostly I would look at the material and say,
"Well, I already wrote it once. You know? Why should I write
it again?" If somebody came to me and said "We would
like to adapt Good Omens," I would say, "Okay, here it
is. Go do it. Have fun! Send me the comics when they come
out." I'm not convinced you can simply transliterate
something from one medium to another. I remember when I was
watching the stage play adaptation of Violent Cases, which was
incredibly faithful—and didn't work. The dramatic highs and
lows were all in the wrong places. They took the words of the
comic book, but in terms of theater, the one bit of theater magic
they did was during the sequence where the character is talking
about the wonderful light in the sky. And at that point the
director flooded the stage with this wonderful light. Which meant
it became the central image, and so became the center of Violent
Cases—which it isn't! So the stage adaptation became kind of
mushy and soft-centered, and the center in Violent Cases is about
Al Capone beating these guys to death with a baseball bat while a
birthday party's going on, which is something which was covered
in two lines of dialogue on the stage—pretty much a
throwaway. It was at that point I realized that faithful
adaptations very often miss something. You need to recreate your
story, you need to retell it. What is interesting is that I did
"A Murder Mystery" for the publication Midnight
Graffiti, as a short story. and about twenty-five percent of the
people who read it noticed that there was one incredibly obvious
story, and beneath it, one much, much less obvious story going on
at the same time. And a lot of people don't even notice that's
anything beneath the surface story to read! Whereas I know that
if I did it as comic, there would be two or three little visual
clues running through it, which would have meant that perhaps
ninety-five percent of the readers would have picked up on the
other story. That's why I find comics interesting. The way people
read comics and they way they read prose is a different
experience. I believe a lot of people don't read prose with the
amount of attention and effort that they give comic books. In a
comic book they will read every picture and *every* word, and be
forced by the juxtaposition to look at how these things relate to
each other.

CBR: What was the experience of adapting Good Omens into a
screenplay? Was that an enriching experience?

GAIMAN: Not particularly, for a number of reasons. First time
we tried to make the book into a ninety-minute movie, and it
didn't fit. You remember the old story about the guy who goes
into the tailor to be fitted for a suit? And the tailor fits him
really weirdly, so the suit hangs on the guy with the arms being
four or five inches too long? So the tailor says to him
"Just raise your arms." And then the guy says,
"Well, look at the way the back hangs." So the tailor
says, "Fine, just curve your back and hunch over." And
then the guy complains, "Well, look at these trousers!"
The tailor says, "Fine, just lean that leg forward."
Finally the guy walks outside, looking like Quasimodo, and this
man comes up to the guy and demands, "Who's your
tailor?" And the guy asks, "Why do you want to meet my
tailor?" So the man says, "If he can fit somebody like
you, then he can fit *anybody*!" Which is sort of like the
process of writing a film script from a novel. You're chopping
off limbs, and trying to put things in that fit. So that aspect
of it wasn't particularly pleasant.

CBR: In other words, "Screenplay by Procrustes."

GAIMAN: Exactly! On the other hand, it *was* a pleasant
experience to take everything that I've learned from doing these
adaptations of Good Omens—the one I did with Terry Prachett,
and the one I did on my own—and using it for developing this
TV series for the BBC. It has the working title of The Underside.
So that was very interesting because I was working on something
that was *meant* to be filmed, and meant to have actors floating
around a sound stage. and I could do all sorts of neat things
that I would have bothered doing in comics. For one things,
rather than an artist drawing word balloons, here I could see
actors speaking my words, and using their own expressions.

CBR: You touched earlier upon the concept that people
literally have to read comic books more intensely than prose. In
what sense?

GAIMAN: People tend to skip when they read prose. People skip
words, skip pages, sometimes they skip thoughts. Or they flip
through pages. Or they read it faster and less attentively than
they read other sections. A writer has no control over how
somebody reads. In comics, you have a lot more control over the
experience of reading. Over what and how the person reading it
reads. You are doling out pieces of information to them with an
immediacy that they otherwise might not have.

CBR: You often draw upon world mythologies to either
deliberately dissect them, and/or build upon them. Do you have a
conscious game plan for using mythologies in the comic medium?

GAIMAN: No. I remember speaking to a woman who had been a
friend of Joseph Campbell, and she said that Campbell believed
that superheroes are the mythologies of the twentieth century. I
don't actually think they are. Mainly because they don't have
stories attached to them—they are simply characters. You've
got this strange division in twentieth century mythology right
now, in which you've got stories floating around with no people
attached, like the urban legends: the vanishing hitchhiker, the
death cars. And you have characters like Tarzan and Superman and
Batman—but with *no* stories. Myths are my favorite subject.
I think if I wasn't writing comics there probably wouldn't be a
career for me. Unless somebody came up with Personal Religion
Designer. You know—people would come up to me and they'd
say, "Hi. I'd like something that was strong in the sin
department. I'd like a whole pantheon, and I'd like really neat
holy days, and a great creation myth." And I'd say,
"Okay, that'll be $20,000 and five percent of your poorbox
takings." I could do that.

CBR: In Violent Cases and the serial killer story in Sandman
you explore violent American lore, while in Mr. Punch and Sweeney
Todd you draw from murderous archetypes of European folklore, as
if exploring both sides of the same dark street of human nature.
A darker side than Sandman chooses to explore.

GAIMAN: Well...yes. [Pauses] Sandman is an entertainment. It's
delightful entertainment, even though I've had to work harder and
longer and it's given me more headaches than anything else I've
had to do. But I think it's something to do with choosing your
targets, who your audience is. And yes, my audience is me. That
is, at the end of the day, the person I'm writing most to please
is myself. But Sandman represents to some extent my preoccupation
and fascination with America, with sort of a mythic take on
American cities and institutions. The New York in Sandman is
probably not the real New York, but the one I remember seeing on
my first day there. With these magical manholes spouting steam,
and this mad old woman rushing past me going "Fuck! Fuck!
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" And standing before these buildings that
just went up forever... Violent Cases was a way for me to talk
about America as well as violence. It germinated from the fact
that a lot of the incidents in the first few pages are, in
effect, true. It is quite true that my father sprained my wrist
when I was about four, grabbed my arm trying to get me to go to
bed and something went. He took me to a gentleman who, I was
informed a few years ago, had been Al Capone's osteopath. That
much is true. But other than that, the rest is not. Beyond that,
I've always been fascinated by America. I always figured America
was kind of like Oz—it was a country where, for only ten
dollars, you could buy your own submarine and set it up in your
bedroom! I knew we didn't have anything like that in England, so
America has always been a "myth" that I've been fond
of, and a myth I like building on and newly creating. Your
statement about there being a difference between my American work
and my British work is partly to do when you think of the old saw
that in England a hundred miles is a very long way, and in
America a hundred years is very long time. I have this theory
that you can find anything in America. Absolutely *anything.* You
just have to drive far enough. Sooner or later you'll find the
guy with the seven-foot-high ball of string. Or the guy who makes
furniture out of cheese in his garden. You just have to go far
enough. In England, you just have to look far enough back. And
whatever you're looking for is going to appear sooner of later.
So Mr. Punch and Sweeney Todd are looking back, if you will. It's
significant that in Violent Cases, the osteopath character is
European. He went to Chicago, and then he came back. In Mr.
Punch, you're looking again at a childhood incident that happened
to me around the age of seven or eight, partly real, partly
imaginary, built up from family myth and from the inside of my
head, and from Punch and Judy. The patterns in Mr. Punch go back
to the medieval mummers' plays and possibly before. It's buried
in that. Sweeney Todd goes back to the mythical founding of
London. That is the starting point for Sweeney, to some extent
where the story will lead and end. Someone once explained about
the "desks" of London, saying, "Well, about twenty
feet down are the Roman times." It's true; civilization *is*
lower. You can calculate the time periods from the strata, how
the ground has risen and so forth. Sweeney Todd, and to some
extent Mr. Punch, involve just getting in there with our spade,
and digging in particularly bloody ground.

CBR: How do you think your work in comics has changed the
field?

GAIMAN: There is a level of work being done today that is more
graphic in violence and six. Yet I don't think that has very much
to do with anything truly significant; it's a superficial
"pushing of the envelope." The only way I can really
reply is to remember what it was like when Alan Moore was doing
Swamp Thing, and that was the mythical archetype around which
*everything* revolved, coming out of the monster cycle. And look
at the comics that never quite got into it even that far. Yet,
for example, there were no gay characters in Swamp Thing. There
were no nipples, as I recall. Now mainstream comics have both.
But these days, somewhere in all that, we've since come to think
that we have done something. I think Sandman #6 to some extent is
a watershed. Because is went farther in terms of extreme and
graphic horror and sex than anything anybody had ever done
previously in comics that I can think of. Sandman #8 was a
watershed because it went farhter in "nothing happens in
this issue" than anybody had ever done in mainstream comics
to date! But other than that, I don't know. I can't see a huge
influence that I've had on the field. I confess that if I have
had an influence, it's probably not anything you'll see for at
least ten years. Well, maybe eight years... But what I'm
interested in is the thirteen to fifteen year olds, who are
reading their Sandman and Black Orchid, and who are sitting in
class and arguing with their teachers. Saying, "Look,
look—see this? This is literature! It's every bit as good as
the literature you've been teaching us! When I grow up, this is
what I want to do for a living."

CBR: Which of your series are you personally most satisfied
with?

GAIMAN: I have individual favorites. One of my favorites is
Miracleman #19, the Andy Warhol issue. And Miracleman #22, which
ties earlier episodes together. I love Sandman #14,
"Midsummer's Night Dream," because was such hard work.
And I'm really proud of it. I'm proud of the fact you can't see
me with my desk, covered with tiny pieces of paper, trying to
keep the action backstage, frontstage, back of the audience,
front of the audience, and the play, all moving along in three
dimensions, and getting it all down saying everything I have to
say. I'm terribly proud of Signal to Noise.

CBR: Any major encounters with censorship along the way?

GAIMAN: No, not really. I had one script about a serial killer
in Sandman where I was asked to change a McDonald's into a Burger
Joint. Things like that. I was told I couldn't use the word
"masturbation" in my serial killer script. Having said
that, I could probably use the term today. But I have been
relatively uncensored in the industry. There *was* one story I
decided not to write. It would have been sort of a little
compliment to "Dream of a Thousand Cats." It would have
been a story about fetal dreams. It would have made a lovely
story. Had it only been published in England, where abortion is
not really an issue, I would have quite happily written it with
no problems. But I chose not to write it, because I suddenly
thought there would be some fifteen-year-old girl who's been
raped and wants an abortion. And somebody would come up to her
and show that story, and say, "How can you even think of
getting an abortion after you read that story?" So I decided
no to write it, which in a way tears me apart. I know I had
enough people come up to me and say Sandman #8 got them over the
death of their child, or the death of a best friend or something
like that. But you know that your stories *can* change people's
minds, and hearts. So that was case I decided to censor myself; I
didn't want to be responsible for the consequences of a living
soul. But for the most part the censors leave me alone, for
reasons not adequately explained.