Neil Gaiman in black and white
by blaine kyllo
Publish Date:
6-Oct-2005
Who is Neil Gaiman? He’s a writer, but you’re
forgiven if you didn’t know. “If people know who I am
and what I do, odds are they’ve read something by me and
they liked it,” he suggests. “Occasionally, they’ve read
something by me and they hate it.” Gaiman has been
writing for some time and has tackled pretty much every
mode you can think of. He started off as a journalist,
segued into comics, and after gaining a bit of a
reputation, ended up working in radio plays, television,
film, and, of course, books.
Not many writers can make a decent living at their
profession. Gaiman can, but it wasn’t always thus. “When
you first start out, you have no money, you have no
work, but you have infinite time.” Gaiman is explaining
his triangle philosophy of life, which articulates how
difficult it is to balance the trio of work, money, and
time. “Now I’m in a position where I have as much money
as any human being could sanely want,” he continues.
“The work is anything I want to do as bounded by time.”
I can hear Gaiman italicize the words as he speaks.
He’s on the phone at home in Minneapolis, where he moved
his family years ago. Like other British writers, he is
distinguished by his accent, his vocabulary, and the
cadence and precision of his speech. Although unable to
see Gaiman as we talk, I am confident he is dressed in
black. Dave McKean, friend and frequent Gaiman
collaborator, claimed in an e-mail to the Georgia
Straight that on their first meeting Gaiman was already
wearing black exclusively. He has a bit of a goth
streak. “What I really want is rubbery time.” Gaiman is
trying to find a way to have enough money, work, and
time to satisfy. “So you could lean on it a bit and get
12-day weeks, 48-hour days, and maybe the occasional
700-day year.”
Neil Gaiman Q&A
The Georgia Straight hosted an intimate
afternoon with Neil Gaiman in Vancouver on
October 6 at the Vancouver Public Library. Our
thanks to Neil Gaiman, to HarperCollins, to
White Dwarf Books, and to the Vancouver
International Writers and Readers Festival for
helping to make this happen. If you'd like to
listen to 27 minutes of audience Q&A, click
here. |
At one time, Gaiman’s claim to fame was as the author
of the Sandman comic series. With friends like Alan
Moore and Clive Barker, Gaiman had strong influences and
mentors starting out, and his comics became part of the
canon of the postmodern era of that art form. Gaiman’s
fame these days has a broader base
“There is no distinguishing mark or feature by which
I can identify my fans,” Gaiman says. “A few of them
stand out because they are gorgeous and dressed in
flowing black things and have wonderful hair and makeup
and strange tattoos, but…” Now Gaiman’s fans are as
likely to be schoolteachers and grandmothers as the
goths who discovered him through Sandman.
“In the beginning, comics readers drove the engine,”
Gaiman says. Now the Sandman comics are driven into
reprints by the success of other projects like his
children’s books and his novels American Gods and the
newly released Anansi Boys (William Morrow, $36.95).
Anansi Boys is a witty weave of humour, fantasy, and
family plots. “Its sole purpose is to amuse,” Gaiman
confesses. “I wanted to write a book that would have its
fair share of darkness but would use that darkness as a
condiment.”
American Gods was grey in terms of mood and
atmosphere, in terms of concreteness and intention.
Anansi Boys is contrasty, more black-and-white. In
American Gods, the concepts of good and evil blurred in
the characters. Not so in Anansi Boys, where the good
guys wear black and the bad guys wear white and when you
put them together in a room, complications ensue.
If American Gods was Gaiman’s Bleak House, then what
does that make Anansi Boys? “Probably the Pickwick
Papers, if one’s doing Dickens,” Gaiman muses. The
lightness in Anansi Boys is refreshing, as much of
Gaiman’s earlier work was full of melancholy and
despair. He hasn’t been afraid to get morbid and
transgressive, either. He’s a latent goth, after all,
and was one of the first mainstream comic writers
allowed to deal with seriously adult themes. Where does
that melancholy come from? “Mostly, I think, it comes
from being a human being,” he says. “I’ve never met
anybody who is just one thing. I would hate to create a
world in which there is nothing but despair and
melancholy and bleakness.”
Here’s the thing about Gaiman: he’s a nice guy. He’s
easygoing well-meaning. He genuinely cares about people.
(“He cares about his audience and about his creations,”
McKean writes.) You get the sense that he’d give you the
shirt off his back, as long as you don’t mind wearing
black. In a recent New York visit, Gaiman read at a
benefit event to save the infamous CBGB nightclub, which
has been evicted by its landlord. Gaiman readily becomes
a champion for anti-censorship and free-speech projects.
After participating in a fundraiser for the Comic Book
Legal Defense Fund, Gaiman conceived of a similar
campaign for the First Amendment Project, a nonprofit
organization in the U.S. pledged to “protect and promote
freedom of information, expression, and petition”.
Nineteen authors—ranging from Rick Moody and Dorothy
Allison to John Grisham and Stephen King—auctioned off
an opportunity for a fan to name a character in an
upcoming book. It’s not only a great fundraising idea;
it gives those of us who like to keep score the chance
to see how writers compare with each other. The winning
bid for the King book went for US$25,100, Amy Tan went
for $3,338.88, and Gaiman went for $3,383, which
suggests that although Gaiman isn’t as famous as King,
he’s a little more famous than Tan.
In July, Gaiman zoomed through Southeast Asia on a
tour sponsored by the British Council. More than 3,000
people showed up to see him in Manila on the first day.
King might win a higher price, but there is something
about Gaiman’s work, be it in comics or books, that
crosses cultures. But when asked to talk about what that
something is, rather than mouthing eloquent words about
the nature of myth and Joseph Campbell and the
collective unconscious, Gaiman hesitates, and then
starts talking about how he was one of the first
bloggers and how surprised he was to find that 10,000
people from Singapore were visiting his Web site. “But
Neil,” I ask, “why are there 10,000 Singaporeans coming
to your site?” “I’m not sure why there shouldn’t be,” he
responds.
It’s not that he’s reluctant; I’m not sure he knows
that there is a something. But there must be. Because
Amy Tan wouldn’t draw 3,000 people to a reading in
Manila.
Part of what makes Gaiman unique is indeed his Web
site,
www.neilgaiman.com, where he has been keeping a
daily journal since 2001, before the publication of
American Gods. “I thought it would be interesting to
document the processes behind the scenes of getting a
book published,” he says. “And then by the time I was
done, it was September and I didn’t feel like stopping.
I was enjoying it.”
Another aspect of Gaiman’s repertoire that explains
his popularity is that he works in so many media.
“The thing that keeps me awake and interested,”
Gaiman says, “is I keep going off and doing things I
can’t do very well so that I can find out how they work.
“It’s so much more interesting,” he says. “I love not
having anything to prove. I love not having to compete
with myself.”
After he got good at comics, he decided to try
writing novels, which he obviously has the hang of:
Anansi Boys reads with ease, and you get the sense that
it was with equal ease that Gaiman wrote it. (Readers
agree. It debuted on the most recent New York Times
bestseller list at No. 1.) He started from scratch again
as a children’s author. And now, film.
In September, the Hollywood Reporter claimed that
Gaiman is perhaps “the most-optioned author in Hollywood
who has yet to have any of his work translated to the
big screen”. Virtually everything Gaiman has written has
been optioned, but thus far nothing has actually been
produced.
He’s had more success writing directly for the
screen. He was the only writer other than creator J.
Michael Straczynski to script an episode of Babylon 5 in
its final seasons, and he penned the English-language
script for Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki’s
Princess Mononoke. The Beowulf project he and Roger
Avary have written for director Robert Zemeckis is in
production now. And this fall sees the release of
MirrorMask. Designed and directed by Dave McKean, the
film was written by Gaiman from a story the two crafted
in collaboration. They have a long history together, and
it seems that they matured into the artists they are
today by each other’s side. They met in London in 1986
during the planning of a new comic anthology (a project
that never materialized). Gaiman was a journalist;
McKean was completing art college. They both aspired to
work in comics, ended up working together on Violent
Cases, and haven’t stopped since.
McKean has designed and produced the covers for every
Sandman comic book, and the two have collaborated on a
number of projects, including the graphic novel Signal
to Noise and the children’s books The Wolves in the
Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.
They complement each other in the same way as Bernie and
Elton, George and Gracie, Fred and Ginger, Batman and
Robin. In coming up with the story for MirrorMask,
McKean and Gaiman holed up inside the London flat Jim
Henson used to reside in. Although being surrounded by
Henson memorabilia was inspiring, the project required a
change in how the two were used to working together. In
the past, Gaiman would write something and send it to
McKean. Not this time. “We worked out the story and the
script together,” McKean said in his e-mail, “and this
caused a good deal of friction for the first time in our
working relationship.” At one point, the difference in
creative opinion seemed as though it couldn’t be solved.
“We tossed a coin,” McKean admitted. “We have a couple
of working rules,” he continued. “Whoever cares the
most, wins. And, if it’s the pictures, I have final cut;
if it’s the words, Neil does.”
Gaiman will have no one but himself (and a legion of
fans) to answer to with the film version of Death: The
High Cost of Living, his three-issue comic miniseries.
The project languished at Warner Bros. for a time but
has found a new home at New Line. Gaiman expects to head
into preproduction on the film he has written, and will
also direct, in March.
Who is Neil Gaiman? He’s a writer. And a human being
who is equal parts goth, samaritan, and postmodernist.
His writing, whether in the form of comic, novel, or
script is as much about the nature of stories and
storytellers as about the stories themselves.
The theme Gaiman discovered in the years he was
composing the Sandman stories—which he refined with
projects like Neverwhere and American Gods, and which
resonates clearly in Anansi Boys—is that the stuff of
myth, of story, surrounds us, if we choose to see it.
Neil Gaiman reads
tonight (October 6) at Magee Secondary School (6360
Maple Street), beginning at 7 p.m. For tickets, contact
Ticketmaster (604-280-3311).
