The Dreaming » 2005 » September
Sep 24

From the September 25th San Francisco Chronicle:

Writer Neil Gaiman and director David McKean thought the hardest part of making MirrorMask would be finding the lead.

After all, Helena, the rebellious 15-year-old who anchors their “Wizard of Oz”-by-way-of-Salvador Dali CGI-powered fantasy, appears in virtually every scene. But they found their star, Stephanie Leonidas, on the first day of
casting. Two smooth weeks of location shooting in England were followed by four trouble-free weeks on a blue-screen soundstage.

Only after the actors completed their jobs did the headaches began. McKean and his team of animators and model makers spent 17 months huddled over computers cranking out a digitally generated dreamscape populated with troglodyte man servants, carrot-nosed fish monkeys, blobby black birds and eight-legged eyeballs. The film’s $4 million shoestring budget was supposed to fund just eight months of postproduction. How did McKean feel about the
process?

“It was nearly fatal, actually,” he says dryly, sitting in a conference room at Henson Studios, where a stray octopus tentacle is draped over office cubicles decorated with Muppets and dinosaur sculptures. Short, plump, balding and bearded, McKean is a well-respected illustrator and painter, but he’d never directed a movie until Lisa Henson invited him and Gaiman to create a picture in the tradition of her father Jim Henson’s fantasies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

“Having never done a film before, I had nothing to fall back on,” McKean says. “Some days were just horrible, where I thought, this is actually impossible, we should just admit that, pack up our few remaining marbles and go home.”

One low point came when computers crashed and the “edit line” organizing thousands of carefully composed shots appeared to have been deleted.

“The reason it dragged on so long was just the boring technical rubbish,” McKean says, “just trying to get the bloody images out of the box when the computers refused to play with each other.”

Gaiman, lanky, clean-shaven, and, like McKean, dressed entirely in black, springs into the room, quipping, “We’re really glad we did ‘MirrorMask’ except for the fact that McKean was 6 foot 5 and had a full head of hair when we began.”

Gaiman, well known in comic-book circles for writing the award-winning “Sandman” series in the early ’90s, has collaborated frequently with McKean on graphic novels and children’s books. Their long-standing division of labor blurred when they huddled for three days in the basement of the Henson family house in London to hash out their story line on a giant piece of paper they
covered with notes and doodles. The team eventually cooked up an archetypical story centered on Helena, who escapes into an alternate universe called Dark World after her mother becomes ill and the circus her parents once ran is shut down.

“This is that same sort of story as ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ‘Wizard of Oz,’ ‘Spirited Away,’ ‘Time Bandits,’ ” McKean says. “It’s a known quantity. Once
the spine of the story was there, we were interested in taking something that was immediately familiar and playing with it.”

To create that backdrop to Helena’s quest for the MirrorMask, McKean worked on Dark Land six days a week from 11 in the morning until 6 the next morning, when he’d retire to a flat a few feet from the production’s makeshift London office.

“The thing that kept me going was building that city,” McKean says. “Every morning, when I’d see another sequence come together, I felt like I was exploring the city with Helena.”

McKean’s vision for Dark Land’s gold-burnished, slightly decaying urbanity drew on his fondness for gracefully aging European cities, juxtaposed with bits and pieces of textures both natural and man-made.

“I love walking around places like Venice and Warsaw and Trieste at 3 in the morning,” McKean says. “I’d take photographs of these cities, and they became the buildings in Dark World. You turn a corner and you’re in Trieste, then you look back and you’ve got Warsaw coming. I wanted it to have this strange, fragmentary quality where you never quite settle on one place or one style.

“The sky is made of paper and metal and bits of cloud and bits of type.
It’s like a memory, a color here, a sense there. You build up your impression of the place through collage. I could have happily carried on building my perfect imaginary city forever.”

McKean extended his collage aesthetic to the mythological creatures Helena meets along the way: “The griffin had bony stubs in front but cat legs in the back, and the body was made out of stone but the wings look like they’re made out of thin paper — it’s all over the place.”

And what’s up with the talking human heads he affixed to the felines prowling around town?

“I’ve drawn cats with human faces for a long time,” McKean says. “I’ve
always owned cats, and they always seem to know more about the world than I do. You can look at a cat and there’s a very strange intelligence going on there. I just expect them to start talking to me.”

But it’s Helena’s journey that drives the story, and Gaiman, who lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children, looked no further than his own daughter for inspiration.

“As a parent of a teenage daughter, it’s funny to watch: You start off
with a little girl; she’s lovely and compliant and helpful. And then there’s this moment where all the hormones hit, madness hits, society hits and suddenly, you’ll say, ‘Do you think it’s possibly about time that you think about tidying your room?’ And you get this: ‘It’s like everybody here just wants me to DIE or something!’ And they storm off. I was trying to create a character who had to figure out her identity as a young woman, who couldn’t stay a girl forever, even though there was the desire to retreat into that safe place.”

Although Gaiman hopes MirrorMask attracts an eclectic audience
encompassing art-house fans and fantasy aficionados, he cheerfully acknowledges that MirrorMask is not for everyone.

“For all the nightmares, the best thing about the tiny budget is that you don’t have to make a movie everybody will like,” he says. “A couple of people are going to hate it. Some will think it’s too weird or too soft. And a few people will love it more than they’ve loved anything in the world.”
MirrorMask (PG) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.
–Hugh Hart

Mirrormask is also part of the September 20th Hollywood Reporter feature on the Jim Henson Company at 50. From the Coming Attractions:

MirrorMask: The $4 million feature production finally is being released after having been written in 2002 and enduring about 18 months of postproduction. The visually rich film was co-written by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean and directed by McKean. Gaiman says he was paid so little to write the screenplay that his agent and lawyer couldn’t figure out why he wanted to participate. His answer: “Because it’s cool.”

Sep 24

From the September 24th National Post (with permission of the reviewer – many thanks, Rob!)

With Anansi Boys, his first adult novel in almost five years, Neil Gaiman turns away from the epic, apocalyptic fantasy of American Gods in favour of a smaller story, a frequently humorous, occasionally emotionally fraught family drama about the sons of a God and the trouble they get themselves into.

What, you were expecting Terms of Endearment? This is Neil Gaiman I’m talking about here. He is the former journalist who, in the late 1980s, created The Sandman, a 75-issue comic book series that not only revolutionized and reinvigorated that genre but also stands as one of the great novels of the 20th century. His last adult novel, American Gods, was a groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, and his subsequent children’s novel, Coraline, sold millions of copies while thrilling children and scaring the hell out of the adults around them. Gaiman, a transplanted Englishman now living in Minneapolis with his family, has made a successful career out of defying expectations and channeling a world of myth and tale back into the contemporary consciousness.

Anansi Boys is no exception: A rich repository of myth and story masquerading as a fantasy novel, it defies easy categorization. Gaiman describes the book as “a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic.” It’s as good a description as any, although he notes that it “leaves out the detective bits and much of the food.”

As the novel begins, Charles “Fat Charlie” Nancy, an expatriate American, has made a solid if unremarkable life for himself in London. He’s got a job he dislikes at a second-tier talent agency (run by the oily Grahame Coates, who makes Ricky Gervais’ character from The Office seem well-adjusted) and a sweet fiancee, Rosie, whose mother dislikes him intensely.

When he returns to the United States for his estranged father’s funeral, Charlie makes two discoveries that overturn his life of quiet, if comfortable, desperation. First, he learns from a group of neighbourhood women (who have, it should be noted, secrets of their own) that his father was not just the irritating, too easygoing, feckless figure of his memory (his mother left Mr. Nancy when Charles was a boy and took him to London) but, was, in fact, the human incarnation of Anansi, the Spider God of West African folktale, both trickster and culture hero.

Fat Charlie also learns that he has a brother, Spider, who is his opposite in every way. Confident where Charlie is meek, smooth where Charlie stumbles, gleefully narcissistic where Charlie is insecure, Spider is very much his father’s son. When the brothers meet, they set off a chain reaction of events that includes infidelity, murder, romance, torture, suspenseful chases, jail breaks, bird attacks, awkward dinners, Caribbean cruises and karaoke. Ah, those kids.

While Anansi Boys is tangentially related to American Gods (Mr. Nancy was a minor character in the earlier book), it is a marked departure in tone. Sly and understated, it is a novel rich in Wodehousian humour inflected with just enough Pythonesque bizarreness to remind readers that Gaiman more than held his own with British fantasy humorist Terry Pratchett in their collaborative novel, Good Omens. One can almost picture a young John Cleese as Fat Charlie, deadpanning his way through the increasingly surreal and disturbingly amusing (or is it amusingly disturbing?) events of Anansi Boys.

Gaiman draws that humour, at least in part, from the tone of the original Anansi stories, which he threads through Anansi Boys. These stories depict Anansi as the consummate free-spirited trickster, creating and spreading wisdom almost by accident, as a by-product of his own desires. He is also the father of stories (“All stories are Anansi stories,” Gaiman writes. “Even this one.”) whose words give shape to reality. When he passingly calls his slightly chubby 10-year-old son Fat Charlie, for example, the nickname sticks. In a running gag, Charles Nancy, even as a relatively lean adult, will always be Fat Charlie.

In spite of the humour and the fantastic trappings, Anansi Boys is firmly rooted in the domestic and the realistic. While its characters initially seem broadly drawn, they quickly reveal surprising depths and contradictions that defy our expectations. We expect Spider, for example, to wreak havoc on Fat Charlie’s organized life: We’ve seen this type of character and narrative arc before. What we don’t expect is for Spider to reveal a yearning for the mundanity of Fat Charlie’s life; we don’t expect our trickster figures to want to settle down.

Nor do we expect the psychological depth Gaiman brings to Fat Charlie himself. We’ve seen this sort of milquetoast figure before; we expect his growth but not its particulars. Gaiman routinely defies expectations and Anansi Boys resonates with a human verisimilitude, even when the going gets strange.

Gaiman doesn’t just draw from the folktale tradition, he also returns to it. Anansi Boys can be read, if one so chooses, as a new Anansi tale: the story, beginning with a song, of what happened the time that Anansi died and his boys finally met. Which, I suppose, would make Neil Gaiman a cultural elder, a storyteller whose tales resonate with secrets and deep truths. That sounds about right.
–Robert J. Wiersema

Sep 24

From the September 25th Washington Post:

With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman’s delightful, funny and affecting new novel, the bestselling author has scored the literary equivalent of a hole in one, employing the kind of self-assured storytelling that makes it all look so easy. One can imagine Gaiman’s legion of fans putting down the book and rushing en masse to pen their own riffs on traditional folklore and contemporary pop culture. But it’s hard to imagine anyone topping Anansi Boys, if only because it’s a tall tale to end all tall tales, inspired by the trickiest of all trickster gods, Anansi the Spider, whose origins lie in Ghana.

Tales of the West African deity traveled with slaves to North America, where the clever spider became the anthropomorphic figure known as Aunt Nancy, Anancy, or Bre’r Ananse (a counterpart to Bre’r Rabbit, another African American trickster). In Gaiman’s last full-length novel, American Gods, Anansi made an appearance as the (mostly) human Mr. Nancy. In Anansi Boys, Mr. Nancy cedes center stage to his sons, Fat Charlie and Spider. As the novel’s catchphrase puts it, "God is dead. Meet the kids."

Only Anansi isn’t exactly God; he’s a god, sort of the god next door: "In the old stories, Anansi lives just like you do or I do, in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi’s side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories." Anansi isn’t exactly dead, either, though it’s true that Fat Charlie’s troubles begin when he attends his estranged father’s burial. Fat Charlie "…was only ever fat for a handful of years…But the name Fat Charlie clung to him, like chewing gum to the sole of a tennis shoe." He grew up in Florida but now lives in London, where he is engaged to a nice girl named Rosie, who won’t sleep with him until after they’re married. He works for the loathsome, weaselly Grahame Coats, a talent agent who for years has been fleecing his clients, including the delectable Maeve Livingstone, widow of Morris Livingstone, "once the most famous short Yorkshire comedian in Britain."

Fat Charlie’s pre-marital and career woes work in tandem with his chronic insecurity and a constant, slow-burning sense of embarrassment, guaranteeing that nothing very exciting will ever happen to him — until, that is, he goes to Florida for Mr. Nancy’s funeral.

Afterwards, Charlie visits some family friends, four little old ladies who just happen to be witches. The most formidable of these is Mrs. Dunwiddy: "As a boy, Fat Charlie had imagined Mrs. Dunwiddy in Equatorial Africa, peering disapprovingly through her thick spectacles at the newly-erect hominids. ‘Keep out of my front yard,’ she would tell a recently evolved and rather nervous specimen of Homo habilis , ‘or I going to belt you around your ear-hole, I tell you.’ "

There’s also Mrs. Higgler, who tells Fat Charlie that his father was a god.

” ‘He was not a god. He was my dad.’

” ‘You can be both,’ she said. ‘It happens.’ “

And Mrs. Higgler informs Fat Charlie that, if he wants to see the brother he never knew he had, all he has to do is tell a spider. Charlie, who obviously never learned that it is extremely unwise to scoff at witchy old ladies, returns to London and rescues a spider from his bathtub. Perhaps it was the devil in him. Probably it was the alcohol. ” ‘If you see my brother,’ said Fat Charlie to the spider, ‘tell him he ought to come by and say hello.’ ” And of course, his brother — nicknamed Spider — does just that.

Spider is everything Charlie is not: lucky, debonair, smoothly confident, possessed of their father’s silver tongue and gift for wooing women. Before you can say ouch, Spider has stolen his brother’s job, his fiancée, the best room in Fat Charlie’s house. Rosie doesn’t just tumble into Spider’s arms: She tumbles into bed with him and shows few signs of ever getting out again. Worse, the awful Grahame Coats frames Fat Charlie for embezzlement and has him thrown in jail.

Now, you might think that none of this could possibly be Fat Charlie’s fault. But you would be wrong. He summoned Spider; now he realizes he has to get rid of him. Fat Charlie returns to Florida and the four old ladies, who concoct a ritual that gains him entry to the spirit world where totemic animal-gods dwell.

And that’s when things get really interesting.

Gaiman first came to prominence in the late 1980s with The Sandman, the brilliant series that helped reinvent comics and put graphic novels on the map as Literature with a capital L. His previous full-length books, while wildly popular, are hit-or-miss, hobbled by epic ambitions that can occasionally seem pretentious and clever conceits that overpower other concerns such as characterization and pacing.

In Anansi Boys, he gets it all right: Here, Gaiman’s storytelling instincts are as remarkable and assured as Anansi’s own. As Fat Charlie frantically attempts to undo the damage he’s caused and save his brother Spider, and the world, from the forces he’s unwittingly loosed, Anansi Boys becomes darker, richer, wiser than any of Gaiman’s earlier works.

Here’s old Mr. Nancy, in his ghostly guise: " ‘Now, Anansi stories, they have wit and trickery and wisdom. Now, all over the world, all of the people they aren’t just thinking of hunting and being hunted any more. Now they’re starting to think their way out of problems — sometimes thinking their way into worse problems. They still need to keep their bellies full, but now they’re trying to figure out how to do it without working — and that’s the point where people start using their heads. . . . That’s when they start to make the world.’ "

Lewis Hyde titled his noted study of the trickster mythos Trickster Makes This World . With Anansi Boys , Neil Gaiman has made it his own world, too, and given readers a first-class ticket for the journey there.
–Elizabeth Hand

Sep 23

On alt.fan.neil-gaiman, Maria Siu Lee posted about neilgaiman.co.uk, specifically the Stuff section, which talks about the new UK editions of Anansi Boys, American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Smoke and Mirrors.

Most have additional materials or introductions, reading group discussion questions, such as this one from Stardust, and new interviews, such as this one from Neverwhere.

The website also has the details of the UK book signing tour, a brief FAQ, and a really neat Lenny Henry intro (of sorts), discussing Neil, Anansi Boys, and other such things.

If nothing else, that part is definitely worth the read.

Sep 23

A quick heads up – Neil will be interviewed as part of WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show on Thursday, September 29th at noon EST. It also looks like it will be rebroadcast on Friday, September 30th, at 3:00am EST. The show streams in Windows and MP3, and is archived. It is also broadcast direct to air in New York City on 93.9 FM and 820 AM.

Sep 23

From today’s Rocky Mountain News.

Neil Gaiman’s amazing and expansive American Gods is the only novel ever to win Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards. The book was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and deserved to win that one, as well. Now Gaiman, of Sandman comic-book fame, looks at the old gods from a more humorous viewpoint in Anansi Boys.

Gaiman’s own description of the novel is hard to beat: “It’s a scary, funny sort of a story, which isn’t exactly a thriller, and isn’t really horror, and doesn’t quite qualify as a ghost story (although it has at least one ghost in it) or a romantic comedy (although there are several romances in there, and it’s certainly a comedy, except for the scary bits). If you have to classify it, it’s probably a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-rom- antic-comedy-family-epic, although that leaves out the detective bits and much of the food.”

Fat Charlie Nancy wasn’t fat anymore. He’d been pudgy as a boy, and his father had gifted him with the awful nickname. When Mr. Nancy gave someone a name it stuck, because, in addition to being Charlie’s dad, Mr. Nancy was a god. More specifically, he was Anansi, the trickster god who first brought stories to earth. Sometimes Anansi is a spider, sometimes a man and, sometimes, something in between.

The story opens as Fat Charlie attends his father’s funeral. There, he learns that he has a brother he never knew who inherited all of his father’s magic, and if Charlie ever needs his brother, to tell a spider.

Sure enough, on his return to England, Charlie’s life becomes so complicated that he tells a spider, half in jest – and when the brothers get together, the fun begins.

What follows is Gaiman at his best, with the Anansi boys falling in and out of love, running from the law, visiting with all the old gods their father has tricked in the past and learning what family is all about.

I hope the author’s trophy case has an empty shelf, because, at the end of the year, the awards should come rolling in again.
–Mark Graham

The Rocky Mountain News also has information on the Tattered Cover signing in Denver on September 27th.

Sep 23

From today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Verdict: An offbeat comic fantasy that sings.

If you Google the name Neil, the most popular links are not Armstrong or Young, Simon or Diamond. Most popular is Neil Gaiman, a British fantasy and sci-fi author who has a following of sufficient size that it easily surpasses cult, although it falls short of household-name-dom.

With his shaggy, Byronic good looks, black leather jackets and shades, Gaiman is almost a semi-mythic figure to his fans, even if his nonstop blogging presents him as a very regular guy. So it’s appropriate that his latest novel — which may break through to some of those unaware households — is about mythic figures and regular guys, and how sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which.

His last big book, the Hugo Award-winning American Gods (2001), was a fantasy epic with an intriguing idea: What if the old “small g” gods — Norse, Native American, African — lived in contemporary America, but with diminished powers, in a culture that worships the gods of DSL, SUV and TiVo above all else? Its imagination was impressive, but at times you could hear Gaiman (who’s still best known for his Sandman series of graphic novels) huffing and puffing, trying to bring forth Stephen King’s The Stand.

Anansi Boys takes “a sliver of DNA,” in Gaiman’s words, from American Gods to produce a very different (and in many ways more enjoyable) novel, a welterweight boxer of a book — light on its feet, but capable of delivering a punch. “God is dead. Meet the kids” is the novel’s irreverent marketing slogan. The book is dedicated to, among others, Tex Avery, creator of the wackiest Bugs Bunny cartoons, and P.G. Wodehouse, creator of light British whimsy. Combine those two incompatible forces and you’re in the off-kilter world of Anansi Boys.

In the old legends, Anansi is an African trickster god who usually takes the form of a spider. He’s cunning, lustful and life-affirming, all characteristics of the man named Spider who shows up at Charlie Nancy’s London flat claiming to be his long-lost brother. Charlie, whom everyone calls “Fat Charlie” even though he hasn’t been fat for years, is a human kick-me sign, a sad schlub with a soul-killing accounting job, a fiancee who doesn’t really love him and a future of unmitigated dimness.

Spider shakes up Charlie big-time (and not out of altruism or brotherly love) by connecting him with his heritage — explaining that he is the son of the great and timeless Anansi himself, who here takes the form of a dapper elderly man with a fondness for the ladies, fedoras and karaoke.

Indeed, karaoke plays a rather large role in Anansi Boys. Usually when a character is said to be fond of “wine, women and song,” it’s understood that the song is pretty much an afterthought to the first two, but not here.

“Each person who ever was or will be has a song,” Gaiman writes. “It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their own song. Most of us fear we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or honest, or too odd. So people live their songs instead.”

A righteous policewoman’s song, for example, begins “Evildoers beware!” She is too embarrassed to sing it, but she lives it every day.

Elsewhere in Anansi Boys, Gaiman throws in alternate dimensions, seances, murder and a chilling homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds, all of which feel more in step with what’s expected from a fantasy novel. But it’s the singing that sets this book apart. It’s somewhat out of place, and Gaiman knows it, and so do his characters, and that makes the song even sweeter.
–Phil Kloer

Sep 23

I’m not sure this will post correctly, as I’m not hosting these images, so keep your fingers crossed. If it doesn’t work, blame me – if it does, credit Bill^2, who was smart enough to grab a picture at absolutely the right time. Thanks Bill!
The dual covers for Good Omens

At the Union Square signing, Neil mentioned that Harper Collins would be reprinting Good Omens as in hardcover, with two new covers. While this will probably not be the final images used, we did get a sneak peak at the mock-ups. That’d be Aziraphale on the black cover and Crowley on the white one, unless I’m completely mucking things up. And yes, the subtitle is split over the two covers.

Sep 23

From the September 23rd Associated Press Newswire:

Cooler-than-cool author Neil Gaiman is proof that you’re never cool to your own kids.

Gaiman, 45, dresses in rock-star black, from his boots and pants to his T-shirt and leather jacket. But the best-selling fantasy and graphic-novel writer says his 11-year-old daughter makes him turn off whatever music is playing in his car when he drops her off at school, so he won’t embarrass her.

” `Oh my God, Dad, my friends are coming over, you’re not allowed to speak to them,’ ” Gaiman recounts his daughter saying.

“Nobody’s cool, if you’ve got kids,” adds Gaiman, who also has a 22-year-old son and a 20-year-old daughter.

Gaiman explores the embarrassment parents cause their children in his new book, Anansi Boys. The protagonist, Charles Nancy, dubbed “Fat Charlie” by his joke-loving father, suffers one indignity after another, including his father dying while singing in a karaoke bar.

But that’s just the start of Fat Charlie’s woes. It turns out his father was Anansi, the trickster spider-god of West African folklore, and soon a magical brother Fat Charlie never knew he had turns up to insinuate his way into his drab life.

Anansi Boys hits bookstores just as MirrorMask, a movie written by Gaiman and directed by artist Dave McKean, a longtime Gaiman collaborator, is about to open in limited release Sept. 30.

Taking a break while autographing stacks of his new book in the backroom of DreamHaven Books and Comics in south Minneapolis, Gaiman (pronounced GAYM’n) recalls being embarrassed by his own father as a teenager growing up in England.

Gaiman says his father had gotten bright-yellow European shoes that were “not shaped like any shoes any human being has worn before or since” and looked like “two giant bananas.”

“And I would try and walk far enough away that people would not assume I was with him,” Gaiman says.

Gaiman, who gained fame in the 1990s with the epic Sandman comic-book series, says he wanted to return to the humor of Good Omens, his 1990 novel with Terry Pratchett about a misplaced baby Antichrist.

Since Good Omens appeared 15 years ago, he said, “People by now had begun to conclude that obviously that book must have been written by me writing a very serious book and Terry dancing behind me, scattering jokes like little flowers through the text.”

Anansi Boys packs plenty of absurdist humor, with Fat Charlie turning up late for his father’s funeral and delivering a heartfelt speech to the wrong casket. But there’s also magic, as Fat Charlie is transported to the ends of the world to ask the African gods to rid him of his charismatic brother, Spider, and a gruesome murder.

Gaiman – a tall man with a prominent nose, brown eyes and hints of gray in his shaggy hair – is warm and approachable in person.

Sipping tea, he talks of everything from his homesickness for England (he lives near Minneapolis after moving to America about 12 years ago so his family could be near his wife’s relatives) to writers’ relationships with their fans (he blogs on his Web site, http://www.neilgaiman.com) to his support for the First Amendment Project and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

It was Gaiman’s idea to have authors auction off character’s names in books to raise money for the First Amendment Project. On eBay, Gaiman is auctioning off a name on a tombstone in his next children’s novel. The highest bid as of Wednesday was $2,700.

“I think the First Amendment is probably the most important thing that you have in this country. And I’m always horrified at the cavalier way that you (Americans) treat it,” Gaiman says.

Gaiman resists pigeonholing of his work, pointing out that his 2001 novel American Gods won awards for best science fiction, horror and fantasy.

“It’s just a matter of shelving. It doesn’t mean anything. Genre tags are just telling people in a Barnes and Noble where to go and put books,” he says.

Born in Porchester, on the south coast of England, Gaiman says he spent his life wanting to be a writer. “You get to make up worlds,” he says. “It’s the nearest thing you actually get to playing God and being paid for it.”

Gaiman grew up loving the works of British writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton before moving on to science fiction authors Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and R.A. Lafferty.

“I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I’d go and work my way through the children’s area,” Gaiman recalls.

Although Jewish, Gaiman says he was accepted at a “very high and very strict” Church of England school because of his exam results and interview. He says his schooling “gave me this wonderfully alien point of view on religion.”

“I was top of my class in religious studies. I just didn’t happen to believe it. I just thought these were really, really interesting stories,” he says.

As a freelance book reviewer in his 20s, Gaiman says he “wound up reading all this stuff I never would have read,” which taught him the techniques of mainstream fiction.

“Somebody would say, `Can you do us an article about big, bodice-ripping, blockbusting romance novels?’ And I’d say, `Yes, of course,’ because I was a hungry young journalist,” Gaiman says.

In 1985, Gaiman met Dave McKean, a young art student. They collaborated on a comic called Black Orchid, then did Sandman, with McKean doing the covers and Gaiman the writing. Sandman, with a gloomy central character called Morpheus or Dream, ran 75 issues.

“The best thing I think about me and Dave as a creative team is, we don’t have to work together. We both have individual careers,” says Gaiman, who also has written children’s books such as Coraline illustrated by McKean.

“So whenever we come together to work together it’s because it’s fun and because we want to.”

McKean says he and Gaiman trust each other.

“We’ve grown up together, so there’s no b——- in our relationship. We test each other, and provoke each other into trying new things,” McKean said in an e-mail.

Their latest collaboration is MirrorMask, a live-action and animated film about a 15-year-old girl who runs away from a circus and enters a dream world. Gaiman says Sony Pictures had approached the Jim Henson Co. about producing another film like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth, which were considered flops in the 1980s but had discovered new life on video.

The budget was only $4 million. Gaiman says he offered to write the screenplay at a fraction of his usual quote.

“The deal was very, very simple. From Henson, it was, `We will give you not enough money to make a film with, and in return, we will leave you alone. You get creative control. Give us (a) family fantasy film,’” Gaiman says.

Although MirrorMask has been screened at Sundance and other film festivals, Gaiman realizes it probably will become a cult movie – and he’s “perfectly happy” with that.

“I would feel `MirrorMask’ had done what Dave and I set out to do if in, you know, 20, 30 years time, when I’m a cranky old man, some bright young thing comes up to me and goes, `Oh my God, you made `MirrorMask.’ That was the film that I watched, that was the thing that got me through my 15-year-old angst,’ ” Gaiman says.
–Jeff Baenen

Sep 23

From the September 23, 2005 Christian Science Monitor:

Charlie Nancy is an easily embarrassed London accountant in this sort-of sequel to Gaiman’s “American Gods,” winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Attending his father’s funeral, Charlie discovers two disconcerting facts:
1) His dad was actually Anansi, an African trickster god; and
2) Charlie has a brother, Spider, who’s inherited some of his dad’s powers.
When Spider comes to visit, he proceeds to seduce Charlie’s fiancée and get Charlie fired from his (admittedly horrible) job. Then things start getting out of control. The genre-busting novel is very creative and very funny, two Gaiman specialties. Its sweep is less epic than “American Gods,” but it works well on its own terms. Grade: A-
–Yvonne Zipp

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