Puck | 
10 24th, 2008| 
The interview touches on the rumours that Neil will adapt the Dr. Strange movie, and the status of Death: The High Cost of Living.
Aug
5
This chat took place on the 30th of October 1998
<Puck> First, I’d like to thank Neil for joining us, and Andy at Avon Books for helping to organize this.
<Puck> First question is from Ehich. Ehich, go ahead.
<Ehich> On the event horizon chat you talked a bit about your interest in finding out the relationship between fairy tales, myths and religion. How do you think that this is related to philosophy? I mean; do you think there is any bridge between Mythos and Logos; litterature and Philosophy? and if so; how do you think this bridge can be explored?
<NGaiman> Ah, right. Let’s start with the small ones… (er, typed with a small amount of irony, that). Honest answer, I don’t know. And as an addendum… I try not to think about it too much. Especially when I’m writing. Mostly what I’m doing is telling stories, which is a strange sort of occupation — it’s part instinct, part craft, part skill and part luck. There are places I sometimes think that it’s wisest not to go… or rather, not to go on purpose. I was fascinated when Zelazny pointed out that the first books of Magic followed the traditional Cambellian Heroes quest pattern, as it was not designed or intended to go that way: it was just where the story went. As a final note on that… I’d hate to pretend to be unconscious of the craft. But when it comes to the relationship between myth and philosophy, hell, I’m still trying to figure out why we need fairy tales.
Aug
5
Most of the creators identified herein as “comic book rebels” have bucked the status quo of how comic books are published and the role creative people are relegated to in the traditional business structure of the industry. Yet Neil Gaiman continues to regularly work with established publishers like DC Comics. How, then, is he “rebel”?
Gaiman was chosen as being representative of a new order of creators. Cosmopolitan and nomadic, they successfully maintain their creative autonomy while demanding the respect of their chosen publishers through a clear sense of who they are, what they are worth, and a canny blend of independence and diplomacy. In short, a creator plying the sharpened skills of both a seasoned professional and the shrewd businessman, able to freely move between all media, and work with any publisher.
Born in 1960 in Portchester, England, and growing up in Sussex, Gaiman left school purposely to become a writer. His first professional work in the early Eighties was as a journalist, meeting and interviewing many authors and cartoonists whose work he admired. Alan Moore showed him the rudiments and structure of how comic scripts were crafted, and in short order he chose to abandon his early company-owned comics to collaborate with artist Dave McKean on their first graphic novel, Violent Cases (Escape, Titan, 1987; reissued in color by Titan/Tundra, 1991).
Aug
5
Straight from AOL, here’s a transcript of Neil’s interview on February uh… 24 (?) 1996. I’ve done a bit of editing to clean it up and boldface the speakers’ names.
OnlineHost:
OnlineHost: *** You are in “The Odeon”. ***
OnlineHost:
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s event with SANDMAN creator NEIL GAIMAN will begin in three minutes.
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s DC COMICS ONLINE event with Sandman creator NEIL GAIMANwill begin in two minutes!
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s event with DEATH creator NEIL GAIMAN will begin momentarily….
DCOMLeib: Welcome to tonight’s VERY special DC COMICS ONLINE EVENT!
DCOMLeib: With me here this evening, making his first DC ONLINE appearance is SANDMAN creator NEIL GAIMAN!
DCOMLeib: The highly anticipated sequel to the DEATH miniseries is on sale now!
DCOMLeib: DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE is its title!
DCOMLeib: Welcome Neil!
NGaiman223: Thanks. Hi. Fire away!
DCOMLeib: Okay…first up….from SHADES30….
Question: Why did you decide to focus on Foxglove and Hazel in the first issue of DEATH: TOYL?
NGaiman223: Because it was their story. Death crops up a bit more in ish 2 an d3.
NGaiman223: but DTOYL is the story ABOUT Foxglove and Hazel. That’s why I focused on them.
Read the rest of this entry »
Aug
5
To The Best Of Our Knowledge, broadcast May 31, 1995
A production of The Ideas Network, University of Wisconsin
INTRODUCTION
Neil Gaiman: I remember when I was about seven, somebody gave me books of American comics. They were just the most wonderful, alien things. Everything about them was strange. I was perfectly willing to believe that America was this country filled with people in strange costumes who hit each other through walls. It seemed every bit as likely as the other odd things in there, like fire hydrants and pizzas and things that we didn’t have in England.
Jim Fleming, ANNOUNCER: Neil Gaiman kept up his childhood fascination with comics by becoming a comic writer. He creates the best-selling adult comic, SANDMAN — definitely not pulp. Open a SANDMAN comic, and it’s full of pictures and word balloons. But start reading along and you enter a somber, mysterious world. It’s the dream world of Morpheus, Prince of Sleep, Gaiman’s leading man. Dressed all in black, with dead-white skin, gaunt body and jet-black spiky hair, he looks nothing like the other flying superheroes. He’s not out to save the world, either. Instead, he haunts his way through tales of myth, history, horror and fantasy. Gaiman has only six more adventures planned for Morpheus, but he told me where they all began.
NG: When I was 15, we had one of those things where you do a battery of tests and then they bring a careers advisor in to talk to you about careers, and the careers advisor said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I want to write American comics.” And there was a very, very, very long pause. And then he said, “Well, how do you go about doing that?” And I said, “Well, you’re the careers advisor, I thought you were gonna tell me.” And there was another really, really, really long pause, and then he looked at me rather desperately and said, “Have you ever thought about accountancy?” And I had to confess …
Aug
5
This file courtesy of Aron Wallaker - wallaker@vnet.ibm.com
August 23/94
The Beguiling presented Neil Gaiman at the Bathurst Street Theatre in an even to raise funds for The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Representatives were on hand from both the Canadian and US branches of the CBLDF distributing information and selling CBLDF merchandise. The evening was split into two segments; in the first Neil read from among his prose works, in the second he answered questions submitted by the audience.
Aug
5
Interview with Neil Gaiman. Conducted October 26, 1989 12:30 am. by Brian Hibbs, Owner of San Francisco’s Comix Experience. Transcribed by Brian Hibbs. Edited by Brian Hibbs, and Neil Gaiman.
Editor’s Spoiler: If some of the questions and answers seem non-linear, please keep in mind this interview began at 12:30 A.M., and didn’t finish until nearly 2 A.M. (Or 11 am in whatever time zone I was on.-NG)
COMIX EXPERIENCE: Let’s start off with an incredibly typical question — the obligatory “Why did you decide to start writing comics?”
NEIL GAIMAN: Because they were there? No. Because I wanted to, because it was a medium that I loved. I’d read comics extensively as a kid, and wanted to write comics as a teenager. I drifted away in the late seventies when there was very little interesting to read. I would occasionally pick up and flip through a comic, then put it back down in disgust. Then one day in early ‘84 (or very late ‘83) I was on Victoria Station in London and they had a pile of comics at the newsagents, including Swamp Thing. It was a title that I had loved as a kid, so I picked it up, thumbed through it, and thought. “‘ang on, this is literate, this is really interesting.” But by this point I had a very deeply ingrained prejudice against comics, and put it back down. Over the next month or so I’d pick up the Swamp Things, flip through them, and put them back down again. And finally, I think it was Swamp Thing #28, I bought it and took it home with me, and that was that. I’d discovered Alan Moore, discovered what he was doing. I realized you could do work in comics that was as every bit as mature, and interesting, and exciting, as anything that was being done in mainstream fiction or in modern horror literature. It was like coming back to an old lover, and discovering that she was still beautiful.
Jul
15
The Nearly Compleat List of Sandman Frequently Asked Questions
(Now in four action packed parts, plus a rather dull table of contents) Compiled and pushed around by Lance Smith (lsmith@cs.umn.edu) with a lot of help from the kind folx in rec.art.comics.misc Disclaimer: The Sandman and its characters are owned by DC Comics. We are not about to do anything to upset them. (They’d squash us like a peanut!) Send questions, comments and condolences to: Lance Smith (maintainer) or Joe Fulgham (HTML Conversion). Special hello to all the people who are reading this in Gopher holes, with the help of faithful Fido, and on the Widespread WorldWideWeb. Wubba Wubba Wubba. Still NOT mentioned by the folx at Wired. Dang. Read the rest of this entry »
Apr
13
Myth, Magic and the Mind of Neil Gaiman on the Wild River Review.
WRR: As time marches on and cultures collide, new cauldrons of belief are stirred and new faith systems arise from reformulated archetypes. In American Gods, you’ve presented the collision of old and new culture in a poignant way where the gods of the old world fight for survival against the deities/archetypes of the modern age. Do you feel that we are at the crossroads of belief?
No, I think that we are in more or less exactly the same place we’ve been for probably the last 250-300 years which is to say that on the one hand you have - you have the forces of science, you have materialism, you have religion as something advanced and for want of a better word, fairly liberal. And you also have fundamentalists, back to the book religion, and all of those things -I think that’s where we still are.
And it’s where we were, where we’ve been at for a long time. I find it bizarre that here we are in 2007 in a world in which there are states in America arguing about, still fighting about whether or not to allow evolution onto their syllabus, it’s bizarre and strange. And I have to say I find it quite reassuring in some ways. At the end of the day, some things really don’t change.
Jun
14
Bruce Moyle sends this along:
I thought I would drop you a line and say we have just put up our podcasting which features a 28 minute interview with Neil from the Sydney Writers Festival. If you post it on your website, please warn your readers that the surrounding content of the podcasting is not children friendly (contains swearing).
