COMICS
Los Angeles: Cha Cha Cha!
It's a warm L.A. night and Cha Cha Cha! is jumping. The staff of DC Comics and their supporters are crowded into the trendy restaurant on this first night of BEA 2003. Everyone is talking, laughing, sometimes shouting. PW has to lean forward to hear what Karen Berger is saying. The executive editor of DC's Vertigo imprint has just placed pages from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Endless Nights on our table.
Berger tells us how Gaiman collaborated with an international "dream team" of artists for his return to the comics series that made his reputation, seven years after he quit comics to concentrate on books and screenplays. We flick through the pages. There are gorgeously colored drawings of two armies clashing, and of a man--or is it a woman?-- of great beauty, with yellow eyes. Elsewhere a young woman, her face white and her hair black, peers out at us as if she knows us. The pages are bold, seductive, kinetic.
DC has big hopes for this September hardcover release--bestseller hopes. There's recently been a "dramatic growth" in the bookstore market for graphic novels, Berger says; reason enough, we think, for BEA organizers to have granted comics their own pavilion and a day of seminars. Yet "dramatic" is relative; in 2002, while the graphic novel market reached an estimated $100 million, a 33% hike from 2001, graphic novels accounted for fewer than 1% of the books sold in America. Graphic novels remain the wayward child of the publishing world, as apt to be found in comics retail stores, which aren't tracked on bestseller lists, as in bookstores, as understood and appreciated by most in book publishing as a nose-ringed teen is by her parents.
Guests migrate from table to table as others arrive. Music thrums over us from the bar area, adding to the din. Plates of spicy salad and jerked chicken clatter onto our table, nearly splashing the Sandman pages. A man walks up to us and speaks with fervor about the importance of comics to the world. Perhaps comics, he exclaims, are creating a mythology every bit as important as those created by the Greeks and Romans thousands of years ago.
Gaiman's Sandman series is considered by some to offer a new mythology. Published in 75 monthly 24-page issues by DC from December 1988 to March 1996, plus one special double issue, and now collected into 10 graphic novels, the series rocked the comics world with its literate, visionary tales of the godlike siblings known as the Endless. Gaiman's stories about Dream, aka the Sandman, Lord of the Dreaming, about his pale, black-haired sister Death, and about Delirium, Desire, Destruction, Despair and Destiny crowned comics bestseller lists for years, drawing an unprecedented number of female readers, and won awards galore. With its vast scale, encompassing eons from the birth of time to today, with its gallery of unforgettable characters, from gods to serial killers to Shakespeare and Marlowe, with its marvelous art and wit, ferocity, compassion and astonishing hipness, it spun comics in a more sophisticated direction and earned the indelible loyalty of fans, many of whom took it as a guide to life, the figure of the Sandman, tall, thin and brooding, helping to spawn the Goth movement along the way.
To comics folk, Gaiman's return to Sandman is a second coming. How will it play in the mainstream book market? The last graphic novel to scale national lists, Art Spiegelman's Maus, did so more than 10 years ago, but the excitement at BEA about graphic novels and Endless Nights reflects a medium climbing to the edge of commercial and critical embrace. Perhaps all that comics need is that one book, that one author, to pull them over the edge. Will Endless Nights be the tipping point?
We've heard that Gaiman might show for dinner, but he doesn't. The next day we spot him at the fair. He could be an older brother to the woman we saw in Endless Nights, in his black T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket, dark hair shagging over his pale face. A gawky guy clutching a mess of comics and books is standing close to Gaiman, handing him item after item. Gaiman signs each one quietly, patiently.
Manhattan: DC Comics
The seventh-floor elevators at DC Comics open to a panoramic view of Metropolis, a huge mural of the city centered by the rising bulk of the Daily Planet building. The mural extends to a waiting area of four boxy chairs in red, yellow and blue. They're Superman's colors, and they're repeated in the nearby life-size statue of the Man of Steel, his arms thrust high in flight. Three phone booths stand along a wall, as does a pedestal displaying a chunk of mysterious green rock.
As Peggy Burns, DC's publicity manager, leads us to the office of Paul Levitz, we spot the DC president and publisher seated in a conference room; at another chair sits a life-size statue of Clark Kent. Levitz's office is a showcase of comic books, graphic novels and superhero figurines; near his desk hangs a embroidered portrait of Batman. Levitz joins us within moments. He's trim with glasses and wears a suit. Noticing the can and glass of Diet Coke we've placed on his desk, he slips a coaster beneath each and responds to our first question.
"Will Endless Nights be a tipping point?" Levitz raps twice on the desk. "The product itself is the first step in whether or not you can make this the tipping point. We're putting out a product that is literally world class." He considers his words. "In many ways," he suggests, "the American comic industry has been evolving, like a child saying, 'When I grow up I wanna be...'"
Comics have been growing up for more than a century. The first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, appeared in the 1890s. Forty years later came the first comic book, the familiar serial tabloid sold mostly in comic book stores, with Funnies on Parade. Detective Comics, or DC, was formed in 1937. A year later DC introduced the first superhero, Superman, in Action Comics #1, joined by Batman in 1939 and, in the '50s and '60s, by the wonders created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at Marvel. The industry's growth has been seriously arrested twice, first by the adoption in 1954 of the infamous Comics Code, which imposed censorship and stifled creativity, then by the collapse of the collectors' bubble market in the early '90s, which sent sales plummeting. Yet comics continued to mature. Underground work like R. Crumb's Zap Comix swarmed to prominence in the 1960s, and 1978 saw the birth of the graphic novel with Will Eisner's A Contract withGod, followed by revelatory works like Alan Moore's Watchmen, Frank Miller's Dark Knight (Batman) series and Gaiman's Sandman.
"At last," continues Levitz, "you reach that point in maturity when you begin saying, 'I want to create something that will matter beyond me.' And that's when you have something that's worthy of being the tipping point." Levitz raps on the desk again. "Neil," he adds, "is one of a very short list of creative people who altered the limits of what the field can do. Endless Nights will be viewed as a benchmark."
Burns offers a tour of the DC offices. In the library, cliffs of steel cabinets secure vast archives. We roll one drawer open to extract a copy of Action Comics #1. In mint condition this comic can fetch up to $200,000 on the collectors' market, but someone has dismembered DC's vault copy, separating and laminating each page. On another floor, we visit the offices of the perpetually rambunctious MAD Magazine. Front and center stands a bronze bust of Alfred E. Neuman as combat soldier; original artwork for classic MAD covers lines the walls. Another elevator ride brings us to a virtual Gotham, backdropped by a mural of Batman's fabled city and embellished with a projected Bat Signal, a small-scale Batmobile and George Clooney's Batman costume. Steel containers and siding, looking cold and rusty, hulk in corners, while around them DC staffers, mostly young, bustle at their tasks.
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman writes far from Gotham's debris. Today, the sky is heavy with thunderheads, darkening the surrounding fields to emerald, as Lorraine Garland drives us up to a large brick Victorian house. Within this countryside where cows outnumber people and farms abound, Gaiman lives with his wife, Mary, his youngest daughter, Maddy, and Garland, the Gaimans' general assistant.
The author and his wife greet us in an immaculate kitchen. Gaiman is dressed in black again and hasn't shaved. He looks rested, and fit enough despite a slight paunch. He asks after our flight, and suggests a cup of tea as a restorative, then takes us outside, where he shows us his small garden and frets about a row of drooping pea plants. He's been away on a European tour, he explains, and hasn't been able "to pass on his complete knowledge" about pea-growing to Garland. He seems genuinely apologetic about the peas.
Gaiman was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1960, his father a businessman and his mother a pharmacist. After graduating from the Whiting School in 1977, he skipped higher education in favor of a writing career, initially as a journalist. He married Mary McGrath in 1985 and, in 1992, moved to America with her and his two older children. He settled in this area, he says, mostly for the privacy, and to keep fans away; he prefers that we not mention the exact location of his home. The land is a refuge of trees and fresh air, and clearly Gaiman loves it; he happily shows us his blueberry bushes and, down a path, a gazebo where he used to write. But 10 years in America, plus the reach of the Internet, have rendered him a man without a country.
"When I go back to England," he explains in the English accent he retains, "I am no longer regarded as English. But here I'm not regarded as American. From 1992 to 1997 I worked very hard at living in America. I watched a lot of late night TV. Now the world is redefined. My paper of choice is the Guardian, which I read online, and my TV is as likely to come from Australia as from the US. So I don't think of myself as anything anymore. It's not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers--we're much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling."
We go back inside, dodging a SuperSoaker wielded by Maddy, and pass through rooms graced with fine furniture. A glorious painting in red by illustrator Yoshitaka Amano brightens a Japanese-themed living room, and Gaiman points with pride to an ink drawing by Harry Clarke, an Irish artist in the Beardsley manner whom he collects. We go down to the basement, into an archive room crammed with comics and books preserved in plastic bins. Gaiman checks on the several humidifiers in one corner, plugging one in and pouring dirty water from a can labeled "Humidifier in a Can" into a hole in the floor. The next room is his library, centerpieced by a leatherbound 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The walls are dense with books, awards and plaques tucked into every cranny, including one congratulating Gaiman as the Most Collectible Author of 2002. But it's now getting late, so Gaiman drives us in his cluttered Toyota Camry back to our hotel. We will meet tomorrow for our formal interview.
BOOKS
Manhattan: Writer's House
In 1872, a descendant of John Jacob Astor built a mansion on a leafy Manhattan side street to serve as his counting and money house. The building's walls of marble, plaster and dark wood, its slate tile floors and its stained glass windows made it a fitting home for the man's fortune, as did the walk-in safe in the building's basement. Today the mansion hosts one of publishing's most veteran dealmakers, literary agent Al Zuckerman, and the firm he founded in 1974 and still heads, Writers House.
Gaiman's agent, Merrilee Heifetz, works here. Dressed in a black pants suit that sets off her red hair, she greets PW in her office, where bookshelves (built by Zuckerman's son, Heifetz says) support editions by Gaiman and her other clients, including Laurell K. Hamilton, Bruce Sterling and Octavia Butler. Joining us for a minute, Zuckerman, smooth and cordial in an expensive suit, informs us that the building is in the manner of Aesthetic Movement, then takes his leave.
Heifetz explains that she first encountered Gaiman in 1988, when, as the American rep for a publishing house owned by the Who's Pete Townshend, she sold a book by "this young guy named Neil Gaiman, about Douglas Adams, for far more money than anyone thought it would." She looks steadily at us over glasses perched on her nose. "And of course half of that money belonged to this young journalist who barely had two pennies to rub together." Gaiman soon signed with Heifetz, proclaiming, she recalls, that "I write comic books, and I'm going to write novels someday."
Heifetz repped mostly Gaiman's comics until, in 1990, he kept his promise, producing Good Omens, a humorous tale of Armageddon co-authored with Terry Pratchett--the first major step into the shape-shifting that would mark his career. Six years later he took another step, delivering to the BBC six half-hour teleplays for Neverwhere, about a young man's adventures in a fantastic underground London. Intending to novelize Neverwhere himself, Gaiman told Heifetz that "I want a really big book deal with this. A million-dollar book deal, and I want a really good film agent. We're going to have to go to L.A. and meet people."
"We came away with Jon Levin of CAA," says Heifetz. "I made the book deal first. It was with Morrow/Avon. They bought Neverwhere and a short story collection [Smoke and Mirrors] and another novel [Stardust]. It was for nearly a million." Spending that much on an author who'd yet to crack bestseller lists was a shot in the dark, but one that paid off with strong sales on Neverwhere and, in 2000, a major national bestseller in American Gods. That epic about a struggle between ancient European gods and younger, brasher American deities outsold Gaiman's previous books by nearly two to one.
"What made the difference was his Web site," Heifetz says. "Six months before American Gods was to come out, he started the site, and he started his blogger. And people started to visit. By the time American Gods came out, they went out and bought, and the book hit the lists." There are dozens of sites devoted to Sandman and Gaiman, but none like Gaiman's own (www.neilgaiman.com). It's a slick, immensely entertaining information and promotion machine, featuring a message board with more than 3,000 registered members and 200,000 posts, but most impressively Gaiman's blogger, where he converses at length with fans nearly every day about anything, but most often about his work. The site reportedly draws hundreds of thousands of regular visitors.
Gaiman followed American Gods with another shift, his first children's chapter book, Coraline, about a girl trapped in a parallel home with her "other parents," who have buttons for eyes. "He had been writing it for years," Heifetz says. "The advance was not huge. But the royalties have been, and now it's won awards [two ALA citations; a Stoker from the Horror Writers Association]. And it's broken Neil out to a new audience." An audience, we point out, he's expanding further this summer with The Wolves in the Walls, a whimsical HarperChildren's tale of wolves invading a home that looks a lot like Gaiman's, featuring a girl who looks just like his daughter Maddy. English artist Dave McKean contributed the rich, jazzy illustrations to Wolves. McKean collaborates with Gaiman on nearly all of Gaiman's illustrated books, and he created all the Sandman covers, including the one for Endless Nights.
Gaiman works at a furious pace to produce all this product--and to promote it. He's known for extensive tours jammed with overflow signings. "He just doesn't stop," says Heifetz. "He went to Brazil, and he got this huge turnout. Who knew? And they want him to come back. I said, 'Neil, you cannot go to Brazil again, it's going to take two weeks of your life.' And he said, 'Yes, but I could be the #1 bestselling author in Brazil.'" Heifetz suggests that Gaiman's primary goal is neither fortune nor fame, however, but the freedom to create what he wants when he wants.
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
Gaiman picks us up 45 minutes early this morning, explaining that he's lost his broadband so he couldn't watch "digital dailies" of the fantasy film Mirror Mask, a Jim Henson Pictures production that he wrote and that Dave McKean is now directing in England. We drive for 20 minutes, through a small town and forest, until we reach a wood-framed motel situated above a gleaming lake. Gaiman rents the end unit, and it is here, in what he calls his "cabin," that he writes in splendid isolation, with two rules: no reading and no Web surfing. The one-bedroom unit can get hot, so he turns on a fan that will drone noisily throughout our talk.
"I know that I'm an oddity," Gaiman tells us with a characteristically complex mix of humor, frankness and self-awareness. "I seem to be fairly good at moving from medium to medium. What I really am is a storyteller. And what I'm fighting for is just to be allowed to do what I want to do next. It isn't the idea that I'm the 'bestselling author that no one's ever heard of' [a title given to Gaiman by Forbes magazine] that rankles. What rankles is that I'm sitting here with a readership and an audience in numbers that most people never dream of, and that every time I do a tour with a new publicity organization, they do not understand this."
Gaiman draws from more discrete readerships than probably any other bestselling writer, because he works successfully in so many media--serial comics, graphic novels, adult novels, children's chapter books and picture books, plays and teleplays and, now, films. It's difficult, he suggests, for professionals in any one field to grasp his success in the others. At the core of his readership are the Sandman fans, as loyal to Gaiman as Potter fans are to Rowling. He recalls that in 1997, when his and Dave McKean's illustrated children's book, The Day I Sold Dad for Two Goldfish, came out, the book "did over 20,000 straight off in hardcover in the comic stores to the Neil Gaiman fans. So there's a built-in readership." Gaiman cultivates his fan base, not only via his Web site but through the extensive in-person appearances, sometimes building a groundswell of interest far in advance of publication. "I've been doing Wolves in the Walls at readings ever since I wrote it, so from about late '98, early '99. I'm filling 1,000-seater bowls and now each of those 1,000 people is waiting for the book to come out."
"Why do so many people show up at your signings?" we ask. Like few other authors, Dean Koontz and Clive Barker among them, Gaiman will sign for hours, until the last fan is satisfied.
"I think they want to say 'thank you.' Sometimes they don't even have a book. Sometimes they bring you presents, sometimes they burst into tears. One girl fainted. I think you've given them something and you took them somewhere they couldn't have gone on their own."
Gaiman's work, his ambitions and his will to achieve them are creating greater public awareness of him, and his personal look speeds the process. Like Clancy in his quasi-uniforms and King in his country-cracker duds, Gaiman conjures up an easy-to-grasp image, of a handsome youngish man, sometimes unshaven, clad in all black and, for many years, in shades. "The shades were fun," Gaiman says, laughing. "The shades mostly came from trying to give people something to cartoon.
"But I'm kind of nervous about the upcoming three months," he adds. "Because for the last eight, nine years I've been every bit as famous as I would like to be, famous enough to get my phone calls returned. Which is probably saying stuff that I shouldn't be saying, but I really do like existing under the radar. It's a really cool and comfortable place to be."
We notice a sheaf of comics pages on a sofa. They are in black-and-white, the panels depicting men and women in old English dress--and there's an angel locked in a dungeon. We ask Gaiman what it is.
"It's something I'm doing for Marvel."
COMICS
Manhattan: Marvel Enterprises
Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel Enterprises, is rushing around his office. "There's been an asbestos explosion!" he shouts as he bends to pick up stuff off the floor. Quesada continues to straighten among his piles of comics and books and toys until we sit in the low chair opposite his desk. He then takes the much higher chair behind it and indicates that we should begin.
A celebrated comics writer/artist who took over Marvel editorial in 2000, Quesada has been credited with saving the comics giant from financial and artistic disaster. "Marvel needed to build some bridges with the creative community," he admits. "There were several key creators over the course of 10 or 15 years that we didn't do the right thing by, so consequently as a company we looked around and wondered why our books weren't that good. Neil was one of the first bridges that I wanted to build."
Quesada, stocky and solidly built, exudes a vigor that goes with his open-necked black knit shirt and gold chain. "1602 was an instant green light," he says. "We were raring to go, and I was incredibly honored that Neil was going to do his next big comics project here at Marvel." The publication in August of the first issue of 1602, illustrated by Andy Kubert, an eight-part series set in Elizabethan England and concerning mutants, a powerful object and an ancestral version of the Marvel universe, marks Gaiman's return to serial comics.
"Why were you 'incredibly honored' "?
"Neil is one of the top five writers in the history of our industry. He brings a certain amount of cachet. And he always brings his A game. " Quesada's heavy watch clacks against his desk as he makes his point.
1602 initially will appear only in comics stores. But Quesada expects the series to be collected into bookstores by July or August of next year. Marvel's drive for bookstore attention began three years ago, he tells us. "We perceive bookstores as the next feeder system for our industry. Every Wednesday is new comic day at the comic shops. So every Wednesday the true and faithful are there waiting for the boxes to be opened. Most human beings don't shop for anything that way. But there are people who go to the bookstore, and they love the product." And looking beyond comics, Marvel has just made its first foray into prose books, with the YA novel Mary Jane, about Spiderman's girlfriend.
When we conclude, Quesada shows us out to a lobby stoppered on one end by huge double doors aflame with images of Marvel's superheroes. An impossibly muscled Hulk rages at the center.
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
It's interesting to see these black-and-white pages of 1602, to observe a graphic novel in gestation. Like film, comics are a collaborative medium. The most important contributor is often the writer, who dreams the story and provides a script that includes not only storyline, commentary and dialogue but also art direction. "Foreground--the phone. In the background we can see Rick, heading for the phone, and Felix, picking up his bag, and preparing to leave," runs the script description for page 2, panel 4 of the Sandman episode "Calliope." An artist will then draw the story (Gaiman has worked with dozens); a letterer will add the words (Gaiman's longtime letterer is Todd Klein); an inker will go over the drawing in ink, and a colorer will transform black-and-white into a rainbow.
Gaiman likes to collaborate and is intent, he says, on playing to the strengths of his colleagues; that's why he refuses to write a comics script until he knows who will draw it. He's also intensely loyal, as evidenced by the duration of his collaborations--not only with Dave McKean and Todd Klein but with Merrilee Heifetz, DC Comics and HarperCollins. He has a reputation within publishing as a good man. Certainly his work for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund bears this out.
Back at the cabin, Gaiman sits by the front window. He's only a shadow against the intense sunlight that floods the room from behind him. There's fire in his voice as he talks about the Legal Defense Fund, citing cases it has fought, beginning with the State of California's attempt to reclassify comics from "literature" to "signed paintings," their aim, Gaiman says, "being that if it was signed painting they could collect sales tax on it." Other cases he relates involve obscenity arrests. For years, Gaiman participated in grueling tours to support the fund. He feels so passionately about its work, he says, because "the First Amendment is something that I think is really, really cool. I'm from England. There is no First Amendment there, no guaranteed freedom of speech."
FILMS
Los Angeles: CAA
Gaiman's film agent is Jon Levin, who speaks with us by phone from his offices at Creative Artists Agency. To date, Gaiman's best-known work in film is his English-language adaptation of the acclaimed Japanese animated movie Princess Mononoke, and the only Gaiman film project currently in production is Mirror Mask. But the author's screen future looks bright. "We're very active on a couple of books of his," Levin says. "One is Stardust. And he has American Gods, which sundry filmmakers are interested in, like George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section Eight Films. He has a project in development at Pandemonium, which has a deal at Disney, for Coraline. He has a project that is in development at Warner Brothers, called Books of Magic."
"What is Gaiman's appeal to the film world?" we ask. Levin pauses. "His unique vision. Neil is able to synthesize ancient mythology with the current zeitgeist. His characters, no matter how fantastical the world, are essentially human. And I will tell you that on top of all things, he is an amazing human being, and his work stems from his essence as a human being."
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
"In 1995, '96," Gaiman recalls at the cabin, "when I first started getting seriously wooed by Hollywood, I went out with Merrilee and interviewed agents. We got the full William Morris gang bang, all of the different agencies came out to see us. It was very obvious that very few of them got who I was or what I did. And everybody seemed to be out to make a real quick buck on me. Nobody was long term, which is why I wound up with Jon. He got who I was and what I did."
Gaiman's film dreams are huge but he knows how Hollywood works. He mentions an article in last year's Variety about how "I was the person who had sold the most properties and scripts in Hollywood and had not actually had anything made." But, he adds, "I think the odds are very good that the next one that I've written will actually happen, which is The Fermata [Nicholson Baker's erotic novel about a man who can stop time], for Robert Zemeckis. After I finished American Gods, I re-read the novel and thought, 'Okay, it is completely un-filmable but I could do this....' We plan to start shooting in the beginning of the year." Gaiman also expects to spend up to eight months of next year directing his first film, his own adaptation of his Sandman spin-off graphic novel Death: The High Cost of Living, for Pandemonium/Warner Brothers.
The string of recent $100-million grosses for movies based on Marvel properties have doubled Marvel's stock price, and DC intends to follow suit, with Catwoman filming this fall with Halle Berry, and other DC properties in development or pre-production. So what of Sandman? "It's in limbo," Gaiman says. "The book is much too weird and complicated to be a nice 100-minute movie. Or even three Hollywood movies à la Lord of the Rings." Numerous screenwriters have chipped their teeth chewing on Sandman, which ran to nearly 2,000 pages in comics form. "The worst of the scripts was the last one I read," Gaiman recalls. "The Sandman was completely powerless, had been kept under New York for a long time by giant electromagnets, and when they were turned off he was free but he had no superpowers of any kind, and his identical brother had taken over the Dreaming, and... as I'm reading this I'm going, 'I don't know who this is being written for.' "
BOOKS
Manhattan: HarperCollins
Jane Friedman and Cathy Hemming look summer-relaxed yet dressed for business, Friedman in pearls and a pale lime linen suit, Hemming in a black skirt and gray jacket. We can see the sun beating on the terrace adjoining Friedman's office, but the air inside is cool, the light subdued. Gaiman has no new book coming out from Harper adult trade this fall but the house is pushing him, issuing Neverwhere and American Gods in trade paperback. "Why are you making this additional investment in Neil Gaiman?" we ask the Harper CEO.
"We think he is a great talent," Friedman answers. "And there are people who have not yet discovered him. Once people read Neil they want to read all of Neil, and we should have the books in the right format."
"He's been successful as a children's author," adds Hemming, president and publisher of the house's general books group. "He has been very successful as a graphic novelist, and his audios are very successful. He's developing all these constituencies in all these different formats."
We suggest that by publishing books pitched at varied ages, Gaiman, who is 42, and HarperCollins are training younger readers to enjoy him from the go and to continue reading him as they grow up.
"How wonderful," Friedman says. "How wonderful! Which is interesting because this is exactly what we used to talk with Michael Crichton about, as his career was building. How do you get the ones who are 14 to become the lifelong fans? It worked with Crichton. There are the fans of Coraline, and there are the parents who are fans of Coraline, so we are building a generation that will follow suit."
Does Harper have any plans to move into graphic novels in a big way? "I doubt that we'll have a HarperCollins graphic books imprint," says Friedman. "Of course, if the right illustrated novel comes to us, we would publish it. We're open to anything, but we want to play to our strengths. We're better off sticking to the business we know. "
Gaiman is currently contracted to HarperCollins adult trade for two unpublished novels and a collection of short stories. He has published books with the house since the mid-'90s, weathering a shock when his longtime editor Jennifer Hersey left (Jennifer Brehl now edits him). Friedman expects him to remain. "I think it's a great relationship. There's so much behind him and yet so much in front of him. We're married. We're in the Neil Gaiman business forever. Forever."
To get an insight into Gaiman's work for children, we call Susan Katz, president and publisher of the house's children's division, whose enthusiasm for Gaiman erupts into a shouted "Yay!" time and again. "He's one of the handful of successful adult writers who knows how to talk to children effectively without talking down to them," Katz suggests. She mentions that Gaiman "has another children's book in the pipeline. It has a lot to do with graveyards [which also figure in Gaiman's entry in the third volume of the Little Lit series, edited by Art Spiegelman, a graphic novel for kids due out from Harper's Joanna Cotler Books in August]." And Katz expects Gaiman's forthcoming tour for Wolves to excel, because "when Neil tours, all of his fan base turns out. Yay!"
The Sandman mythos has generated a cottage industry in related product. The primary publisher of Sandman sidelines is Chronicle. According to executive editor Sarah Malarkey, current offerings include a Sandman wall calendar and collectible postcards, plus two journals. This fall, Chronicle will publish Sandman: King of Dreams, an illustrated study of the series by Alisa Kwitney. Then there is The Sandman: The Book of Dreams, from HarperCollins, with stories about the Endless from genre stars including Clive Barker, Gene Wolfe and Tad Williams. DC has issued a collection of Dave McKean's Sandman covers, as well as Hy Bender's The Sandman Companion, and an array of Sandman toys. And smaller presses, too, are hitching to Gaiman's star. Wildside Press has just published Stephen Rauch's scholarly study of the Sandman mythos, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and Joseph Campbell: In Search of the Modern Myth, and the British publisher Titan is releasing in America a newly revised edition of Don't Panic.
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
For lunch we drive to a cozy spot that features an array of fantastic pies. We each select sour-cream-and-raisin, topped by a cloud of meringue.
"Why do you write fantasy?" we ask.
"You can do so many things with fantasy. At a rock-bottom level, you can concretize a metaphor. Part of it is that, if you're a writer, you can play God. This is my world, you are welcome to come, but I get to call the shots, and I won't be embarrassed to pull in anything I need or want."
Calling the shots means deciding not only what to write but how to write it, and in American Gods Gaiman tried something new. "There's a style of writing," he says, forking some meringue, "that I had always admired, which I think of--although there couldn't be two writers further apart--as a Stephen King/Elmore Leonard thing, where what the writer is trying to do is to become invisible. What I tended to do before was the very English thing of saying, 'Lovely to see you, I am your host, please sit down, I'm going to make you comfortable, I'll bring you a drink, would you like a story?' The American voice is almost pretending there's nobody writing the story." Gaiman's gambit worked; American Gods is the only fiction ever to have won all four major speculative fiction awards, including a Hugo, Nebula, Stoker and World Fantasy.
Gaiman informs us that his next novel will be Anansi Boys, set in the world of American Gods but this time with a comedic spin. He considers writing humor a particular challenge, pointing out that "humor and horror and pornography are incredibly similar--you know immediately whether you've got them right or not because they should provoke physiological changes in the person reading."
COMICS
Manhattan: DC Comics
Karen Berger, slim and blonde and casually dressed, greets us warmly. She has worked with Gaiman for 15 years, ever since the young author, a lifelong comics fan who was trained to write a comics script by Alan Moore, approached her with his plan to revitalize--and totally transform--a defunct DC superhero known as the Sandman, who caught criminals by knocking them out with sleeping gas. For the past 10 years she has edited Vertigo, DC's prestigious graphic novels line, which publishes all of Gaiman's DC work. "I think it was Vertigo's 10th anniversary that got Neil to commit to a big book for us," she tells us. "And this was what I was able to get out of Neil. It sounds desperate my saying it that way, but the guy's getting a hell of a lot more money as a book author than he is here. I'm thrilled to get whatever he'll write for us."
What Gaiman has written for DC is a comics masterpiece, a book that, in its seven tales, one devoted to each of the Endless, each illustrated by a different artist, demonstrates the enormous range of the comics medium both in content and style. The seven artists bring visuals as disparate as the sharply delineated, reader-friendly work of P. Craig Russell, who drew the "Death" story, and the deliriously jagged paintings of Barron Storey for "Fifteen Portraits of Despair." Berger comments, "Each story is like a novella, rich in narrative and character and texture. And that's even without the art. It's such a great deal, too, $25 to get 160 pages of amazing story and art."
A great deal, but will the public buy? "I think the tide is just starting to turn," says Berger. "We're moving up to crest but we obviously haven't crested yet. We've lined up a ton of publicity, including ET, USA Today, bookstores. The buyers recognize this book, so we're getting a lot of support."
"You'll want to convince folk who never bought a graphic novel to buy one."
"If it's going to happen with anyone, it's going to happen with Neil and Sandman."
The Minneapolis Area: Neil Gaiman
After lunch, we return to the cabin to wrap things up. We ask Gaiman about his thinking process in the creation of Endless Nights.
"I'm often asked, 'Where do ideas come from?' The best that I can point to is that ideas come from two or more things coming together. You combine them and suddenly it's, 'Oh, nobody's ever done that before. That will be really fun.' In comics, very often for me it's somebody asking, "How would you like to do something for artist X?'
"Minara [Milo Minara, the artist for the Desire story in Endless Nights, about a young woman who finds love briefly only to see her lover slain, and who then takes revenge] is a lovely example. I had this great odd idea of a way to write the story. And if it works, by the time I get to the end page, where she's turning around and she's talking directly to us over a span of 50 years and essentially dying in the last panel, it's going to be absolutely beautiful. I pulled that off only because Minara gave me that last page, where she ages from 20 to 70 and is somehow recognizable. This is a comics thing because you're seeing her age on the page, while the images remain static in a way that wouldn't have worked in a film. In a film she'd be talking to us and you'd have to do a 60-years dissolve. As a prose story you might well have wanted to end it earlier. Here there are six inexorable panels that do something in comics that I couldn't have done in any other medium."
The sun moves low over the lake and we return to the house. There we admire a World Fantasy Award, shaped as a craggy bust of H.P. Lovecraft, and one of Gaiman's Stokers, a casting of Poe's House of Usher, with a little door that opens at the front. Gaiman says that he doesn't want Coraline's Stoker mentioned on the paperback edition of the novel, as "it would frighten too many parents."
Driving us back to our hotel, Gaiman muses. "Do you know what the coolest thing about Endless Nights is? It's seven short stories that are, respectively, a very realistic short story about a contemporary soldier that is melded with a weird sort of Casanova fantasy. A really cool historical thing based on a fragment of an anecdote about a Scottish clan related by George Fraser. A high fantasy set at the beginning of the universe with an animated sun. An out-there, para-literary, post-modern sequence.... Not one of those stories is even in the same genre as any of the other stories.
"I did it right, I did the thing that people remember and love. I did this thing that now, what, 10 million people have read, 20 million people have read, you know?"
Later that night we're channel surfing when we come across a show on the History Channel about comics. There's Stan Lee, and Batman writer Frank Miller, and there's Gaiman, unshaven and in black, caught while on tour, his face worn from lack of sleep, speaking with passion about the medium he loves, a medium that has found its lead title, and perhaps even its tipping point, in his latest work.
A special thanks to PW's Calvin Reid for guiding me through the arcane world of comics--Jeff Zaleski.
