“HB: So why does a person get involved with someone who’s entirely wrong for him? NG: I think the answer, quite simply, is that you don’t always get to decide to whom you give your heart.” HeartDecisionsWrongInterviewNeil Gaiman Book:The Sandman Companion Source: The Sandman Companion
“Once, while at a party in London, the editor of the literary reviews page of a major newspaper struck up a conversation with me, and we chatted pleasantly until he asked what I did for a living. “I write comics,” I said; and I watched the editor’s interest instantly drain away, as if he suddenly realized he was speaking to someone beneath his nose. Just to be polite, he followed up by inquiring, “Oh, yes? Which comics have you written?” So I mentioned a few titles, which he nodded at perfunctorily; and I concluded, “I also did this thing called Sandman.” At that point he became excited and said, “Hang on, I know who you are. You’re Neil Gaiman!” I admitted that I was. “My God, man, you don’t write comics,” he said. “You write graphic novels!” He meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who’d been informed that she wasn’t actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening. This editor had obviously heard positive things about Sandman; but he was so stuck on the idea that comics are juvenile he couldn’t deal with something good being done as a comic book. He needed to put Sandman in a box to make it respectable.” PositiveRespectableComicsNeil GaimanHooker Book:The Sandman Companion Source: The Sandman Companion
“Gaiman provides some additional insights via these comments in his script for chapter 5: “What I want to do here, without destroying the story as an adventure yarn, is grab the subtext and make it text, grab the metaphor and make it text; allow that we’re spinning a metafiction and see how far we can push that fact before it collapses in on itself. Which is going to be hard; good fantasy is as delicate as butterfly wings, and just as liable to crumble if improperly handled, leaving you with something that can no longer fly.” FantasyFlyNeil GaimanButterfly WingsCrumbleGood Fantasy Book:The Sandman Companion Source: The Sandman Companion
“HB: Given all the theologies you were dealing with, did you receive any outraged letters? NG: I did; but most of them were from comics fans who felt I was creating cruel parodies of the Marvel Comics characters Thor, Loki, and Odin. [Laughter.] At the same time, I received quite a few letters from readers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden who thanked me for portraying Norse gods accurately. All I really did was follow the actual legends. In Norse mythology, Thor is enormously strong, bearded, and overmuscled; and he’s also quite stupid, and is easily made drunk. And if you rub his hammer, it really does get bigger. [Laughter.] The legends also strongly imply that Thor’s wife is bonking Loki on the side.” LegendsInterviewNorse MythologyNeil GaimanNorse Legends Book:The Sandman Companion Source: The Sandman Companion
“I did Barbie’s dream as a one-off thing, but I found it haunting me; I kept having an image in my head of Martin Tenbones getting killed in real New York. Still, that would’ve been the end of it...except, by a wild coincidence, a short time later I received a postcard from Jonathan Carroll. He wrote that he’d been following my graphic novel Signal to Noise—which was being serialized in The Face magazine at the time—and he was finding a number of very scary similarities between my story and his as yet unpublished novel, A Child Across the Sky. He concluded, “We’re like two radio sets tuned to the same goofy channel.” I wrote back and said, “I think you’re right. What’s more, I abandoned a whole storyline after reading Bones of the Moon, but I keep thinking I ought to return to it.” Jonathan then sent me a wonderful letter with this advice: “Go to it, man. Ezra Pound said that every story has already been written. The purpose of a good writer is to write it new. I would very much like to see a Gaiman approach to that kind of story.” With that encouragement, I began creating A Game of You.” WritingRadioInterviewNeil GaimanEzra PoundJonathan Carroll Book:The Sandman Companion Source: The Sandman Companion