Hey folks, Ambush Bug here. Luke O’Neil had a chance to talk with Neil Gaiman about a myriad of things over at Metro Newspapers, but O’Neil had a ton more info from the interview that wasn’t used, so we thought it was something you guys would like to take a look at. Let me pass the mike over to Luke for the interview.
A lot of the time doing interviews with well known artists (particularly big time actors and musicians) can be like pulling teeth. Rotten teeth, that is, since most of the quotes you end up getting are barely passable as coherent thoughts. But every now and again you find that rare interview that's not only extraordinarily talented, but also capable of reflecting on, and talking about his or her implementation of that talent in full, thoughtful sentences. When we interviewed Neil Gaiman for the Metro Newspapers last week, he was, unsurprisingly, just that.
Unfortunately the paradox with print is that when subjects actually have something to say you never have enough room to let them say it. Consider this the special bonus features from that interview, with the rest of the stuff I had to cut. Here Gaiman discusses the reason most mainstream comic titles are no good, how he ruined comic book stores forever, why there will probably never be a SANDMAN movie, and the legacy of his beloved title below.
The original interview can be found here.
With its swirling, dream-like blend of mythology, fantasy and horror, Neil Gaiman's seminal THE SANDMAN series remains one of the finest achievements in comic book history to date. When it first appeared twenty years ago it combined a literary credibility with a crossover appeal and radically changed the pop culture landscape for years to come. Metro spoke with the British ex-pat about its legacy after the recent release of the fourth THE ABSOLUTE SANDMAN COLLECTION.
LUKE O’NEIL (LO): Obviously there has been extraordinary praise for SANDMAN over the years, including from outside the comics world. How do you explain its sustained crossover appeal?
NEIL GAIMAN (NG): The truth is I don't anymore because it has lasted twenty years. If you asked me while it was going on what the appeal of SANDMAN was I would've talked about it not being costumes and capes, about writing something for an audience of people like me, and hoping that they were out there. But I don't think even at my most madly optimistic I would ever have predicted a future in which twenty years after the first issue it would be selling more copies with each passing year. I think at the time I thought I was doing something that was fundamentally transient. That was going to be around for a little while. The joy of SANDMAN for me now is that it wasn't something that was time specific. And that…I can't explain it, but I delight in it.
LO: Has the genre ghettoization of graphic novels and literature abated since then?
NG: Well, for a start no one would have used the phrase graphic novels because nobody knew what it meant. Today of course no one knows what it means, but we use it all the time, which is different. There was definitely a ghettoization going on back then that you don't get now. One of the most interesting thing in some ways, looking back on it, is that now, and even back then, SANDMAN was making it onto university syllabuses. You would get students forcing their professors to read it. Students would discover it, start talking about it, the professors would have no idea what they were talking about and they would make their professors read it. Now of course you have professors making their students read it, which is kind of different. When we began, SANDMAN was pirate literature. The idea that you could have a quality monthly comic with a story was strange.
LO: Do you think it was sort of a Trojan Horse, sneaking literature in through the back door?
NG: I don't think it was exactly a Trojan Horse, but whatever it was, the magic of it was that it was happening in a place that nobody was looking. We didn't get written about in the New York Times until SANDMAN had been over for ten years. Eighteen years after it began. Which is not that I ever wanted an article in NYT. I think part of the strength and the power that it had was that it existed in the gutter. Nobody looked and nobody cared, and that in itself is a wonderful and empowering sort if thing, because it gives you complete freedom. It wasn't like I was trying to sneak in literature through the back door. What was much more fun was just that I got to tell my stories, and people let me.
LO: It's almost like an underground rock band with a huge following before the money interest have taken a hold of it. It has more time to develop on its own.
NG: I think that's very true. There was a point where SANDMAN was a little indie band. It loved being an indie band. Nobody told us what to do, because nobody had done anything like this before. There weren't any rules. It was amazingly empowering.
LO: You could probably trace the explosion of more serious, or adult, imprints like Vertigo directly to SANDMAN. Then there are of course the books that are obviously indebted to your influence like LUCIFER and FABLES to name two. What do you think of the scope of your creation -- your Dreaming if you will?
NG: It's always really, really hard to figure how much real influence you had on the world. I read an article the other day on one of these online blogs called "Five Ways that SANDMAN Changed the World." And I thought 'well I don't know about that.' I'm all of a sudden much more critical and harder to impress than the people reading it. So it said 'Ok, SANDMAN started the whole neo-superheroes thing' and I thought no. I think the most important thing SANDMAN did, and it did create some important things, was that it was the first mainstream comic ever to finish a story. And I think that cannot be underestimated. The idea before that had always been that if you were writing a monthly comic, let's say Superman or whatever, you couldn't finish it. You weren't ever allowed to do the last one, to have the story mean anything. You had to turn back to the soap opera.
LO: Too profitable to stop.
NG: Exactly. The great thing bout SANDMAN was it was the very first time that anyone ever said, we have this comic, it's selling better than anything else is selling, and when it's done, it's done. And that, in many ways, changed a lot of things. On the other hand, I still get complaints from comic store owners who blame SANDMAN for the graphic novel collections, and for many ways destroying their business. They'd say, look, in the old days if you wanted to read a comic, and it was something that had been published a while ago, the only way to read it was too pay extortionate prices for back issues. These days, if you're interested in what happened, you can go and pick up a trade paper back, which is pretty much everything now that has been reprinted. When SANDMAN began, the idea that what we were doing was not going to be collected, but was going to be in print, was enough. Comics were things that if you wanted to find out what happened in an old comic, you'd rummage in the clutter bin. That was where and how you found out.
LO: There are no stakes in a Spiderman comic. You know no one is going to die.
NG: If SANDMAN changed anything, it's that we got to do things the way we wanted to do. And one of those things that we did was the idea…especially when it's a story fundamentally about stories…that for stories to be important, they have to able to finish.
LO: How have you adapted with the way producing comics over the years has changed? It must be a lot different now than mailing pages across countries…
NG: Well actually there were definitely wonderful things about the world of mailing pages back and forth across countries. Because you could use Fed Ex, as a writer, and everything had a 2 or 3 days buffer zone. These days when people say they want something now, what they mean is email it to me. You could write up to the point that the Fed Ex would come! But overall I love the instant gratification. I am writing my first mainstream periodical comic years, doing Batman, just really mostly to keep my hand in it and find out if it was fun. One of the strange things about that is that I get emailed these glorious pages, and they come in and I look at them on screen, and I think, I would have never have seen this level of detail if they had faxed them to me in the past. It's kind of cool.
LO: How will you square working with Batman with what we were talking about before about finite stories?
NG: Well, one of the things that attracted me to it was when they asked if I would be interested in writing the last Batman story, so that's what I'm doing. The last Batman story.
LO: Movie adaptations are of course a big deal lately. A potential SANDMAN film has been in discussion for years. Do you think we'll ever see it come to fruition?
NG: I think for years the biggest problem that everyone had with the film, which honestly is no less a problem today, is that it was never cheap. By its very nature a Sandman film is going to be filled with special effects. But it also has to be intelligent. You can't turn it into a regular blockbuster, and it's also much too deep. You can't do Sandman in the same way you do Spiderman and say "ok here's one of the villains." Or even Batman. “Everyone loves the Joker, so let's have fun with a Joker story.” SANDMAN doesn't really work like that. Warners has been aware for fifteen, twenty years, that they have something that is one of the jewels in their crown for filming. 
On the other hand I had a meeting about three years ago with the current heads of Warners studios, who were getting lots and lots of calls from people saying they wanted to make a SANDMAN movie. They wanted to know what this thing was, could I explain it to them. Could I summarize SANDMAN for them. So I went out to Los Angeles and essentially did a three hour presentations with illustrations that we had done specially, statues, all that kind of thing, and explaining the whole story. When I got to the end of the presentation, the current head of Warners, he explained to me the reason that HARRY POTTER and LORD OF THE RINGS had done so well was that they had very clear cut good guys and bad guys. And they wanted to know does SANDMAN have clear cut good guys and bad guys, and I said no, not even a little bit.
LO: Do you think hundreds of years from now some of our comics will have evolved into myths that we use, the way we think about the ancient stories of gods and so forth now?
It's lovely to think so. Actually what would be even cooler is the idea that all of today's and yesterday's pop culture would evolve into the giant stew, and when they talk about our days they vaguely remember this world in which, you know, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock went to the sky, and Superman and Spiderman kept New York safe, and Batman came out at night and hurt people. And through it all, the Sandman wandered through people's dreams. That would be a lovely kind of world.
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