Now that I’ve moved back to the upper, upper west side I am lucky to be in proximity to Symphony Space and all it’s awesome cultural events. Last Thursday, I got to see Neil Gaiman interviewed by Paul Levitz, comic book writer and also former president of DC comics. Given their history at DC, Paul promised that the questions would be different. I’m just happy that the discussion was all Sandman all the time, as those series of comics remains my favorite of Neil Gaiman’s oeuvre.
Snippets from their discussion that stood out to me:
On Jewish writers in comics
In response to being asked where all the Jewish comic book writers are now, when they made up almost 75% of writers in an earlier age, Neil states. “I killed them all.” He then goes on to make a more serious point that doors that were closed in that earlier age are open now, hence you have writers like Michael Chabon writing his novels instead of comics. He also adds, “I’m not sure I approve of it being respectable. I loved the gutter, dammit. I loved that nobody was watching, nobody cared. I liked feeling we were part of the gutter media.” This inevitably leads to a discussion of the internet currently filling that perceived role of “gutter media”. Neil goes on to reminisce, “I remember comics before we were graphic novels. I remember at eleven arguing with my teacher about why I couldn’t read comics in school.” His teacher’s response - that comics make you illiterate - was surprising to the young Gaiman. After all, he had won the English Prize in high school for the past two years and had been learning most of his vocabulary from comics.
I hadn’t known that a couple of years back that Gaiman was in the running for a Pulitzer. Apparently the committee had spent a couple of days arguing back and forth on awarding him one, I suppose predicated on the legitimacy of comics as a medium. The discovery that he wasn’t American and ineligible for the Pulitzer anyway kind of killed any discussion.
On the move to America
Neil remarks that “America was this mythical place like Oz.” and goes on to reproduce a list of amazing (at least amazing to a Brit) things such as fire hydrants, tossing pizzas, smoke coming out of the grates of New York City that was sometimes “Frank Miller smoke” and at other times “Will Eisner smoke.”
On the Sandman writing process
Paul mentions the meticulousness of Sandman, how it felt like Neil wanted each thread to tuck into every weave of the story. Neil then talks about how writing each monthly issue of Sandman took at first two weeks, to three weeks to a month and then on to five weeks. This at a time when a typical comic script took from one week to ten days. I think this goes a long way to explaining the richness of The Sandman series, why I continue to feel nothing else can compare. And of course, why Sandman has sold over 10 million copies and counting. Neil continues to say “I felt like I owed it to the material. You have to give it the time.”
Neil also gave details on how he meant to end Sandman at issue 30, then said he’d end it as issue 50 and after that just stopped saying when it would end. The series ended on issue 75.
On the business side to being a writer
Paul also remarks on Neil’s influence on the comics industry not only as a creator but also a businessperson. He commented that Neil’s assertion that “when I’m done the series is done” was at the time, considered insanity. He then goes on to say that as The Sandman continued, it became obvious that what Neil was asking for was reasonable, that “what was succeeding for the series was not a frame-able model”. Paul continues, “For Sandman, it didn’t matter that we owned the character. No piece could continue without the creator’s voice.” And a testament to the friendly relations between writer and publisher, Neil responds that his approach was “not to argue but to point out the sheer logic.”
Neil also, after one year of writing Sandman, renegotiated his contract. Once again, this was unusual but also a signifier of the ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of Sandman. Quoting Paul again on the uniqueness of Sandman from the metaphor of landowner and tenant - Gaiman built, “Not a house. You built a city out of a plot of land, this bizarre architecture pivoting out of that spot.” And once again, the discussion of this contract negotiation was a “sane and rational discussion.”
I think this theme of protecting your creative work by paying attention to the business aspect is one of the more interesting things to come out of the public discussion between writer and former publisher. I also suspect most young artists aren’t thinking about this but Neil’s success makes the point. Paul describes Neil as being “disproportionately concerned with marketing”. Neil says that early on when he decided on writing as a profession, bought books on how to be a writer and closely read the chapter on contracts where it said “Everything in a contract is negotiable including the date on the top.” He then spent the next three years as a freelance journalist to learn how the publishing industry worked. He asked Alan Moore what a comic script looked like and Alan Moore graciously showed him and critiqued his first attempts. This whole appreciation for the business of publishing allows Neil, when faced with certain frustrations in how his work is brought out into the world, to take it all in stride with the mantra “never attribute to evil what can easily be explained by incompetence.”
On Sandman and modern myth-making
Paul tells Neil, “I consider what we do at DC to not be modern mythmaking but rather folktale-telling. But I think you did mythology with Sandman, the Endless as a genuine pantheon.” He also asks about the origin of the Endless, asking if Neil was thinking about his core audience of bright high school and college kids where “desire, despair and delirium are one beer away”.
Neil responds that while there may be merit to Paul’s theory, he himself can’t also claim that he planned it all. Neil says, “I was trying to cover up the things I couldn’t do. I knew I couldn’t write great superhero comics but I could do something that might look enough like it to a casual observer.” Neil knew that he needed to write a new story every month for Sandman so he needed a big framework to do that. He mentions Robert Zelazny’s Lord of Light novel as a direct influence in creating this framework for Sandman. Zelazny took these myths - the Hindu-Buddhist pantheons - and wrote science fiction around them. Neil continues to say, “I loved the way that writing people being gods pressed the same emotional buttons that a good superhero story would.”
On the evolution of the Endless
Neil goes on to say of the Endless that he wanted to write, “things that are sort of gods but beyond gods. I wanted to create a pantheon that I could actually believe in.”
“I found a quotation - ‘Death is a brother to Dream’. Destiny was an old DC character that would fit. Then of course Despair and Desire. And I think there’s another two but I don’t quite know who they are yet.” This explains why Delirium and Destruction weren’t in Sandman 1.
“I wasn’t so much imagining them but discovering them.”
On how the continued popularity of Sandman defied his early expectations
‘The weird thing about Sandman is I thought it was transient. I was very specific about the time. It was set in 1989 to 1992. I didn’t think it was going to be around, I didn’t think it would last.”
And of course, there was discussion of Death
On the character of Death, Neil talks about playing with the natural sexism of language by making Death female when everyone expects Death to be male. He adds “I will write who I want to turn up when I die.” He relates that in his bar mitzvah studies where he conned his tutor into teaching him about cool obscure Jewish mystic stories instead of the required reading, he came across the concept that “the angel of death is so beautiful that when you see her, you fall so much in love that your soul is pulled out if your body through your eyes.” That factored into his characterization of Death. Also, “Morpheus was not sensible so Death has to be sensible.”
As to Death’s physical aspect, since Dream was all rock and roll, Neil initially envisioned Death as an ice-blond, Nico in Velvet Underground. Mike Dringenberg, drew her as a goth chick based on his friend Cinammon. Which was, of course, perfect. And a good example of the magic that can come out of a collaborative medium such as comics.
