Contents:
I - Annual Potentate's Apology
II - Interview with Neil
III - Neil's Keynote Speech at ProCon, April, 1997
IV - Odd Bits of Stuff
 I - Annual Potentate's Apology |
Yes, it's been a year. No, you haven't missed any issues.
There aren't any graphics in this issue (cool fonts, though, eh?) That's cause there's so much text.
On with the Interview
| II - Interview with Neil |
Magian Line: So... the first question, as always, is what have you been up to in the last year?
Neil Gaiman: Ohhhh.... Of course, I promised that we'd do the interview in the flesh, and I was thinking it'll be fun - that was without being in the middle of a signing tour, which means that with the exception of a couple of hours every day, right now I'm completely brain dead, so I will of course forget things. Let's see, what have I written in the last year? Well, I wrote the American version of Neverwhere.
ML: And that's different from the British version?
NG: Yep. It's about 10,000 words longer.
ML: In order to explain how undergrounds go in London?
NG: A lot of it - more of it is on painting the background of the City of London.
ML: Because people from England already know...
NG: They know what Oxford Street is. If I mentioned a building or landmark in the English book, I assumed that people knew what it was. And then there were things that my American editor wanted changed, wanted rewritten, wanted added... I definitely, where Neverwhere was concerned, had a tendency to simply let the characters... I would never stop and say "this is what this character is thinking, this is what is going on in this character's head at this point." She really wanted some of that. So I put some of that in there.
ML: Do you think Americans need more of that?
NG: I have no idea! To be honest, Avon books paid an obscene amount of money for Neverwhere. Not just a lot, but a BIG lot. Having paid this amount, I rather felt that they were entitled to - it was sort of like buying a coat, they were entitled to say "yes, can we have the sleeves a little shorter, please?" And there were things that I really really like in the American version that simply aren't in the English version - I got to go in and do a scene where you get to learn a bit more about Door's early life, you get to learn some stuff about Hunter. There's a really cool paragraph about the Marquis, which explains some stuff. And it was nice going through and doing it as a second draft! On the other hand, there are a couple of sequences that I miss, and definitely a few lines that I miss. The trouble is, when we get into sort of horse trading, I get to say "OK, I'll let you take out this bit, but I want to keep this bit."
ML: I heard that the American version has maps of the Tube on the endpapers. That's a real neat idea.
NG: Exactly. I feel that the American version - the idea is really that we wanted a book that someone in a small town in the middle of America could pick up and read and not go "I don't get it."
ML: Very sensible.
NG: I'm very happy to have that. So, I did that.
ML: How did the British version do? Apparently, it must be quite popular, considering they wanted a fully ... You know, if it was just an "eh" sort of book, they'd probably sell a few over here, but they wouldn't pay an obscene amount of money for the American version, right? So it must have done pretty well.
NG: Pretty much. And it's doing very very well internationally. It's currently a minor German best-seller.
ML: It's been translated in all these other languages?
NG: Oh yes - it comes out in French and Dutch and then Swedish towards the end of this year.
ML: How successfully do you think that's gonna work?
NG: Well, we're already getting fan mail coming in from Germany, which is interesting - including a request from some gentleman to turn Neverwhere into a rock opera.
ML: Oh dear! the mind does boggle! Well, stagecrafting it would probably be loads of fun. And you wouldn't have to have the cold mud! You could have warm mud!
NG: What's actually fun right now - and one thing that I've now learned... I sort of knew this, but I've really really learned it this year, this has been my year for really being taught hard that Hollywood is an imaginary place. Whether or not this will ever happen, I don't know, but right now a producer who I like and want to work with a lot, and a director who's a young director who I like a lot - I've seen his stuff and I think it's really interesting - both want to do Neverwhere together, with division of a major studio who just wants to do it. This is a bit complicated now by the fact that now the book has come out and other people at other studios have read it, and they are apparently trying to get the rights, too. These are not rights that I control.
ML: OH! so the fact that you like this one team...
NG: So that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be the ones to get it. We're also trying to find out exactly what rights... Crucial Films has various rights, but various lawyers are trying to figure out exactly what rights the BBC does and doesn't have. I thought that by passing on Neverwhere Series 2 they'd actually given up all rights, but apparently there are some rights they have, which would include probably the American TV rights, which would have to be negotiated through them.
ML: But the film rights not necessarily?
NG: No, the film rights wouldn't be, but if you wanted to buy the film rights, if you were an American company, one of the things you want is TV spin-off rights. So, it's just trying to sort all that kind of thing out is a bit of a bitch. Unfortunately, none of this stuff is stuff that I have control over. The rights that I have control over are the book rights. But it's quite possible that there may be a cool movie version of Neverwhere at some point. And it's just as possible there won't!
ML: It could wind up being a nicer project than all the Sandman movie shenanigans that have been going on for years and years...
NG: Sandman currently - it's not that NOTHING good has come out of the Sandman movie, so far, in fact I've made some good friends out of the Sandman movie. All of whom have been fired from the Sandman movie! I'm very good friends now with Roger Avery, who was ex-director of the Sandman movie, wrote a draft of the screenplay and then was fired essentially for wanting to keep it faithful to the comic, and for showing them some Jan Svenkmajer, a Czechoslovakian animator's work. He wanted the stuff in the Dreaming to be like that, and they fired him. However, Roger and I actually had fun, recently - I was getting intensely frustrated lately with the standard Hollywood ways of doing things, which is that you have to write these outlines, and then they sit on people's desks, and then people sort of get to ask you to rewrite things and outlines and ... The trouble with an outline, as far as I'm concerned, an outline is a statement that says "this is the kind of thing we're doing", and you leave it at that. As far as THEY were concerned, the outline is a sort of thing that you can infinitely tinker with. I was amazed at how much time and energy get used up in the outline/treatment process. So Roger phoned me up recently, and said that he's always wanted to direct Beowulf, and do a very faithful Beowulf. He had some ideas, and we were chatting about it, and suddenly he phoned me up and said "Look, do you have any time?"
ML: HA!
NG: I said "No, not right now, time is sort of at a premium." He said "Well, what time DO you have?" and I said "Well, the only time that I'm not actually on tour or here or doing this or whatever, is this week." And I gave him a week about three weeks back. And he said "OK, let's go to Mexico. I've got a friend with a house, there are people there who will feed us and stuff, we don't have to go out, we don't have to do anything except write. Let's go and write Beowulf." So we did. It was great - get up every morning, eat breakfast, write Beowulf. Have lunch, play a game of pool, write Beowulf. Round about 3 o'clock we'd get really hot, climb in the pool, talk about Beowulf, get out of the pool, play a game of pool... We were both equally bad at pool, which was so great. Just as either of us would actually start getting good at pool, it would last for about 5 minutes and we'd forget how to do it again. We'd spend 45 minutes chasing a black ball around the table until you'd pot your white and lose... It was great. At the end of it - in fact, one day early, we walked away with a finished script.
ML: And you managed to do all of this without mead!
NG: No mead. We got to WRITE lots and lots of drunken things. My theory is that you can write things murderous and drunken sex and stuff without actually having to DO them while you're sitting at the typewriter. So, we wrote Beowulf, and it's lots of fun, and Roger now has the hard bit, which is to go out and try and finance it. What is fun is that at least at this point you can show people the script and say "this is the script" and they can either say "yes we like it" or "no we don't".
ML: One way or another, the work is done, and if somehow he failed to get it appropriately financed, it would still exist so you could do SOMETHING with it.
NG: Well yes, exactly. It's there and it's done, as opposed to treatments, where at the end of the day once you've written a treatment, all you have is a treatment. Also, the lovely thing about writing Beowulf like that was that it played to my strength, which very often is turning the page and finding out what happens. We had the ancient saga as a template, and used that a lot - actually amazingly faithful - and sort of filled out the story a bit more. We do things like 3/4 of the way through the story you were suddenly 50 years and he's now an old man, and you get the last part of the story, and it's lovely. So, I did that. Let's see... Lots of the things that are coming up for publication are poems.
ML: And they're going to be hither and yon, or collected?
NG: Errrhhh... I suspect that I may well wind up collecting a lot of them, if Avon don't mind. I have to really talk this through with my editor and find out how many of them I'm allowed to put in their short story collection that Avon will be doing, because that's the next book. In a year's time, Avon will be doing a short story collection. We'll collect together everything that we can think of that I'm still happy with. We're letting Angels and Visitations go out of print.
ML: So is much of that material going to reappear in this?
NG: No, probably three or four stories. Maybe a little bit more, but I'd say that a good half of Angels and Visitations will be forever out of print now. The whole idea with Angels and Visitations was to do a bit to celebrate 10 years as a professional writer and it was a small press book from a small press, in hardcover.. Small press books, in America, if you do a small press short story collection, and you sell 1,000 copies, you are doing very, very well. It's really, really good. A John Updike story collection is likely to sell about 10,000 copies. That's doing very well, too. Angels and Visitations has now done 23,000 copies, through a small bookshop in Minneapolis. Greg's not sure if he wants to do another printing or not - this was going to be the last, the 4th printing. I've always said that we have a 25,000 print run cap, we would never go above that, that would be that. But he's receiving lots and lots of orders now for it, from places like Amazon.com - now that all of the people in America who have discovered that you can just go online and punch up books...
ML: It's possible, too, that you'll get a whole new audience with Neverwhere that will then go back and want to find all the other stuff. You have your established Sandman audience, but now you'll get a whole new crop of people...
NG: So anyway, we may go back and do a fifth printing of just a couple of thousands, really just for Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com and those people. But then, that will be that completely.
ML: So the stuff that would be in this next book would be things that you've written but we haven't seen? Or are they like collected from all these other little...
NG: All the other littles. They'd be, you know... Snow, Glass, Apples, The Price - oh, The Price is a short story I wrote which is in a Dreamhaven booklet. We're doing one of the "a percentage of the price - actually 10% of the cover cost - goes to the Legal Defense Fund" - actually, there's more because then Greg winds up giving them hundreds of copies, and we sign them and they sell them... That is called "On Cats and Dogs" and contains a short story called The Price, which is a very nearly true story about me and cats, and it contains a story called Only the End of the World Again, which was printed in a Fedogan and Bremer anthology called "Shadows Over Innsmuth", in hardback. That's the only place that's ever been. So we're reprinting those in one volume, and having done two, I sort of am feeling that it's time for me to retire from the whole Legal Defense Fund donating chapbook thing, and I hear Harlan Ellison wants to do one. I believe Greg is in discussion with Stephen King about doing one! He says that there's not that many authors around who can shift 5,000 - the whole thing only works if you can do 5,000, if you can actually have a limited edition of things and know that they'll be gone in a year. So I'm going to assemble stuff and collect stuff, and I'm not sure how much of the poetry is going to be collected and assembled in it. I promised that I will write three short stories that are completely new and original for the anthology.
ML: So that's in about a year, eh? Do you have a tentative title yet?
NG: "Smoke and Mirrors" I wanted an "and" in there because I thought it would be nice - "Angels and Visitations" would be happy if it knew that it had a reincarnated version.
ML: So every two or three years, you'll have to have to do an anthology with a paired title like that.
NG: I'd be perfectly happy with every five to ten years, actually! Let's see... I wrote some short stories that nobody's seen yet, that haven't come out. One in some collection about gargoyles, called "How Do You Think It Feels?" which I think I may wind up doing a full rewrite on before it turns up in the book. I was sort of satisfied with it at the time it was written, and I knew it wasn't quite right when it was done - it was trying to write a story from the point of view of somebody who is essentially heartless, has no more emotions. He is writing about a love affair and the events that rendered him devoid of emotion, and the problem is that of necessity the affair that he's writing about comes across amazingly flat. And you can't ooomph it up without getting into emotions again. So, figure that one out... And a weird little story called "Tastings" which I'm going to do the last draft on this week and get off, which is for a Datlow and Windling anthology of erotic fantasy. It's actually a story that I've been working on now for about five or six years. It's not amazingly good, it's not like I've been working on it for five or six years polishing it like a jewel. In fact, I started it five or six years ago for an anthology by Ellen Datlow - these are all for Ellen Datlow, it's always been Ellen's story. She just asked me in about 1991 for a story for her erotic horror anthology - which came out, and I even had a piece in the sequel. So originally it was for that, but it wasn't finished, in fact it was barely started. Then it was going to be for the sequel, then it was going to be for an erotic science fiction thing, and then... The trouble with this story is that I'm not very good at writing sex, I discovered. I get very embarrassed. So I'd write some of the story, and then I'd get embarrassed, and then I'd stop. And then six or eight months later I'd write another three or four paragraphs, until I got embarrassed, and then I'd ! stop. So this is why this story actually took five years to write - it's not five years worth of outstanding brilliance, it's just five years worth of complete and utter embarrassment. I wanted to do a story about people having sex, and actually all of the story basically takes place while they're having sex, and the conversations and so forth...
ML: Kind of like "Justine", eh?
NG: Well.... Yes, except it's nowhere near as boring as de Sade... The problem with de Sade is that you're always very aware that these are being written by somebody who is basically writing down masturbatory fantasies, and they do that thing that bad masturbatory fantasies do, of just being the same every time with just a tiny detail changed. It's that Kama Sutra thing of position 86 the same as position 87 except with the little finger on the right hand extended.
ML: So.. is it still an erotic horror story, or did it mutate along with the project?
NG: Well, it kept evolving, and the plot would keep changing a little bit at a time because every now and then Ellen would say "Well, you missed THAT project, but now I'm doing -" I think at one time she was talking about doing an anthology of revenge stories.
ML: Erotic revenge stories, or just revenge?
NG: I think it was just revenge, but I had this one on the go, so revenge elements began creeping into it at that point. When you're writing a story a paragraph or two a year for five years... Finally, one day I got down and finished it, and sent it off to her, and she accepted it, and Terri Windling, her co-editor, accepted it. And then I had to say "But I'm not sure I even want it published, cause it's too embarrassing!"
ML: Ha! That was going to be my next question, are you still embarrassed over it.
NG: The problem is, just as you finally get to the point... I had this marvelous period of time, somewhere around the age of 24 or 25, when I actually got to the point where - HA! - I didn't care if my parents metaphorically were looking over my shoulder or not, or even going "they'll probably read this one - well hell, I don't care", and I didn't. But just at the point where you've REALLY exorcised your parents, you turn around.. And your CHILDREN are now old enough to read everything... So you get embarrassed all over again.
ML: I'm glad I stuck to music reviewing, ha! So hey - do you have any more comic book projects? I guess Stardust is almost actually imminent.
NG: Stardust is one I've actually been really writing a lot this year. To be honest, right now, rather than being on tour as I am, and traveling round and writing Stardust, I'd rather be at home writing Stardust.
ML: You never really did enjoy these tours.
NG: I didn't, but I'm enjoying them less. One reason why I'm trying to do readings and a question and answer at every tour stop is that it at least gives me something to do! I was starting to feel like a rock musician would feel, going on tour and going to record shops to sign CDs for people. No no no, you go out there and you PLAY every night! And while at least I cannot write every night, I thought I least I should do something. So that's why I've been reading.
ML: That is a bit weird - the job is not supposed to be ENTIRELY PR.
NG: Anyway, I would much rather be at home writing right now. Stardust is coming along great. I've done some short stories in comics. I did one in the Spirit thing, which young Eddie Campbell drew. Young Eddie... I call him that but he's older than me.
ML: Is that out yet and I just missed it, or what?
NG: No, Kitchen Sink are having problems.
ML: Oh dear, yes they are, I heard.
NG: I saw from something somebody posted on Compuserve that they may be doing alright and haven't had to close their doors yet, so that's a relief.
ML: It's sort of touch and go, I guess. What a pity.
NG: So, the Spirit story if ever it comes out... I really just wanted to contrast - like one of those essays, "Contrast and compare the world of the Spirit with the world of the plethora of sub-Quentin-Tarantino clones that turned up over the last few years."
ML: That actually isn't a comparison I wouldn't have immediately thought of making!
NG: I just thought I'd do one of those, so it was fun - I got to make up a high-concept Tarantino-esque thriller. The "high concept" is that you have three criminals who call themselves Mr. Snap, Mr. Crackle and Mr. Pop.
ML: Oh dear...
NG: Mr. Snap is actually secretly a girl, and Mr. Crackle is actually a cop... and it's all being written by this rather sad little screen writer in a hotel in Southern California.
ML: On a signing tour?
NG: Nope! He's just writing... Meanwhile, you have a Spirit adventure going on, called "The Return of Mink Stole". It's great fun - it's very weird art. The art does not look like it was done by the inestimable Mr. Campbell. It looks like it was maybe done by - some panels look like Lou Fine... But it's very obviously - talking to Eddie, what happened was he got stagefright. The realization that Will Eisner was going to be looking at this... So I'd written it expecting scratchy little Eddie Campbell people, and what I got back was something completely different. Very lovely, though. I wrote an 8-page story for Dave McKean for a book called "Dust Covers", which is the collection of Sandman covers. That's going to be coming out at the end of the year, it's a big pretty book, oversized.
ML: So they're actually larger than the original covers?
NG: Yes, and all the royalties go to Dave.
ML: Nice!
NG: Well, he's the only person that doesn't get royalties on the Sandman books, he just gets some flat reprint rate for the use of all his covers through the books, but he doesn't get actual royalties. He's always been very well paid for designing the books and so forth, but I always felt, and he always felt that it was a bit unfair. So I donated my share of the royalties to him. And I wrote him a story for it, an 8-page story, which is kind of a little memoir, slightly fictional memoir. Bits of it are fictional, bits of it are true. We wrote the commentary on the various pictures.
ML: So he discusses what the heck he was thinking of at the time, and you...
NG: And very often he'd forgotten things and I'd remembered them, and sometimes I'd forgotten things and he'd remembered them, so we both sort of went off independently and wrote about the creation of the different covers, and anecdotes connected with covers. So that will be fun.
ML: And that's a hardcover, coffee-table type book?
NG: Big, hardcover, coffee-table thing. Which DC kept postponing and putting off the schedule, because they were scared that retailers wouldn't like it or wouldn't want it, and eventually the retailers started telling them that they really did want this book.
ML: Seems like it would do well in real bookstores, as well as comic places.
NG: I don't think it would ever get sold into real bookstores, any more than the Sandman hardcovers.
ML: Really? They really didn't? I've seen them in loads of real bookstores!
NG: You'll see the Sandman paperbacks in real bookstores. But Sandman hardcovers almost never get into real bookstores.
ML: So they're a specialty thing for the real hard-core fans?
NG: Well... No, it's just DC's policy - actually, it's not DC's policy, it's the policy of Bruce Bristow, the head of their marketing department - is that he will only print enough hardcovers for the initial order. And they will never ever ever go back to print. But what actually happens is that the Science Fiction Book Club keeps all these books - like Season of Mists and everything - in hardcover, in print, so when people want them, instead of buying a $30 book at their local comic book store, they join the Science Fiction Book Club, and get them as their five sign-up books, and get all the Sandman hardcovers for $12 or whatever.
ML: They'll keep selling for ages and ages. I did a little websurfing to bookstores - although I'm still a little leery of ordering BOOKS from the Web....
NG: Oh, I've been doing it. It's wonderful.
ML: They have TONS of stuff - I couldn't believe this one place, I looked under "Neil Gaiman" and it scrolled for like 10 screens. The only thing it didn't have - it even had the Duran Duran book!
NG: That's Amazon.com - they don't actually HAVE it. The trick is, what Amazon.com does ... I think between them and Barnes and Noble, there's a little bit of dick-waving about who has more millions of books listed, insofar as Amazon.com will stick things like Duran Duran hardcover, of which as far as I know 200 copies were printed for libraries in 1984 and the publisher went bankrupt shortly thereafter and so on and so forth, and they've got this stuff up on their page as one of their books, so they can say "Yes, We Have Ten Million Books On Our Database", and the fact of the matter is that you can't get it from them. I actually ordered the Duran Duran book from them, thinking "Great! I don't have copies, I'd love a copy!" So the months have gone by, and there is still no sight of it...
ML: I was gonna put my little order in, and then I thought better of it, and now I'm glad because you should get the first copy, for sure.
NG: Well, I think I was in the line ahead of you, Sadie, so feel free to order...
ML: Heh! Well, it DOES say "Hard to find"...
NG: What they mean is "We know this book exists. If at some point somebody sends us a list of books they have that they want to sell, and it's on there..."
ML: Somebody was inquiring about "Ghastly Beyond Belief" the other day, too - that wasn't on the list, I was shocked.
NG: Probably because it never officially came out in America.
ML: That would be why a lot of people have never heard of it, too, I guess.
NG: Mm hm. "Ghastly Beyond Belief" was published in England in 1985, secretly remaindered by Arrow into Australia -
ML: Which is where I got it, through a friend.
NG: Anyone who got copies in the last 5 years got them from Australia. Which I actually think is really, really tacky of a publisher, to do something like that. Contractually, they're met to let us know. I would really have liked some copies of "Ghastly Beyond Belief" - there were people I could have given them to who would have been really happy about it. But instead, they secretly remaindered them into Australia without telling me or Kim.
ML: That's not very nice!
NG: I discovered it when I went on tour in Australia and everybody had a copy - it's like "how did you guys get this?" "Ah, y'know, mate! The Five For A Dollar Shop!"
ML: Oh god! How rude! Ha! Surely they were at least $1.95! So, are you going to keep doing novels and screenplays and such?
NG: I want to keep doing everything! The trouble is that so much right now is in this sort of weird, amorphous, just-taking-shape thing. There's a project that I'm meant to be doing with David Lynch, for example. Whether it's going to be a radio thing, and audio project of some kind, available as real audio through the Web, or whether we'll say "oh screw it" and do it as a TV one-shot, or as a movie - I don't know. But we have these characters and we have a story, and it's stuff we've been working on together. And it's very, very strange.
ML: No! I cannot imagine how you two could have come up with something strange!
NG: I LIKE him, he's VERY funny. You talk to him, and suddenly you understand everything about David Lynch films and TV shows and stuff, because he'll be sort of like going on completely normally, and then [David Lynch impersonation] "OK, Neil, and then I think, OK, so we're halfway through the film, and then suddenly I think we should move to somewhere like Germany, and follow around these people we've never seen before, and then when we finally go back to the people that we had at the beginning, we pull back, and they're on the moon." OK. So, it's my job to make that work. But no - I'm looking forward to it, it'll be fun. What else... A lot of things are in that kind of state, they're floating there amorphously.
I have to start the novel very soon - the big one that I'm committed to do. There's a lot of people who would like me to write a lot more comics right there, and my attitude, and the thing that I keep repeating, is that I want to stop doing comics for a while! because I love doing comics.
I want to continue loving doing comics. There are too many people I have met out there for whom it turned one day from a calling into a job. I like having left while it was still a calling, while I still love it. And doing things tangential to comics, because I think if I'd HAD to keep doing comics... I think one morning I would have gotten up and hated them.
ML: This is a pretty bad time to HAVE to do comics, too! What with what's happening in the industry, you could wind up very, very depressed if it was your full-time job. Do you think the industry is likely to turn around, so that it's likely to actually be FUN to work in the industry? Right now, people are so damn miserable!
NG: They are, aren't they. It is weird. I don't know. As I think I said to you in our last interview, I feel very much like the guy who told everybody back in 1913 or whenever it was - "Guys, I'm going to be riding the Titanic OUT with you for the first 60 miles, but then I've got a friend to come and airlift me off, cause I've got an appointment, if that's alright..." As the helicopter takes off, you hear this large crunching noise and the deck tilts... It certainly feels a bit like that, in terms of - well, it was alright when I was there. The said thing is, I gave them a speech in April of 1993, at the height of the boom, where I got to actually play Cassandra and stand up there and say "this is what is going to happen in the future", and unfortunately I called it completely correctly.
ML: Do you think there IS a future? Will we get it together or keep muddling along?
NG: I think muddling along will probably occur. I think that the problem that I do see, that right now is a real problem for comics - and this is said with no.... [sighs] Back when there was Diamond and there was Capitol, and you had two distributors, both Diamond and Capitol had their frustrating things. Both of them had their things they did that were their own idiosyncrasies, and their own weirdnesses, that were frustrating. Some people liked Diamond's weirdnesses and some people liked Capitol's weirdnesses, and some of us liked the fact that there were both of them, because their weirdnesses tended to cancel each other out. Capitol had some strong points that Diamond didn't have, and vice versa. Now that it's just Diamond, the whole shape and face of the industry is essentially become Diamond-driven, and the entire comics industry is taking on Diamond's foibles. There are weird things going on - I'm not just talking about Diamond accidentally sending the entire West Coast Californian shipment of comics to Germany for two weeks running. Which they did... But I'm just talking about the things that they do that have always been frustrating, but that was ok because they weren't the only game in down, but now they ARE the only game in town. I DON'T think that's good for the industry.
ML: It's a pity, because now more than ever I see a wide range of really interesting independent stuff available. The publishers are so wary of doing anything, so all these creative people have to go someplace else, and there's a lot of really GOOD independent and self-published stuff.
NG: There is.
ML: Of course, distributing it...
NG: Distributing it is hard, and a lot of these guys are having real problems selling stuff. And you're getting really really good independent and self-published stuff which is stopping because people have to earn a living. Rick Veitch isn't doing Rarebit Fiends anymore. Which is a bad thing because it was the coolest comic!
ML: That's right, I didn't see him at APE Con, and usually he has a table right up there at the front...
NG: Eddie Campbell says that every month he sells 500 less issues of Bacchus. The time will come soon when he's going to have to stop, he won't be selling enough to break even.
ML: I keep hoping that a "Punk Rock" sort of event will happen, but it just doesn't seem to be within this industry's realm of capabilities to pull a do-it-yourself...
NG: Well, actually, I think it HAS happened a couple of times, but Punk Rock worked - whenever it has worked - it has been rapidly incorporated into the mainstream. In fact, as Johnny Rotten said - or John Lydon, rather - in his autobiography, said "We knew that we weren't going to sign to a small label, because you get not enough happening, trying to pin-prick your way in from outside. Instead we were going to sign with a major." Which is what they did, in fact they got signed by three majors. It all became very rapidly incorporated into the mainstream, but that also worked in music because you had a thriving and vigorous mainstream to transplant the new seed into.
ML: And it invigorated the mainstream even more by having all this interesting stuff come into it.. Plus, we did a lot of punk singles that would be distributed much in the same vein as tape trading, at a very grassroots level, and there just doesn't seem to be a grassroots level in comics.
NG: No, I think there is - it's the minicomics. A lot of the cheaper, more self-published independents. Cheaper in the sense of people just did them on their own and give them out to friends and stuff like that. There's a lot of really lovely stuff out there. And a lot of stuff gets the Xeric Foundation grants and so forth. But, as I see it, there is a very real problem, too, which is just that the quantity of comic book shops has dropped by 50% in the last couple of years.
ML: Yeah - there are ALWAYS record stores!
NG: There were 7,000-odd comic shops, and there are not 3,000-odd comic shops. These days, selling 3000 copies of an independent is really good. The only thing that puzzles me is that sales of the Sandman trade paperbacks have not dropped. I get the royalties, and they come in every quarter, and I look at the numbers, and here we are in our tenth printings and our fifth printings and our fourth printings and they've sold out and they've gone back to press again and again... They're still out there.
ML: That's great - that's not only nice for you, getting your nice little royalty checks every quarter, but it's probably new comic readers. I doubt very much that it's just comic readers who just managed to overlook Sandman all this time, I think these are probably people getting their new comic books, so that's great for the rest of us!
NG: I don't know where they're coming from! I think it does prove my original theory, which is that readers don't go away, collectors do.
ML: Ha! Sounds good to me!
NG: Which was why we always tried to do a comic that was for readers, not for collectors.
ML: Good for you!
NG: Thank you, thank you...
ML: I'm glad you're there, Neil!
NG: Um.. well, what else? Me and Alan Moore are talking about doing a strange project together, which is a sort of magazine for the millennium. Sort of an artistic statement, possibly an annual magazine, that we want to edit and write stuff for.
ML: Like what? What sort of content?
NG: Like a gorgeous, artistic, wonderful thing, that whoever actually winds up publishing it will probably lose their shirts on... So neither Alan or I are going to publish it... Actually, we're having talks right now with people who may want to do it.
ML: So you're going to invite other people - not just you two...
NG: Oh sure! Lots of art, lots of photography, and essays and short stories...
ML: Ah, so sort of like the Yellow Book for our fin de siecle.
NG: Exactly! that's the plan.
ML: I'll buy it!
NG: It's one of those things that we both want to do because we both would like to read it, and nobody else is doing it, so...
ML: Good. Well, that's the best reason for doing something, cause you want it to exist.
NG: Exactly. I'm getting a lot of people on the signing tour asking for another CD. Which surprised me, because I sort of thought that Warning: Contains Language would be enough for anybody.
ML: Are you looking forward to doing something like that? Do you have more material you want to read, or was it a pain?
NG: Oh, it was fun, actually, it was all completely fun. I think the one that it wasn't fun for was Adam Stempel, producing it. Working it, taking out every breath, every page turning.
ML: It doesn't seem to have hurt him too much.
NG: He's survived - well, I don't know, now that I think about it, the hair is thinning, and he had a full head of hair before he did Warning: Contains Language.
ML: He worries me, you know - will he still be the same Adam Stempel, now that he's going to stop drinking?
NG: We can but find out.
ML: So, would that be with Dreamhaven again?
NG: Probably. Probably a single CD this time instead of a double CD. So many people were complaining that the last one was expensive, and we were going "Yeah, but that's what it costs to do a small run of a double CD, sorry!" Nobody was walking around making anything resembling a profit on that thing! So I think if we did another one, it would be a single CD. Um.. the goldfish book came out, "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish".
ML: So I have seen.
NG: And I'm very happy about it, because it seems to be going off into places that... I love the fact that people are buying it who are people that have never heard of me or Dave.
ML: So it's actually sitting in the Childrens' Books sections?
NG: Some places. Some places it's an art book, some places it's fiction and fantasy, some places it's with the graphic novels and some it's for children.
ML: Huh! Keep em confused!
NG: A few places sensibly avoided the whole issue by putting them up at the front.
ML: And how has the tour been going? You were telling me about the Charlotte reading.
NG: It's doing fine.. I'm... It's tiring. It also gets more tiring, I think partly because we get older, partly because I've been doing major signing tours of America and of Europe - actually, if you exclude England, I've been doing major signing tours for 8 years. Including England, we're up at about 11 years. There's not exactly a lot of excitement there. Which is why I'm doing readings and answering questions and stuff, just to get some sort of...
ML: So the Comic Book Defense Fund part was completely different from the signing/book tour part? It just happened at the same time?
NG: Exactly. It was just because I was going to Charlotte for the CBLDF, and a local book store got onto Avon and said please please please please please will Neil come and sign for us here in Raleigh, or Durham, or wherever it was, so I did.
ML: And it took off from there. That is quite a bit of that sort of appearance in one lump.
NG: We're planning on doing a big Comic Book Legal Defense Fund tour. Which I am looking forward to, doing readings.
ML: Hibbs was mentioning something about this. He wanted to get Tori to come and back you up!
NG: Yeah... I don't know - we keep going backwards and forwards on that. My point of view on this, that I keep pointing out to Brian, I said "Great! You get Tori on as support, she comes on, plays her piano for 25 minutes, you have 4000 people out there, she goes off, I come on and start reading, to 300 rapt and happy people, and 3700 people who after a couple of minutes begin banging the seats and shouting 'TO-RI! TO-RI! TO-RI!'..."
ML: That IS rather a nightmarish thought, yes...
NG: That is was I'm fairly convinced will happen, and then Brian rings me up and he says "That will never happen, your fans won't mind, they'll love it, and we'll make sure it's understood that Tori's just doing a little introduction, and it'll be great, and..."
ML: Have you actually asked Tori what she thinks about this?
NG: I'm going to ring her up and talk to her about it.
ML: Well, it WOULD be a lot more fun than... I mean, I love the guys that did the long speeches, the last time when you played here, but...
NG: There will not be any more - each of the guys that did the long speeches, and Paul Mavrides NEEDED to do that long speech because we were fighting for him, and Dave Sim really wanted to do the introduction to the tour in San Francisco, and Susan wanted to do her little "This is what the Legal Defense Fund thing is", and everybody said "Oh yeah, our speeches time out at 10 minutes"... Except when they each got there and gauged them, they timed out at 20 minutes...
ML: Oh, Paul's was more like 45! They were good speeches, but they weren't really what people had come for.
NG: Yeah. So what we've been doing on the last few has been really - I've actually enjoyed this most of all - Susan gets up there and talks for a minute and a half about the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and then Mike Diana comes on, and Mike Diana talks for 10 minutes just about who he is and what his legal case is. And that is so cool, because when you actually meet Mike, you discover that he is a shy, cool, nice kid, who... It's one thing to have this idea of this scary, creepy, weird person called Mike Diana who's going to go to prison for the general good, it's another to meet Mike and find out that - yeah, he's going to prison for drawing.
ML: That's such a mind-boggling case, too - when I tell people about it, when I'm working at the CBLDF booth, and give them the 30 second rundown of the Mike Diana case, they're like "not in AMERICA!" So seeing a Nice Guy, saying 'Yes, this is happening to ME, in AMERICA"...
NG: Exactly - and Mike is not a practiced public speaker, so he gets up there and he just reads it out and says this is what happens to him, and people come over with wallets open. This is a very good thing, because that's the money that the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund needs to continue to operate and continue to pay lawyer's fees. It's paid out 2 or 3 hundred grand to lawyers in the last couple of years. That money has to come from somewhere! So anyway, next year we're going to do this tour. I think Brian Hibbs feels that it will also be very much easier to get media interest, looking at trying to use celebrities in each town.
ML: You could probably charge a bit more for tickets, as well.
NG: Well, we looking at lots of other things for the Legal Defense Fund, including more than just Neil going round and collecting all the money every year. Which is what's currently been happening, I get to go round, do readings, make money... We're looking at things like - I say "we", it's actually "they"! I'm not the board or anything like that, I'm not even a member! In fact, I'm merely a private individual - they want to get people actually to join the Legal Defense Fund, as members. Paying an annual fee, getting the newsletter, getting people a little more involved. Sort of like being a member of the ACLU. Which would give them a more predictable annual fund to draw on, which I think would be a really good idea. We have to stop, I have to go upstairs and phone a newspaper for an interview.
ML: Til next time, then!
| III - Neil's Keynote Speech at ProCon, April, 1997 |
[Neil gave an ever-so-nice keynote address at ProCon this Spring, so I asked him if I could put it in Magian Line. He's ever so obliging...]
To begin with, a confession. I hate writing speeches. When I was asked to give this one, my immediate thought was that maybe I could give a speech I'd already written, and no-one would notice. Unfortunately I've only ever written one speech before, which I gave in the Spring of 1993, and which compared the 'investors boom' then going on with the seventeenth century Dutch Tulip Craze and warned an audience of assembled retailers that if this kept on there was going to be trouble.
And while events unfortunately proved me right, I really didn't think that I'd get away with repeating that speech today.
When I was originally asked to come here and deliver the keynote address, I declined. I said I'd feel embarrassed and out of place. Right now -- for the last 15 months, in fact, since I finished writing Sandman, with the exception of a couple of short stories, I've stopped writing comics.
I told the person who phoned me that I'd feel like the kind of girl who dropped out of high school under dubious circumstances and was now returning, in a pink cadillac, with big blonde hair and far too much make up, to give a graduating speech on the value of sticking to it and hard work.
And the person on the phone -- it was Larry Marder -- said, "Well, these are weird times. A lot of comics pros are looking at the world outside comics and wondering if that's where they'll be making their living in a year or so. You could at least tell them what's waiting for them out there."
And I thought, "Well, he's got a point."
And, after I put down the phone, I thought well, it's also the prerogative of the elderly and the retired to share their knowledge, to drive from the back seat, and to offer unsolicited advice. "To," as a poet put it, "being good for nothing else, be wise". And there are certainly a number of things I've learned in the decade I was actively working in comics.
So that's what we're going to talk about. Other media, and comics.
Many of you have done comics for longer than I have, and have experiences or knowledge that contradict mine. Many of you will have toiled in the vinyards beyond comics and may have had diametrically opposite experiences to mine.
So these thoughts are being offered as one set of opinions.
I began doing comics, continued doing comics, and finished doing comics for the wrong reason. It's a foolish reason, and a strange one.
I didn't do comics to have a career, nor to make money, nor to support my family. I certainly didn't do comics for awards or for notoriety.
I began doing comics because it fulfilled some kind of childhood dream and because it was truly the most exciting and delightful thing I could imagine anyone doing. I continued doing comics because it was fun, and because I discovered I loved the medium, and because I felt like I was getting to do things that were completely new, that, good or bad, no-one had done before. And I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.
When I began writing Sandman, it would take me a couple of weeks to write a script, leaving me with two weeks each month to do other things. As time went by I got slower and slower, until a script was taking me about 6 weeks a month to write. Which didn't leave much time for other things.
So there were a number of projects I wanted to do that I simply didn't get the chance to. Which meant that once Sandman was done I could throw myself into them headfirst.
My experiences with the world outside comics so far since finishing Sandman -- I've written a best-selling novel and a children's book, written and co-created a not wholly satisfactory six-part BBC TV series, and had lunch with an enormous number of people from Hollywood. I wrote the British Radio 3 adaptation of SIGNAL TO NOISE, currently nominated for a Sony Award as best radio drama. I'm currently working on a bunch of stuff, including a couple of movies, an animated TV series I've been approached about based on my short fiction and a radio drama series with David Lynch.
Bear in mind that these are not the opinions of someone who feels that any medium is more legitimate than any other, or that film or print somehow sanctifies or confers respectability on something otherwise grubby or unreal.
One of the delights of comics is that the price of ink and paper remain pretty constant, no matter what you're drawing. Film and television are expensive media. Cheap productions cost unimaginable amounts of money.
Comics, on the other hand, are cheap. If you have an idea for a comic, the odds are good that someone will publish it. And if they won't and you believe in it strongly, why, then publish it yourself. You may not get rich, but you will get read.
I have a friend who had an idea for a comic, and self-published it for a while, and certainly didn't lose any money, and had, at the end, a dozen or so issues of his comic, which he was fairly proud of. Then he decided to try the same tack with film-making, with a cast of enthusiastic amateurs, borrowed money, and a willingness to max out his credit cards. At the point where the production crumbled, he had 11 minutes of film in the can and was forced to sell his house to stave off utter ruin.
Comics are unlikely to do that to you.
Film is expensive. This is why it's such a crazy medium.
I remember an afternoon in London several years ago. I was staying in a friend's flat, overlooking a canal. I was writing two different things that afternoon. One was a scene in which the Endless made a man out of clay, building him up from twigs and mud, and breathing life into him, before sending him to a hidden room in a monstrous underground necropolis. That was for Sandman. The other scene had an encounter, underneath a bridge in the fog, on a mud-bank, between three travellers and some monks, during the course of which one of the travellers was pushed into the mud.
A few days later I had Michael Zulli's pencils of the comics sequence pinned up on the wall, and they were exactly what I'd imagined, and just what I'd hoped for and called for in the script.
A year later I found myself sitting in a freezing cellar, watching a dozen actors being frozen stiff, breathing thick smoke, while about fifty crew, including make-up people, lighting, electricians and so on, stood around shivering watching the actors doing take after take of getting knocked down into the mud.
I didn't have my bridge. It wasn't really the scene I'd had in my head, and mostly I just felt guilty that real people were being put to so much trouble for something that had seemed like a good idea in a warm room a year before.
In comics you are unlikely to have to lose a character half-way through the comic because he broke his leg. You won't lose locations the night before you're meant to be shooting. You won't hand in a 24 page script, and then be told that the artist drew it as a 37 page script, so 13 pages have randomly been removed.
Most important, in comics there's one of you, or at most two or three people, with one vision. As a writer I think I'd been spoiled by the 'because I say so' factor. The point I realised that wasn't there in the TV show was the point I looked at the costume sketches and realised that they bore no relation to what was called for in the script. I think one reason one becomes a writer may well be to have a certain amount of control over a vision, and unless you are working with a director whose vision parallels yours, then the odds are probably against you.
And bear in mind that the TV series is from a show that everyone was at least on the same page about. The Sandmuan film, which I am happily not involved with, has gone through 8 script drafts, 3 writers, and a director so far. And I heard the other day that they're about to hire a new writer with instructions to make it a romance.
After Neverwhere was done, I told my agent to pull out of another TV series I was creating for the UK, because I didn't want to do it unless I had more control than you get as a writer: in fantasy, the tone of voice, the look and feel, the way something is shot and edited, is vital, and I wanted to be able to be able to be in charge of that.
I've agreed to work on the Death movie with the carrot being dangled in front of me that I could direct it. And we'll see if that happens, and if I'm a good director or not when the time comes.
So that's my wisdom on movies.
Books are a bit more straightforward.
A few years ago, when I still hung out on bulletin boards, I was on Compuserve's comics forum, and I read a message by a writer of comics announcing petulantly that he was going to go and write real prose books because he wanted 'an audience'.
I told him his audience writing comics was much higher than he would have, barring some exceptional circumstances, for a first novel in prose. He took this as an attack on his as-yet-unproven abilities as a writer of prose, which it wasn't meant to be. It was simply a flat statement that in those days -- and even in these dark days -- any fairly healthy comic sells in numbers that most prose authors would be very happy to get.
For me, though, comics are much more interesting than prose, at least as a creator. One has greater control of how the information is received in comics than you do in prose -- whether it's keeping control of the reader's eye to stop them skipping ahead, or simply of making sure that they see the same character in their heads that you do in yours.
And comics have the joy that you never see in prose: the joy of being able to enjoy your own stuff. I can't enjoy a prose story I wrote, but I can enjoy what Dave McKean or Charles Vess or Jay Muth or P. Craig Russell does to one of my stories.
Prose has its advantages. You can give it to relatives without worrying about hearing 'Oh.... I don't... read comics... dear,'. And you can buy it in airport bookstores. And book companies are more prone to advertise outside the comics world than comics publishers are. But for anyone who's doing this because they want to collaborate, comics are more fun.
Radio -- I love radio drama. For a writer it's strangely close to comics: in one medium you're telling a story with pictures, in the other you're writing for everything but pictures. It's close to your vision, it's cheap, it's easy, there isn't any radio drama in america and the only way I could afford to do it regularly in england is by sending the children out to dance for pennies on the streets. It's also not a medium I particularly recommend for artists who don't write.
So those are my words of wisdom on the media outside comics.
Now for my decades of wisdom on the world inside comics.
So here, in no particular order are the things I've learned.
1) Big is not necessarily bad. Small is not necessarily good.
Comics creators are an individualistic, unique and bolshy lot. A punch line of a comic I wrote once was 'try getting a thousand cats to agree on anything at the same time,' and cats are a pushover compared to comics creators. They do not organise, do not trust organisations. It's a wonder as many of you are here, as are here. Certainly every shade of opinion, politics and belief is represented here.
It used to be, it may still be, an item of belief in comics that all organisations are inherently dodgy. And that, where companies are concerned, smaller is inherently better. Independence, however that's defined, is vital.
And if you're a Dave Sim or a Jeff Smith, your own publisher and a fine artist and writer, with complete control over your own destiny, then you have independence, or as much independence as the market will allow you.
Corporations are huge, slow, stupid lumbering things with brains in their tails. This may be true. but they do appear capable of learning, and changing.
You are no more likely to get screwed over by a huge company than you are by a small one. I'm not saying you won't get screwed over. I'm saying that there is no moral imperative towards smaller companies not screwing you.
This really is something it took me ages to learn. I kept doing projects or books for small, more independent companies because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because I was convinced that, in my case, DC Comics was a monolithic and ultimately evil organisation that was just waiting for me to lower my guard before they screwed me like they screwed Siegel and Shuster.
It didn't happen. DC were easily the most amenable to reason, accessible, and financially reliable of all the publishers I've dealt with. Which is not to say there was not and sometimes still is a great deal of frustration in dealing with some of the departments at DC. But is to say that their royalty statements arrive on time, are comprehensible, and if one notices something bizarre, one is encouraged to phone the accounting department who will either explain to you what they're doing, or apologise for having messed up and fix it.
For this, one can forgive many things.
In retrospect my one regret with Eclipse was that I didn't audit their accounts years before they went under. Their figures made no sense, and they would only send out royalties if threatened. On some level I knew that there had to be fraud of some kind going on, but Eclipse was only caught when Toren Smith moved his comics from Eclipse to Dark Horse, and his royalties shot up, despite the fact the deal was the same and the sales were constant.
I honestly do not believe there is any moral superiority to a large corporation or to one man working out of his kitchen. What matters is answerability, and honesty, and, above all, competence.
2) Learn how to say no.
This is still the one I have the hardest time with. I think it's part of the freelance mentality: we are so used to hustling, to going out and desperately peddling our skills, hoping that someone will be impressed enough by our skills or moved to raw pity enough by our plight to give us work, that we learn to say yes to everything.
I remember, as a starving freelance writer, in the early 80s, I would blithely proclaim competence in anything, if there was a cheque attached. Which meant I often found myself utterly out of my depth, interviewing the head of NASA or, for one very odd week, editing 'Fitness' magazine -- I don't remember, but I imagine that the phone call for that would have gone something along the lines of
'Neil, can you edit a magazine?'
'Can I edit a magazine?'
'Silly question. Well, do you know anything about Fitness'
'Do I know about Fitness?' (Sort of implication there that anything I didn't know about gyms and leotards and suchlike probably wasn't worth knowing. Note the way I didn't say "Well, I went into the gym a couple of times when I was at school. And I saw Pumping Iron 2 -- The Women". This was because I was a hungry freelance writer, and I said 'Yes' a lot.)
As a comics professional, it's too easy to say yes.
Most of the things I've done that, in retrospect were astonishingly stupid ideas (as, often, my friends were ready to point out immediately) I did because someone asked me to do something, and, hell, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Next thing you know there are unreadable, even offensive comics with your name on that you never wrote in the world. Or whatever.
I learned early on that most of the people at the top of their professions -- and I'm not talking about comics here, I'm talking about everything -- were the nicest people, easy to deal with, and with little side to them. And I also learned that the people who were most insistent on having VIP status, on making a loud noise about everything -- the kind of people who would actually say things like "Do you know who I am?" were the second division talents, the ones who hadn't made it, the ones who never would.
It took me longer to learn that you can say 'no'. And it's an easy thing to say. It helps define your boundaries.
3) Get it in writing. Or put it in writing.
This is important. And on those few times I haven't put something in writing, I've regretted it. Right now I'm locked in a fairly heated and as yet unresolved situation with one publisher about payments for characters, for toys, spin-off comics, and other use of a bunch of characters I made up for this publisher. And part of our dispute is over verbal agreements made on the phone four years ago. If we'd put it in writing then -- I'm not even talking about contracts, I'm talking about my writing down what was said and faxing him a copy with a 'just to confirm this was what we said', life would be easier now.
4) Everything is negotiable.
If someone sends you a contract, whether you are dealing with it yourself or getting someone else -- an attorney or agent or someone -- to vet your contracts, remember that absolutely everything is negotiable. In the early days I used to think that contracts were a take it or leave it proposition. And they aren't.
And, by the same token, contracts are renegotiable, something that I first discovered after the first year of Sandman. I wanted a creator credit and a creator share of the character, which, according to DC's original 'take it or leave it' contract, was entirely theirs. And I wrote a long, sensible, perfectly friendly letter to Paul Levitz explaining why this was a good idea, demonstrating that the Sandman character that I'd created was no more the Simon and Kirby Sandman than it was the Lee and Ditko Sandman. And, after some to-ing and fro-ing, a new contract was issued, giving me a share of the character.
One reason I did it this way was that I'd observed over the previous few years that when people gave DC Comics ultimata, whether DC were right or wrong, they would become inflexible. Corporate history perhaps: Siegel and Shuster wanted the rights to Superman back, and were shafted, and left with only the rights to Superboy. They went back for another legal go-around, and lost even that. Meanwhile Bob Kane was 'taken care of'.
Do not be afraid to negotiate. And if you have people whose job it is to negotiate on your behalf don't be afraid to use them. Nor to accept input. You are not looking a gift horse in the mouth, nor is the contract going to go away because you got someone to look it over.
This is speaking as someone who has been, from time to time, screwed over by overlooked clauses in otherwise pretty good contracts, and who has, from time to time, been astonished by what, in a contract, the other party let slide.
5) Trust your obsessions.
I remember Alan Moore in the late 1980s telling me about a documentary he'd seen on TV about Jack the Ripper. And then, over the course of the next few months, telling me about Jack the Ripper books he'd read. By the point where he was asking me to go and find rare and forgotten biographies of possible Ripper suspects at the British Museum, I thought it quite possible that a Jack the Ripper comic would be in the offing. 'From Hell' didn't start with Alan going "I wonder what I'll write about today." It started as an obsession.
Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally.
People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I'm reading nothing but english 17th century metaphysical verse. And I know it'll show up somewhere -- whether I'll name a character after one of those poets, or use that time period, or use the poetry, I have no idea. But I know one day it'll be there waiting for me.
You don't always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where they rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable.
Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must.
Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.
A footnote to this, for writers:
When I was working with new artists on Sandman the first question I would ask was 'What kind of stuff do you want to draw?' The second was often 'What don't you like to draw?' I found both of these pieces of information astonishingly useful, and often very surprising.
Play to an artist's strengths, it makes you look good. Play to your own strengths if you're an artist -- but don't relax into schtick or into the dozen things that you do.
6) Don't stop learning.
It's too easy to achieve a level of competence in your field, whatever it is, and to stop there.
Competence is one thing, but writers and artists are like sharks: when we stop moving we die. (I got that piece of information from reading JAWS at a young age. I have no idea whether it's true that sharks die when they stop, or go into reverse, but I now believe it utterly, just as I know that double-bass music signals a shark attack.)
I tend to think of technique as the kind of gardening tools one keeps in the potting shed (an english expression that has no equivalent that I know of) at the bottom of the garden, grabbing a garden fork, or a hoe, or one of those metal things you find hanging from a hook that the previous owner left behind and no-one ever quite knows what to do with.
At Will Eisner's 80th birthday bash several months ago, in Florida, I was most impressed by some lithographs Will had done recently, because these were the first lithographs he'd done since art college, over 60 years earlier, and he thought it was a technique he should master.
You never know what tool you'll need. Every now and then I'll set myself writing exercises -- types of formal verse, or styles from other times and other places. Sometimes I surprise myself, and wind up with something wonderful. Sometimes I wind up with something that leaves me hoping I don't die before I get a chance to clean out that directory, because if it were published posthumously, it'd kill me. But either way I have, literally, learned something.
As an artist, study other artists to see what they do, then look at life and see how it does something.
As a writer, read other writers, good writers, even writers who don't write the kind of stuff you like, and see how they do what they do. And then forget about fiction, and forget about comics, and read everything else. Learn.
7) Be you. Don't try to be someone else more commercial. Don't try to be that other guy.
This is about art. It may be about commerce too, but for all our description of ourselves as an industry, we're also an art-form. We may have come into the field because of talent, but we're also here because we're artists. We are creators. When we begin, separately or together, there's a blank piece of paper. When we are done, we are giving people dreams and magic and journeys into minds and lives that they have never lived. And we must not forget that.
I don't want to sound like an inspirational speaker here. 'Be you. Be the best you that you can be.' But this is really important. It's something that we mostly lose track of when we start, because when we start in comics we're kids, and we have no idea who we are or what our voices are, as artists or as writers.
Young writers want to be Rob Leifeld, or Bernie Wrightson, or Frank Miller, just as young writers want to be Alan Moore, or Chris Claremont or, well, Frank Miller. You've seen their portfolios. You've read the scripts.
We all swipe when we start. We trace, we copy, we emulate. But the most important thing is to get to the place where you're telling your own stories, painting your own pictures, doing the stuff that no-one else could have done, but you.
Dave McKean, when he was much younger, as a recent art-school graduate, took his portfolio to New York, and showed it to the head of an advertising agency. The guy looked at one of Dave's paintings -- "That's a really good Bob Peake" he said. "But why would I want to hire you? If I have something I want done like that, I phone Bob Peake."
You may be able to draw kind of like Rob Leifeld, but the day may come, may have already come, when no-one wants a bargain basement Rob Leifeld clone any more. Learn to draw like you.
And, as a writer, or as a storyteller, try to tell the stories that only you can tell. Try to tell the stories that you cannot help telling, the stories you would be telling yourself if you had no audience to listen. The ones that reveal a little too much about you to the world.
It's the point I think of in writing as walking naked down the street: it has nothing to do with style, or with genre, it has to do with honesty. Honesty to yourself and to whatever you're doing.
Don't worry about trying to develop a style. Style is what you can't help doing. If you write enough, or draw enough, you'll have a style, whether you want it or not.
Don't worry about whether you're 'commercial'. Tell your own stories, draw your own pictures. Let other people follow you.
As a corollory to that, let me say something else.
In this strange, small market we're in, no-one knows anything. All bets are off. The kind of comics which were sure-fire commercial certainties five years ago are as likely to tank as they are to succeed, while the kind of oddball cult comics which, five years ago, would never have registered on anyone's radar, are now solid commercial successes, or as solid as anything is these strange days.
If you believe in it, do it. If there's a comic or a project you've always wanted to do, go out there and give it a try. If you fail, you'll have given it a shot. If you succeed, then you succeeded with what you wanted to do.
8) And last of all, know when to leave the stage.
I thank you.
| IV - Odd Bits of Stuff |
Neil Gaiman was presented in March with a GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Award for 'positive portrayals of Gay and Lesbian characters' in Sandman. "It's the only time I've ever had a room of people cheer the correct pronunciation of my name-- all of them undoubtedly convinced it was some kind of political statement" - From Ansible 118, forwarded by Jim Wheelock
Review
My name is Scott Conner and I thought you might like to hear about Neil's recent CBLDF benefit reading in Charlotte, NC.
What can I say other than it was damned excellent! ; )
Neil is a very entertaining reader; he read "Chivalry", "Being an Experiment...", and the Santa Claus poem (the title escapes me) from Angels & Visitations, the entire body of "I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish", another poem from the Tombs anthology, and a new story from the recently published chapbook he did through Dream Haven in conjunction with Lisa Snellings titled "On Cats and Dogs"; this last story was quite stunning coming straight from the horse's mouth as it were.
In addition to multiple signings at the CBLDF booth, he and Charles Vess also had a presentation panel introducing their upcoming Stardust series.
It's not every day that Neil shows you art from your favorite artist that hasn't been seen by the pubic yet.
Needless to say, all this made for quite a memorable weekend....
Another Review
Neverwhere is a tale about a world beneath London, a world created by award-winning fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. Neil makes the improbable seem perfectly reasonable and the grotesque quite ordinary. It's witty and funny and scary and, for those in the know, contains references to another world created by the same author, that of the Endless from the DC Vertigo Sandman series. For example, there are crows, cuckoos and angels. And that's just for starters. Like Richard Mayhew, the hero, I was at times giddy and vertiginous in this parallel world, where place names quite often have intrinsic meaning, for instance Night's Bridge and Floating Market, and the people are called Door or Hunter or Old Bailey, and that too seems perfectly reasonable. There's a damsel in distress for the hero to rescue, several villains, a dragon called Beast, sentient rats, dungeons and labyrinths, angels and priests and demons. The London Underground is also an integral part of the story. The interplay between Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar is just as strong as that between Crowley and Aziraphale in Good Omens. The British version of Neverwhere is available from Dream Haven for $36.95 plus $5.00 shipping. Don't wait for the "cleaned up" American edition; everything is perfectly understandable, even if it was written by a Brit for a British audience.
--reviewed by Lynne Keith
Neverwhere, the American version, was published in July 1997 by Avon Books. It differs from the BBC version, yet is the same story. Snippets of text have migrated to better advantage, and some points have been expanded and enlarged upon, while extraneous exposition has been expunged elsewhere. The description of London Above from a visitor's perspective, as both the hero, Richard, and the average American reader are, is an early case in point, as is the additional info on, for instance, killer fog. This edition uses slightly different paragraph forms and tenses. The spelling (honour, draughty, encyclopaedic) has been Americanized (honor, drafty, encyclopedic), and the punctuation now follows American convention (double quotes, not single; "Mr." with a period). The map of the London Underground printed on the flyleaf is a bonus for American readers keen to see and identify the wonderful place names Neil sprinkles throughout the novel. Where is Blackfriars? Is there a Knightsbridge? How about Earl's Court, or King's Cross? For Neil, the new edition must have been a wonderful chance to reconsider and rewrite some old bits and enhance others. Either version is. . .
"Very funny.
"Very scary.
"Very weird."
--additional review by Lynne Keith
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