DE: Can you talk about your Marvel comics project
[tentatively titled 1602] yet?
NG: I believe I can now say that Andy Kubert is
drawing it. The first script has been written and Andy
has done some amazing character sketches. At this
point I am severely worried that I might not be able
to fit it into the six issue miniseries that was
planned. I begged Marvel to let me make the first
issue long, about 28 pages. I don't think I can fit it
in so it might end up being eight issues.
DE: Marvel won't mind.
NG: I don't think anyone will complain except for
me.
DE: What made you want to work with Andy Kubert?
He's an unusual artist for you to work with.
NG: Part of the fun of working for Marvel is doing
something that feels like a Marvel comic. I hope that
it will be well written, which used to be very rare
with their comics, although recently they've got a lot
of good writers. Both Andy and Adam Kubert have been
asking to work with me since 1991. I keep running into
them at conventions.
It’s fun with this project to do something that
is quintessentially Marvel and quintessentially Neil
Gaiman as well. I also think it’s something no one
has ever done before but still stay true to Marvel.
When I did the Alice Cooper project for
Marvel, which is now in print from Dark Horse, Marvel
had originally published an Alice Cooper comic
when I was a kid, I think it was Marvel Premiere
# 50. I remembered that and I thought it would be
cool. They'll sell them cheap. Then being Marvel they
took this thirty two page comic, put on a card stock
cover and sold it for $5.95, which I thought defeated
the purpose of it. I wanted 12 year-olds to pick it up
like it originally had.
With the new project I'm just having fun. Getting
my whole Stan, Jack and Steve thing going. It's
enormously fun to write.
DE: What made you decide to do the Sandman
epilogue with prose next to Yoshitaka Amano's art?
NG: He didn't want to do comics. It was Jenny Lee
at DC [now Bill Jemas' assistant at Marvel] who
suggested that a 10th anniversary Sandman
poster was needed and she suggested Amano, whose work
I didn't know. She sent me some samples of his stuff
and I thought he would be amazing if she could get
him. He did it and I fell in love with the poster.
Karen Berger [Vice President/Executive Editor of
Vertigo] had been on me to do a tenth anniversary book
of Sandman. I told her that I would do it if I
could make it a Japanese story and if Yoshitaka Amano
would do it.
They came back to me and said that Amano would do
it but he doesn't do comics. He just wants to do an
illustrated book. I said "Okay, let’s do
that."
DE: You and Charles Vess won a World Fantasy Award
for the Sandman story, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Why did the World Fantasy Awards change the rules
after you had won?
BG: [laughs] They changed them the next morning. To
be honest they did it because they were silly. In
1989, John M. Ford had won the World Fantasy Award for
an amazing poem called “Winter Solstice, Camelot
Station.” They didn't look at that and say, "We
have to change the rules so another poem doesn't
win," they said, this is an aberration, an
oddity, it won't happen again. Now with Sandman
they were very worried and confused because when they
spoke to me about the award when the story was
nominated, they asked who does the award go to. I said
that it would go to me and Charlie Vess. They
responded saying that it’s an award for best
writing. But you’re not giving it to the script, you’re
giving it to the comic and the comic is by me and
Charlie Vess. It’s got to be both of us. They
decided that that meant it couldn't happen again.
I thought it was silly because it made the award
look good and diverse. The coolest thing about getting
that award is that I did something that was not done
again until Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan won the
Guardian award in Britain. The point I'm making is
that every other comic book that had won a literary
award had won it in some kind of specially created
category. Everyone knows that Maus won a
Pulitzer but it didn't win the best novel award, which
it should have, but instead it won a special Pulitzer.
Kind of like the Special Olympics.
Watchmen won the Hugo award but it didn't win
the Hugo for best novel, which it should have. It won
the best special Hugo [Watchmen won the Hugo
for the best Other Forms]. It's very bizarre. That was
what I was most proud about.
DE: Is there ever a time when you won't do comics
anymore?
NG: Well, I had stopped for five years but then
returned. I love comics and I love writing comics. In
twenty years of working on them, I've never actually
gotten up in the morning and thought, “I have to
write a comic. How awful.” Which is one reason I
stopped Sandman; I felt it was done. By the
time we were finished we were outselling Superman
and Batman. Could I have kept it going?
Absolutely. But instead I stopped and did other things
and now I'm back writing books like the hardcover Endless
Knights, which should come out at the end of the
year.
DE: What artists are going to appear in it?
NG: Moebius is doing Destiny, P. Craig Russell is
doing Death, Miguelanxo Prado on Dream, Bill
Sienkiewicz on Delirium, and Milo Manara on Desire.
DE: A lot of those guys don't speak English.
NG: I know, it's very peculiar. I write the scripts
and their agents translate them. You have to hope that
the agent is doing a good job.
But I'm really glad I stopped doing comics for a
while. Dave Sim, creator of Cerebus, got very
grumpy with me when I told him I was going to stop
doing comics. He said, oh they never come back as
good, like Barry Windsor Smith, Frank Miller and he
cited a few more people who he felt never came back to
comics after being away for a bit. That may be true,
but on the other hand you come back with your spirit
intact whereas if you keep going you lose it on a
emotional level and people don't think the new stuff
is as good as the old stuff. I'm not doing it for the
money.
DE: What do you think of the writers that you
helped begat like Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan and the
like?
NG: Well, I didn't swing open anything for Peter.
He was doing comics even before me with books like Strange
Days with Brendan McCarthy. I love his work. That
was a pairing I really liked. There was a magic to
Milligan and McCarthy. I think it's the same thing
that happens when I get together with Dave McKean.
Individually we're both good but together we're
something else. I enjoy Garth's work as well.
DE: I remember that a character that seemed similar
to you appeared in a Preacher special: Cassidy,
Blood and Whiskey.
NG: I phoned Steve Dillon about that and asked if
it was meant to be me. Steve and I go back years. He
said, “If it was meant to be you it would have
looked exactly like you and not just somebody in dark
glass and hair.”
I believe him. You don't really take these things
personally.
I thought Preacher was fun and was pleased
it stopped when it did because it took this really
small territory and did it really well. This gross
wonderful lunatic bizarre mad vampire cowboy god
story. Then it ran all the changes it could. I think
going out in a blaze of glory was the right way to go.
I also love Mike Carey's work. He's of the
generation after me, although he's pretty much my age
and influenced by the same books as me. He's quite
brilliant. Lucifer is a book I generally look
forward to.
DE: You're a big fan of Lord of The Rings.
What did you think of the Peter Jackson film?
NG: I thought it was as good as it could have been.
You're looking at a Lord of the Rings movie.
You don't want three films, you want a 25-hour
experience. You want Peter Jackson to be given the
budget he had and give him the amount of time that a
BBC miniseries might have had.
DE: My friends and I have always said the same
thing about doing Watchmen as a BBC miniseries.
NG: Exactly, Lord of the Rings Episode 36:
“More Hobbits.” I watched Lord of the Rings
and enjoyed it to no end but it did have that Classics
Illustrated quality, hitting the action high points.
But for me the best thing about Lord of the Rings
as a film is the fact that Tolkien immediately became
the best selling author of all time again. I love the
fact that there are people who saw the film and
wonders what happens next so they go and get the book.
I do worry that in five years time when I read the
book again some of the pictures that I came up with in
my head will be replaced by images from the movie. I
don't know if I want to replace my Gandalf or my
Saruman. Those characters were close to my images but
with Elrond, I was looking at him and thinking that's
not what Elrond looked like. My Galadriel had dark
hair like it said in the book.
DE: You could pick it apart for hours.
NG: Yes, and that's the fun of it. I thought it was
a tremendous achievement.
I also saw Spider-Man last week, which I
thought was fun and I loved it. It was goofy and in
five years time people are going to watch and say,
explain to me again why this made so much money, the
effects and the script weren't very good. Willem Dafoe
was goofy. It worked because it was the right film for
the right time.
DE: Here's a good question for you. Why did the
Green Goblin have to die from crotch mutilation?
NG: [laughs] Also why did a cop run out and say
"Spider-Man, I have to arrest you."
Spider-Man says he has to save those people and they
argued a bit. There was implication in the rest of the
movie that he was wanted by the police. Did he pick up
a parking ticket? Did he kill some woman's dog? There
must be some scene that was excised.
DE: The crotch thing kind of freaked me out. Every
man in the theater went “ooohhh.”
NG: I loved Willem Dafoe's “oh.”
Click here for the next
page...
NeilGaiman.com
Discuss
this article on the Slush Forums!
