Neil Gaiman Interview

[This interview appeared in Hero Illustrated #4 (October 1993). I have transcribed it verbatim.]

SLEEP OF THE JUST

Neil Gaiman on the act of creating and the perils of fame

by Steven Darnall

     The scene is the 1993 Chicago Comicon, and at the moment, Neil Gaiman is more than the guest of honor; he’s also the prime player in what appears to be a smaller, sweatier version of Beatlemania. As Comicon coordinator Bevin Brown leads us on a beeline through a throng of fans (“Always look straight ahead and never stop moving,” seem to be the orders of the day), Neil– the renowned leather jacket and shades in place– gets that little Beatle-like hop in his step as he reaches the foot of the stairs, and I can’t resist asking: “Did you ever think you’d be the next Paul McCartney?”
     "No,“ he responds. “I just wanted to write and have my writing published. I hoped people would read it. I didn’t expect anything more than that.”
     It’s easy to forget it was only about five years ago when DC Comics unleashed Sandman on the world. Up to that point, Neil Gaiman’s main credit as a writer was on the mysterious but well-received Black Orchid mini-series, and apart from the quality of his writing, he had no reason to believe the fickle comics market would sustain his new baby for more than a year.
     Well, along the way, Sandman caught on big. So big that people who didn’t read comics started reading Sandman, and the buzz made it as far as Rolling Stone. So big that Gaiman began to get more writing assignments, both as a regular and guest scripter (Miracleman, Taboo, Spawn, Secret Origins), which, when seen as a cumulative whole, gave him a reputation as one of the most consistently intelligent and innovative writers in mainstream comics.
     All this has combined to make Neil Gaiman a very big fish in what is still a fairly small pond, and brought to him a fame that could be taken either as flattering and exhilirating, or bewildering and frightening. For the moment, he refers to it simply as “bizarre.”
     Sometime in the next year and a half, Sandman will come to a close, which for many fans, to extend the metaphor, is a little like getting advance news of the Beatles’ breakup. With his newfound adulation approaching critical mass, Gaiman may find himself at a crossroads– in more ways than one.

I guess the first thing I should ask you is what you’re sick of being asked. I want to save some time for both of us.

NEIL: (laughs) “Where do you get your ideas?” That’s the one I’m genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is “I make them up,” they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

Why do you suppose that’s the question that comes up the most?

NEIL: I don’t know. Probably because that’s where the magic is. People seem to think that they can’t come up with ideas, and they’re wrong. They can and they do, but they just think of it as daydreaming, or wasting time. You know, kids get told not to make things up, and I think in my case, nobody told me long enough, or it just didn’t stick.

I’d like to touch upon what you’ve done with Sandman over the last five years. When you went into it, did you know at the start where you’d be at the finish?

NEIL: When I started I plotted the first eight issues of Sandman, and I did that for a fairly specific reason, which was I figured that we wouldn’t sell anything. We’d be a minor critical success, and around about issue 8, I’d get the call from DC saying “We’re not selling anything. We’re a minor critical success. We’ll cancel you at issue 12. That way, you’ve done a full year.” That was what they used to do with things.
     So I plotted through to issue 8 with some ideas of where I wanted to go. When we got to issue 8, and we were surprisingly– at least to me, I don’t know about everyone else– not canceled, that was the point where I basically sat down and figured out what I wanted to do for the rest of it.

Which is going to wrap up in the next year?

NEIL: Year-and-a-half.

There are characters who pop up in the first few issues who show up in later issues– in some cases, much later. Did you know when you created characters in the early issues that you’d be using them down the line?

NEIL: A lot of it is the equivalent of being a juggler who tosses a ball into the air, knowing at one point or another he can retrieve it. Yes, I knew a lot of what I was doing. There were balls that were tossed into the air in the first eight issues that still haven’t come down.

And will they?

NEIL: Yes.

Whose idea was it to give Elvis Costello a cameo appearance in the Doll’s House story? Was that yours, or were you as pleasantly surprised when you saw it as I was?

NEIL: Elvis Costello… Well, let’s put it this way. You remember the title of the very first episode of The Sandman? It was called “The Sleep of The Just” [the title of a song from Elvis’ King Of America].

Well, as I read more of your work, and listen to more of his, it’s obvious that there’s some kind of connection there.

NEIL: I love what Costello does; he’s a genius. And I love what he does to, and with, words. Songs, for me, have to be about something. Probably why I love what Lou Reed does. You get these songs that are sort of three-minute novels.

Have you an opinion on The Juliet Letters?

NEIL: I love it. These horrible little people writing these horrible letters to each other. (laughter)

It’s the sort of thing that made me think “This is like something out of a comic book!”

NEIL: Sure. You could do “Don’t send any money.” [from Juliet’s “This Offer Is Unrepeatable”]

It seems like the term “Gaiman-esque” has become as overused in comics as “Python-esque” or “Fellini-esque.”

NEIL: Let me put it this way: I remember sitting at the Atlanta convention, the Diamond sales thing, last month, listening to various companies announcing what they had coming up, and suddenly I knew how Alan Moore and Frank Miller felt when “grim and gritty” became a catchphrase. (laughs) There’s all this stuff that sounded like me on an off-day.

Have you read any of Marvel’s “Gaiman-esque” titles, such as Morbius or Hellstorm?

NEIL: I don’t read it. Somebody told me that Tom DeFalco had decided that they were going to do Sandman right, so they did Sleepwalker. He said it was all people talking to each other, and they were going to have lots of superhero cameos and fight scenes. I read a couple of issues of Sleepwalker

And that straightened you right out, I’ll bet…

NEIL: I thought “Well, boy, if they’re doing it right, I’m just going to have to keep on doing it wrong, then.”

Your fans are known as serious gift-givers. Jill Thompson says you’ve probably gotten more tapes than any writer at Musician magazine.

NEIL: Most of the tapes I’m given are terrible. You know, Scandanavian death-metal or whatever. You know: [sings in a deep, slightly American voice] “Oh, Morpheus, come down from the sky and give me good dreams CHA-DUNG CHA-DUNG CHA-DUNG” or one guy accompanies himself on a harmonium or whatever.

Well, that last one sounds interesting…

NEIL: It wasn’t. But I still play them. I had a tape given to me in San Diego a couple of years ago by somebody who said “A friend of mine is a huge Sandman fan, she’s just recorded this, she wants you to have it, she talks about you on one of the songs.” About three weeks later I got around to playing it, and it was terrific. Absolutely stunning. There was an address on it, and I wrote to her and said, “I think it’s wonderful, and thank you very much for mentioning me on the song,” and that was Tori Amos, and that was the tape that later became a number of tracks on Little Earthquakes.

That’s one of the nicest stories I’ve heard about a fan ever, I think. Supposedly, Grant Morrison said he’d been getting tapes from fans, and he found it depressing to realize exactly what he’d been inspiring all this time.

NEIL: I don’t. I get lovely fans, and I get inspiring people like Tori. I think it’s wonderful.

One of the things that seems to show up in a lot of your work is the price of being an artist. What do you think that price is?

NEIL: I don’t know, I’m still paying it. What is weird is a lot of it goes back to all that stuff about “Be careful what you wish for; you may get it.” For example: I like comic conventions. I genuinely like comic conventions. I like wandering around from table to table; I like wandering up and down Artist’s Alley and saying “Hello” to people. I like hanging out on the DC booth. I can’t do that anymore. I’d like to, but I can’t. I physically can’t. If I stop moving, somebody will come up to me with something to sign, and if I sign it, somehow it’s like ants sensing sugar. There will be fifty or a hundred people around me and then fire marshals will come and then I’m trapped in a crowd. It’s bizarre.

Then you get blamed for causing a commotion.

NEIL: Yes, and that’s no fun. But yes, one of the things that does obsess me is the cost. You don’t get anything for free, and there is definitely a cost of creation.

But is there a cost beyond merely being in the public eye?

NEIL: Yeah, that’s easy. That’s one of the things you can point to, because it’s an easy thing. Sometimes I think if I were starting all over again, I’d go the Thomas Pynchon route. Create an identity, create a name… I can stand up there in front of a crowd of 500 or 1,000 people and chat to them quite happily and field their questions and do all that kind of stuff, when I know that I’m on. It’s a lot harder when I get recognized in the street, and these days it happens more and more.

In Signal To Noise, the main character is a terminally ill filmmaker who looks back at his work and thinks, “Nothing I ever created was as good as it could have been. Should have been.” None of it came out the way he’d intended it.

NEIL: None of it ever does. One of the things that will occasionally keep me up at night is wondering whether… There is this small, still voice in the back of your head at all times that suggests that possibly the act of making up stories is not a fit occupation for a grown man. It makes you wonder whether or not you’re doing it for a reason. Whether that reason is of any worth. Then, occasionally, people will come up to you and say, “Sandman #8 got me through the death of my best friend,” or “Through the crib death of my baby,” or they’ll tell you about what an issue of Sandman did to their lives. And at that point, it does sort of become worthwhile.
     But on the whole, it’s just you at home, trying to tell stories nobody’s ever done before. And I’ll see fan mail that says “Oh, you haven’t done anything as good as ‘Blah’.” “Blah” is always something I did five years ago: Great, thank you. Most of what I want to try to do is continue to go places with fiction that I’ve never gone before, and tell stories I’ve never told before, and one of the problems you rapidly discover about fans is what fans want is the last thing they liked. They want more of that.

If your most recent Sandman story had been “24 hours,” they’d happily go for more of that.

NEIL: They’d like “48 Hours,” followed by “72 Hours,” followed by “A Week of Horrible Maiming.” And the point where I had to come up against that was at the end of Sandman 1-8, when I knew the one I’d done that people really got off on was the Hell one. That was the one where people really went “Wow,” and I thought “Well, I’ve got this story line– ‘Season of Mists’– and I know they’ll love that. Now do I do that next, or do I go off and do this story called 'A Doll’s House’?” You know, the Sandman’s hardly in it.
     And I did “The Doll’s House.” I figured if I didn’t, that way lay the X-Men. You wind up in the position of continually giving them what they want, and that’s not the bargain I signed. What I’m doing is telling the stories I have to tell, whether people want them or not.

That’s interesting. I’m sure a lot of fans might assume that you created these stories in the order in which they appeared. You’re saying that some of them were mapped out months in advance.

NEIL: Actually, Sandman 19 is the only one that was ever written out of sequence, just because it was going to take two months for it to be done, rather than one month, because Charles Vess had to pencil and ink it. He’s not the fastest. I think I wrote that before I wrote “Dream of A Thousand Cats.” Other than that, they had been written in sequence, but there are shapes in there. I had the idea for a serial killers’ convention a year before I got there, and at that time I thought “Boy, it’s really a pain in the neck to have to wait a year to do a story.” Little did I know that I was then going to have to wait 3 ½ years to bring Destruction on stage!

Is it possible that the act of creating is somewhat masochistic?

NEIL: There have to be easier things to do. My old school got me in a few times to do “careers advice.” I was the token writer, and people would come up to me and say “How do I get to be a writer?” and I said “Well, first of all, if you can do anything else, do that. You know, there are lots of other things you can do that are an awful lot more fun, pay a lot better, will let you sleep far easier.” [laughs]

Have you done any of those other things, or is this as fun as it’s gotten for you?

NEIL: This is what I tend to do. What I do is I write things.

So, no dark past as a school teacher?

NEIL: No, I almost wish I had done those things. Do you remember in the 1950s– it doesn’t happen so much now, but in the '50s– you pick up books from the '50s and they all have author biographies on the back, and the guy’s always panned for gold, been a bodyguard, been a tuna fisherman, worked on a ranch in Argentina, worked as a guard in a prison, and was wanted for three years by the FBI for a crime he didn’t commit. What I think somebody should do is “Author Biography Holidays” for back jackets. You go on holidays for two weeks, during which you pan for gold, work as a bodyguard [laughs], and then you have all this stuff to put on your biography.

Getting back to “the price”: Maybe by committing something to paper, or canvas, or whatever an artist does, it’s frustrating as well as liberating, because you end up sort of condemning an idea to remain fixed. Elvis Costello, for example, has written scads of brilliant songs, but he’s also written some terrible songs with great lines in them.

NEIL: What is actually really interesting with Costello is every now and then you’ll find he’s written a song two or three times; the same set of lyrics but with a different tune, until he gets it right, or whatever.
     It’s one of the things that I find fascinating about writing. I can take 10-15 days on the first five pages of something and take 2 days on the last ten pages, because all the decisions have been made by that point. What I love about starting is the sense of infinite potential, and what I hate about finishing is how far short I probably fell of what I had in my head and how I wanted to do it. But occasionally you get lucky. Sometimes you get stuff that’s better.

And this is not even taking into account that you’re predominantly a writer, rather than a writer/artist. You’ve had some wonderful artists, and in my opinion, you’ve brought out the best of some artists on occasion, but it must also be a little like playing the telephone game, where you’re bound to lose something in the translation.

NEIL: Yeah, but sometimes you gain something. One of the reasons I love comics is that I get to work with artists. I get to work with all these different artists. I get to play to their strengths. I get to make them do stuff.
     One thing that’s fun is seeing an artist and going “He’s really good at that. I bet he’d be good at this.” Everybody thought of Michael Zulli as an animal artist. He was “the good animal guy.” I met Michael and talked to him and thought he’d be great on a historical. He has that sense of detail. And we went off and did Sandman 13 together, as a result of which, Michael Zulli is now known as “the historical artist.” [laughs] You want to do a period piece, you get Michael.

Right. And with Kelley Jones, an artist associated with weird horror stories, you did “Dream of A Thousand Cats,” which was probably not only a nice surprise for him, but for his audience as well.

NEIL: I think for everyone, because it showed that Kelley was an absolutely terrific artist, and we went on and did “Season of Mists,” and all of a sudden, Kelley had this huge following.
     And Jill [Thompson]. She’s being mobbed at the convention, and I remember telling her two years ago, when we were about to start work on “Brief Lives,” “You are going to be a hot artist by the time this is finished” and she laughed at me, because she was the one who gave away her Wonder Woman pages because nobody ever wanted to buy them.

When you deal with other people’s characters– you’ve done it in your own book, and also in books like Miracleman, Hellblazer, Secret Origins– do you ever go in with an agenda, other than to tell a good story?

NEIL: I’m rarely comfortable– I’m quite good– but I’m rarely comfortable at doing other people’s characters, because I always feel like there’s a responsibility there. It still goes on through Miracleman. You know, I want these characters to be the characters that Alan [Moore] created. I would like Alan to be happy with what I’m doing on Miracleman. There’s rarely an agenda other than seeing a character who has been poorly used, or underused, and wanting to do them right. I was talking to Paul Dini last night, who’s the script editor on the Batman animated show, and he was saying he still goes back to the Poison Ivy stuff that I did for Secret Origins and Black Orchid as the definitive Ivy stuff, and that’s nice.

Do you find it sort of a busman’s holiday, since part of those characters has already been sketched in for you?

NEIL: No, no. I have the kind of mind that puts things together in sequences, and in story possibilities and permutations. I try to look at what’s interesting about something, so I can quite happily go back to the first four issues of Prez and go “There is something strange and powerful in here. I think I’ll try to do a 22-page story and see what happens. Boss Smiley as God.”

It’s amazing, because twenty years ago, I don’t think anyone would have thought there was anything to Prez.

NEIL: Well, three months down they may still not! [laughs]

You’ve had the good fortune to write Sandman with virtually no corporate interference, which is pretty rare these days. Are there any stories you wanted to tell, but found you couldn’t– or wouldn’t– because of your own mental checks and balances?

NEIL: The only one I’ve ever put aside would have been a story a little bit like “Dream of A Thousand Cats,” but it would have been about fetal dreams. You know, the dreams of a fetus, and it would have been absolutely heartrending, and, you know, it would have ended in abortion, and it would have been horrible, and so on and so forth. And I thought, “No, I’m not going to do that story.” I might have done it if Sandman were an English comic, seen only in England, I might have felt quite happy about it. But I didn’t want to do a story that somewhere in middle America, someone was going to grab a 14-year-old girl who’d been raped by her uncle and say “Look! See that? Read this! This is why what you’re doing is murder!” I didn’t want to do that.
     I think that what we are doing is creating responsibly. I tend to be more surprised at the amount of controversy we don’t generate. We do something like… the AIDS insert, where Death talks about AIDS: a six-page comic where you are told what AIDS is, where you get it, and how not to. What do we get? We get fifth-grade teachers writing to us, asking for permission to Xerox it and hand it out to their class.

Do you suppose the lack of controversy stems from the fact that comics have had this sort of gutter reputation, almost from day one?

NEIL: I don’t know. I think it’s probably more because Sandman as a whole needs to be read and understood before you realize what’s wrong with it. There may be things we do that would offend. But mostly you have to be bright enough to read it, and understand what we’re doing and why.
     We got one letter when Sandman 50 came out, for example, accusing me of pederasty, because there’s a line in the sequence in the Arabian Nights story in the harem about the beautiful boys in the harem. One other letter came in, accusing me of having anti-Christian beliefs, because there’s that line about the dried dung of the Pope. In both cases, those are things that I took directly from The Arabian Nights. It’s an Arabian Nights story. Those are Arabian Nights things. The actual bit in The Arabian Nights about the dried Papal dung is all about how the dung of the Pope is dried out and sent around, but there isn’t enough, so the parish priests add their own dung, and send it out, purporting it to be the dung of the Pope. And mainly that was in there to show how little the Islamic world knew of the Christian world, which I think allies with how little the Western world knows of Islam. During various signings over the last few months, people have come up with a copy of that and said “I’m Iranian, and I want to thank you. This is the first positive portrayal of Islam or the Arab world I’ve ever seen in a comic.”

Of course, even if you had thought of those lines yourself, and not taken them from The Arabian Nights, it amazes me that people would assume…

NEIL: That they’re the opinions of the author.

Exactly. “Neil must be a pederast! Ice-T must have killed a policeman!”

NEIL: I personally have a great deal of respect for readers. I have a great deal of respect for the human race. I think most people can tell the difference between fiction and fact. I think that the action of writing about something does not condone it. Sandman doesn’t provide answers; it isn’t meant to provide answers. The best thing I can ever hope to do is provide good questions, and I think I do that. I hope I do.

Should we ask about the future, and the last story line?

NEIL: Well, around about September or October, we wrap up “World’s End.” Then we take a month off. During that month, for the people who need some kind of Sandman fix, there will be a Death gallery coming out, with portraits of Death by various artists, by Moebius and various wonderful artists.

May I interrupt long enough to say it was a nice coup getting Scott McCloud to contribute to Sandman 50?

NEIL: Thank you. It’s a beautiful sketch, and it’s also a comic. It was an entire story in one panel.
     In December, “The Kindly Ones” starts. “The Kindly Ones” is going to be a huge, thunderous, bloody, smoke-filled storyline, and it’s the last big Sandman story line. Lots and lots of characters that people probably think I’ve forgotten about will be back, including the three witches in various aspects, the resolution of the little Daniel Hall story line, The Corinthian will be back. It will be huge, full of action and very strange. Marc Hempel will be drawing it. There will be some other stuff after it, but that is the last of the big arcs.

Will those stories that follow “The Kindly Ones” be of a resolutive nature?

NEIL: Well, a lot of resolutions will appear in “The Kindly Ones,” and not all of them pleasant. The story that follows “The Kindly Ones” is going to be called “The Wake.” Then there are a couple of short stories, then there’s Charles Vess’ “The Tempest,” which is the end of it all.

Are there any artists who’ve approached you about doing work whose work might be of an inappropriate nature for Sandman?

NEIL: There are a lot of artists who’ve said they’d like to work with me. To be honest, I’m not sure there is such a thing as an inappropriate artist. The trick is matching the artist with a story. Very often they have to wait quite a while. Marc Hempel asked me in Philadelphia in 1990; he’s had to wait three years. There are a few artists I’d love to work with, who I’d think I’d do a wonderful Sandman story with, who Karen [Berger, Sandman’s editor] thinks are inappropriate. Bernie Mireault, for example. I love Bernie’s work, I think he’s great.

You two did a story for Secret Origins a while back…

NEIL: We did the Riddler story. I’d love to do a Sandman story with Bernie, but Karen thinks he’s too cartoony. Which is fair enough; she’s the editor of the book.

One last question: as a writer, you’ve been a journalist, and probably a number of other things. When all is said and done, what made you want to write comics, and what made you think that you could?

NEIL: What made me think I could? Arrogance. [laughs] It’s got to be arrogance; I can’t think of anything else, looking back on it. But it’s also something I wanted to do ever since I was a tiny kid. I was a voracious reader and I could never understand why comics were of any less merit or importance than any other way of writing. I think the thing that keeps me with comics is there’s still so much to be done. There’s still this huge unplowed field, this huge unexplored wilderness, and as long as I can keep doing new things and coming up with new things, I will. Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren’t a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them.