Neil Gaiman and Chip Kidd: 20th Anniversary of Sandman

now I'd like to introduce Karen Berger Karen is senior vice president and executive editor of vertigo an imprint of DC Comics she founded the award-winning and acclaimed line of cutting-edge comics and graphic novels in 1993 and it's been home to Neil Gaiman's Sandman Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta and the alcoholic as well as 200 other titles please welcome Karen who will introduce our guests thank you [Applause] hi everyone thank you so much for being here tonight to help us celebrate 20 years of salmon I'm also the editor of salmon and it's really thrilling to actually be on this stage too at this event to celebrate what has been 20 years of such a groundbreaking book a book that really raised the bar and set the bar for what you could do in mainstream comics chip and Neill gonna talk a lot more eloquently than I can about all the great thinking behind this series about Neal's collaborators and what Neal and and the series salmon has achieved in comics but I think if I had to pick out two things for me what has made working on this series so special has been the fact that before salmon and and salmon is started off as a monthly comic and was collected into ten volumes as a graphic novel series and salmon came out at a time when the only other books that really show that comics work could be reckoned with in terms of great contemporary fiction was Watchmen and mouse and contract with God and and salmon was the only monthly comic that really achieved this distinction of being able to show what comics can do and to really transcend the form so without greater greater without sorry without further ado I'd like to introduce first chip Kidd who will be interviewing Neil chip is a acclaimed chip is an acclaimed graphic designer novelist nonfiction writer he has two non-fiction books out now bat manga and watching The Watchmen and I was telling chip backstage is that I remember chip first really as this wonderfully acclaimed designer who knew that comics were cool way before it became fashionable for everyone else to think it was so I always thank him for that so ladies and gentlemen chip kid Neil Gaiman's and I go back a long ways he first pitched Sam man to me 22 years ago in a hotel room in London and I think one Neil first pitched this series none of us knew that it was going to go on and become this amazing transformative piece of work Neil I think as everyone knows has gone on to be a successful novelist screenwriter playwright TV writer storyteller and so many in so many forms his most recent book has two books of new books right out out right now the alphabet book and the graveyard book and absolute sama number four which is out as well so everyone Neil Gaiman [Applause] hello hello this is great we can't see the audience the lights are too bright we don't know there's anybody out there we could just be sitting except you're all naked well I feel like I've won some sort of crazy contest or something so I don't know fight spaz out that's why it's funny that Karen was talking about the the pitch and she was talking about because this was the first thing I was going to do when I when I was trying to explain to my friends that don't read comics at all like I'm gonna be doing this event with Neil Gaiman oh well what did he do well he wrote Sandman and they say what's that and I start to explain and then 45 minutes later I'm still explaining and nowhere near you know clearing it up but what I I was fascinated and it's funny that she said about this because what I would like to do is okay it's 22 years ago I am Karen Berger we're in a hotel room and you are you were pitching Sandman to me I've never quite happened like that I I got the closest I ever got to pitching Sandman like that was actually over a dinner with jenette Kahn and Karen I was working on a comic called Black Orchid and otherwise known as Black Hawk Kim otherwise known as Black Hawk kid yes coolkid and having dinner and they were saying so what I'll see you thinking of doing and I pitched this whole new updated dark and gritty take on the boy commandos I had in my head for some reason that week and over just sort of over dinner and conversation I was saying that I'd put I'd drawn it I'd written a page of Black Orchid which took place in a dream and love the idea of somehow doing something with the Joe Simon Jack Kirby Sandman character from the 70s version and just we digging reinventing that character some weeks later Karen was safely back in America and I got a phone call from her and she said look we've just had a staff meeting and we're a bit of marketing meeting we're all a bit worried about Black Orchid and I said why what's to worry and she said well your two guys nobody's ever heard of doing a character nobody's ever heard of and it's a female character at that and they don't sell so we may have a problem and it's a full-color Dark Knight format book and we're really worried that this will be our first big commercial failure in that format and I said okay I take your problem what what what can we do and she said well Grant Morrison's written this thing called Arkham Asylum when we're gonna get Dave McKean to do that and we thought maybe you could do a monthly comic so that people would have heard of your name had I said cool and she said what would you like to do so obviously when faced with with something like this I immediately went away and wrote this great big long list of characters and phoned her back up and I said so why I'd like to do the Phantom Stranger and she said no he's not heroic enough dick Giordano said he's not gonna have his own comic I said okay well I'd like to do the demon she says no madness got the demon there forever people know mark the matter sister in the forever people so the whole list went on like that and we got down to the end of my list and I'd run out of things sugar in the spike no I hadn't I wouldn't do that you couldn't couldn't no that would be wrong Sheldon met somebody should reprint the entire sugar and spike I'm sure they're on it I hope they're wonderful children spike big fancy and at some point Karen said you know that Sam man thing you were talking about why don't you do that and she said don't don't make it the Simon and Kirby 70s Sam man because Roy Thomas is doing him an infinity Inc just do your own and I said okay so that really was the pitch now then it got a little bit more complicated because I started thinking about this and the thinking process was great fun I thought okay you've got this character who's gonna be Lord of dreams that I knew and I thought well if he is actually the Lord of dreams and he is the the the the incarnation of dreams then why haven't we ever seen him all through the DC Universe because at that point everything you were doing was in the DC Universe so I thought well we've never seen him I thought well maybe he's been locked up somewhere and suddenly I had the shape of a beginning of something I had the idea of this sort of naked man in a glass box just prepared to wait until all the people who kept him prisoner what long dead and forgotten and I sort of had this thing going on in my head and I was about to write the outline and we had the only hurricane England has had for seven hundred years and I lived in the only village that was actually cut off by this hurricane in the middle I was in a little village called Muttley in the middle of the Ashdown Forest trees came down we had no power we had no phone line I was stuck there and being stuck I just sat there and would think all day about the same thing and just at the point I was ready to go mad the power came back on and I more or less ran to the computer and typed in a white-hot frenzy the first Sandman outline which was basically the first eight issues and a little bit the background and the first eight stories and I sent it to Karen I don't know if she remembers this but I got a phone call from her a week later and she said well she said I got the outline and I wrote it through honestly Neil I'm not sure about it but Jeanette and Paul heard that it was on my desk and they called for it and it's a go hmm so um I loved the fact that Karen wasn't quite sure about it and it wasn't really that she was overruled but the the word came down but they thought it seemed good enough and of course I started Sandman in a state of absolute delirious terror because I'd written some fiction not much but some what I'd never had to do was write one story a month come up with a new story every month which was one reason why I love the idea of Sandman I thought okay well if I'm gonna do this thing I'm he is going to have existed forever because that gives me the entirety of human history to put stories in and I'm going to try and do something that isn't a the only sort of previous models for anything approaching horror or dark fantasy but basically the monster of the month each issue you would fight the monster of the month and I just knew and and sometimes there were times I Ellen was Steve Behcet's John totleben Swamp Thing where the monster of the month attained this it flew we got off the ground it was magnificent it managed to comment on the state of America and the state of the world and of the human psyche but it was still incredibly brilliant monster of the month and I knew that I didn't want to do that I wanted to be able to go anywhere so in some ways for me the the first eight issues of Sandman was sort of carving out some territory that I then knew that I could move away from which which brings us to our next question when I was charged with doing this in in I put on my website as sort of like contests to people to send in questions in order to avoid having to do much research myself although I did read I was a fan and I read Sandman every month but I wanted people to write in some things get a chance to ask something and I think this brings us to this question and I've always wondered this - this is from Erik you make references to things early in the series that happen later did you have the full story in mind at the time or did you figure it out later for example barbie has a dream in the dolls house about martin 10 bones and the porpentine that later show up in a game of you did you have the game of you story planned out at the time of the doll's house or was the dream something you looked at later and said I can use this it's it was never either/or that was always a sort of weird combination of both that for example I'd had an idea for a story line and the Martin t'aime Bones porpentine thing was from this idea that I'd had for this story line that I'd then decided not to use so I just put this little thing into dolls house and the reason I decided not to use it was I read a book called bones of the Moon by Jonathan Carroll and I'd gone he just did my my story that was mine hmm you Nick my story you bastard and so and about a year later I actually met Jonathan Carroll at a I think the world fantasy convention or a British fantasy convention in England and went out for dinner with him and Dave McKean and at some point I said to him you know is this story that I'm not gonna do because of you and he sent me this great postcard which said the purpose of a writer is to tell it Moo tell your story and I thought oh okay so I went and took this story that I decided not to tell the only little bit of which was Martin t'aime bones and Barbie and I said wheeled it out and it told beautifully and then you got a letter from his attorneys no he's he's always been lovely about it but but did you know but that doesn't really answer your question I knew at the shape of Sandman from the beginning at what base did you know that Daniel was gonna inherit the mantle well that was that was way way in the beginning unfortunately I tried to signal it brilliantly in Sandman 7 and a colouring error meant that nobody ever got to see that because there was there was a seam in Sandman 7 where you actually saw dream at the beginning of time creating the Ruby and in the panel description I explained this is an all-white dream this is the this is how they look when they're freshly minted and they're completely white and he was wearing white clothes and white hand it was gonna be a lovely little setup i thought what everything do at the very end but it was color bright red and nobody could see hmm but there were things that i knew from the very very beginning in fact there were things that i knew from the beginning so early that I'd forgotten that I knew them until I was going through putting stuff together for the absolute Sandman's and going oh that's interesting I set that up there I knew the shape and what I didn't do was tell anybody because I knew that what I was trying to do was impossible and it was nobody had ever done anything like this before so there was 95% of me simply wasn't allowing myself even the hope that I would be able to do it in the first 8 issues I'm spending a lot of time setting up for and building things that are going to occur over the giant hugeness of what will become Sandman having said that the only thing that I was really concerned with was not getting canceled at number 12 hmm DC Comics always used to cancel comics at number 12 oh really yeah these days they're they you know if you're not selling something by number four they'll cancel you with number four and that used to be the case back in the old carmine infantino days and stuff but when Sandman first came out you would get through to issue 12 they do have they do a full year nobody was embarrassed if you did a year and seeing that up until that point in the world of periodical comics critical success and commercial failure what absolutely synonymous these days most graphic novels taken from comics are eight issues long this may have had its roots in ProLiant and nocturnes which is about eight issues long which exactly eight inches long the reason why the first storyline preludes and nocturnes was eight issues long was I was convinced that there was no point in plotting further than that because what would actually happen was it issue eight I will get the phone call from Karen saying you know it's really not selling we're gonna stop it at number twelve and so I just do four short stories and stuff at number twelve only when we got to number eight we were selling more than anything comparable had ever sold and suddenly I thought okay I can actually let myself now believe let myself dream that I'm gonna get to the end of the story and then it was really weird because roundabout issue twenty I thought I need to find out if if DC Comics will stop it when it's done so I remember saying to Karen I said when we're done do you think DC would stop this she said no hmm and so then I went and spoke to jenette Kahn who was at that point the big boss at PC and I said Jeannette you know one can finish salmon at some point do you think there's any possibility that we could stop the comic then and she said Neil never happens so we didn't stop Superman just because Siegel and Shuster okay so um time went by and I would drop in interviews hints that I would pretty much like you to stop when I stopped and it was like slowly this this invaded reality and one day I got a phone call from Karen and she said you know Neil we can't really finish carry on with salmon after you've done can we I said no I don't think so she said well we'll stop well and that was wonderful just knowing that I had that there have been so many different artists involved in in the entire run someone had asked how would Sandman be different if you worked with the same art team throughout the entire series it would have been very very different lots of stories simply wouldn't have happened because there were a lot of stories in Sandman that were essentially created by me going oh my gosh I have soand so I want to do a story for him Midsummer Night's Dream probably would never have happened and The Tempest probably would never happen if I hadn't had Charles Vess mm-hmm just running into Charles Vess at San Diego and saying look Sam man would you like to draw one and him saying sure bless him having no idea what I was talking about he did then go back and read them afterwards but he just said sure and me going okay well Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream so so who did you want the she didn't get who did I want that I didn't get I wanted Barry windsor-smith and never got Barry wanted the the original choice for the kindly ones was Mike Mineola and Mike wanted to do it but Mike wanted to do it one at the point where I was saying I think it's gonna be three maybe five issues long it's gonna be and then when he pulled out when it was gonna be five issues long because he wasn't sure about the time so the idea that he actually would have made the 13 issue version his pretty how many ones turned into I I don't know if he could have done that it would have been very very different I mean the original plan for Sam man was Sam Keith with Mike ring and birding inking we had no plans at that point to change our teams but somewhere around issue three Sam Keith quit and he just it was I mean he was very sweet and I was very relieved honestly when he did because he seemed so miserable on the book he was like it was just the wrong thing he he told me he felt like he was in the wrong band it was like being Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles hmm he was so miserable with what powerhouse a man number one looked he wanted to take his name off it Wow he phoned up and said he wanted it to go out under his pseudonym and we said what is your pseudonym Sam and he said the meet and and that one I think went to Karen who basically said it's already been solicited under the name of Sam key and I'm not putting it out under the meet so so that was so Sam quit Mike came on Mike was great you know and that was that was lovely and I assumed basically Mike would be probably the artist forever with maybe occasional fill-in people just because Mike was slow mm-hmm but then Mike got slower and slower and slower and slower and it just got to the point where he was obviously not somebody who could do a monthly comic and we took him off for was it trying to remember the sequence here I think it may have been season of mists I think the idea may have been that he was going to come back at the end of season of mists but he gone off to do books of magic which it was one of those really awful things that sometimes happens with artists where they just aren't drawing and we'd get cheerful reports about how much he'd done but the pages wouldn't come in mm-hmm and he'd say oh it's gonna be a week it's gonna be another week and finally Karen had to phone him up and say just send me everything you've done or you are fired and he sent her the three unfinished pages that he had done in the previous four months and she had to grater teeth and fire him anyway because it was like you're never gonna finish this are you so that was really sad I mean my and I think Mike's temperament just was not he is such a brilliant artist and he really I think even more than Sam in many ways it's created the whole look and feel of Sam and I would very happily have had Mike until the end of time but at the point where it just became apparent that Mike and deadlines were things that did not exist in the same universe well I'm not a monthly comic I mean it is a real grind it is a real killer and a killer for me it was this thing where remember the opening days of Sandman it would take me two weeks to write a script so every month two weeks would be Sandman and two weeks would be something else by the end of Sandman it was taking me roughly five weeks a month to write a script which meant nothing else happened in the last couple of years of my life and I was late anyway I mean it was you know we we coped somehow by occasionally missing things and missing deadlines and you know we we but it was hard that monthly grind is an amazing grind and I have such a partisan unit I but I would I mean I on the one hand it would have been magical to have had some art team going through the whole of Sandman by my side as it was I had Dave McKean always on the covers that's right and I had Todd Klein almost always like lettering which was wonderful just for continuity and just for the team having those two there all the time was that is amazing about McCain's covers because that really did just completely tie the whole thing together he got fired once by who for what by Karen because she didn't think he was going to be able to make some deadlines on think Arkham Asylum I forget which he dealt with in typical Dave McKean fashion he was in New York this was the we'd had the first nine issues of Sandman which had been these gorgeous huge oil paintings and Karen had brought him into her office and said look Dave I'm just really sorry you've got to finish this other stuff and we're just gonna take you off Sandman and they was a bit upset he said okay and came home went into his office though ever came home phoned me up said what's in the next three sermons and I talked him through the next three issues and fourteen hours later he sent Karen the next three covers Wow on the basis that she'd probably unfair and not another word was ever said about the firing he simply did the work sent it in no dummy he no dummy and he and what was amazing with Dave was he reinvented himself and reinvented covers with every storyline that the process of creating Sandman once we had this magical thing of okay we really are doing a different storyline we gonna get a different artists we can reinvent certainly it was incredibly liberating the idea that we'd do a set of drawings loosely inspired by you know the Milton Glaser Shakespeare covers and then we go from that to something photographic and it was wonderfully liberating and did he do the lettering did he do the logo too he did yeah excellent we're going I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit here we're going to take a sort of u-turn diversion from Mary Rome ask him any question that will get him to do his Harlan Ellison or William Shatner impressions [Applause] they are priceless so we're going to start with mr. Shatner and he's getting the call from his agent that he will not be in the new JJ Abrams Star Trek movie but I met bill China once we were in pointer Cyrus and in a hotel room it's even sadder than that it was a convention and I got there first to the convention and I'm the sort of the lesser guest he is the big guest so I'm in the green room at the back of the convention and they lead him in he comes straight over to me and he says you are Neil Gaiman when they told me that you were a guest here I thought they said Neil Diamond and I said that's a good thing I know Neil Diamond I've been to concerts of his I've actually been backstage so when I arrived I said his Neil here and they said yes he's here he has curly hair and a big leather jacket I said that doesn't sound like the Neil Diamond I know and then he shook my hand [Applause] that was the entire conversation over the next two days we said nothing else to each other I think he may have thought I was Neil Diamond again was he really bloated he was chubby let us say he wasn't corpulent okay all right now we look Welford now now mr. Ellison then I frankly I'm looking forward to this because I don't have a great idea in my head of the things there are to Harlan Ellison's and the one that I normally deal with is my friend Harlan me he's fun but Harlan is great when he gets really really psychotically angry which is like every minute of the day he can do it I think what's strange with Hartley's he turns it on until I got home once and there is a message on my answer phone little red light is blinking and I press it game on it's Allison you're dead you are a dead man you are so dead I am gonna nuke your house I am gonna I'm gonna so soft so nothing grows there ever again [Laughter] call me [Laughter] so so finger trembling i dial and Holland says game him this numb not excuse for a journalist just called me phone me telephone me and I said to him how did you get my number he said Neil Gaiman told it to well I said Harlan I I didn't actually tell him that your number he said no I said no I just said it was in the book he said no that's okay then you know it goes from 180 degrees I will kill your mother I will kill your mother's mother I will kill the ferrets that your grandmother's mother once owned and to this sort of sweet as pie Wow I think was a better place because it has Arlen in it because he entertains me also he just phones every now and then the phone will ring and it'll be Harlan with a joke normally one that Robin Williams or somebody's just phoned and told him and the phone will ring and you say yeah as James Ellison okay there were these two nuns and you get an into an entire and anyway they all have punchlines far too have seen ever to be told in the writing second street one day and he gets to the end of the gag and you're laughing and he says he puts on the phone and that's the entire phone call it's wonderful Wow you could like subscribe to the Holland and some phones you up and tell your doctor he ought to consider that okay you have quite the rabid fan base Darcy from Oklahoma says what's the strangest thing you've ever gotten from a fan and I would add to that what's the most appalling confrontation you've ever had with one you know I I'm incredibly lucky because I have friends who I get to compare myself to and I have it so much better than I have my fans maybe keen but they're terribly nice and then normally sane which puts me way ahead of some people's fans you know I remember talking with Stephen King one day about we comparing fan stories the way he's talking about the mad lady who lived in his attic who claimed to be strapped with a bomb and wasn't I'm going my fans compared to this are angels in terms of strange things you've been given my Barker once told me about a signing that he did was asking for it one of what of my favorite he's tiny about this signing where somebody gave him something wrapped in a towel and then said don't open it until after the signing so the end of the signing he unwraps it this is beautifully carved staff where they freshly cut kept head on the top I never ever get anything like that my assistant Lorraine occasionally complains when things come in with sand every now and then somebody thinks it's cool because it's sand man just sounds like exactly they'll send him some piece of artwork or something they'd made they will put sand in there which gets everywhere but on the whole you know I'm astoundingly lucky in terms of things I've been given then mostly really cool the only time I ever remember going oh my god oh well I've been given it I suppose I have to send it it was it was a it was a carving and a painting that somebody had done out of sort of half a tree it was this enormous chunk of incredibly heavy wood that they carved Sandman and painted and it was bad it was bad in every way that somebody carving and painting salmon and tree could be bad but this was in Seattle and and very nobly I thought I took this thing down to FedEx in the hotel and I said here's my address send it to me and it's never arrived six years later I still worry that it will turn up and on that note okay upcoming projects that you may or may not be able to talk about you had said to me something backstage about a deaf collection oh yes okay well this is this is news this is actually this is kind of fun I've never got to do this before breaking news are there any comics retailers out there make it make a noise if you're a comics retailer okay so the comics retailers you actually will have this and you can go go back and do what you will with this piece of information so we this month or last month a collection of death which will be called the complete death in what's called the deluxe format was solicited and as of yesterday two days ago we've canceled it we've taken it off the schedule and it's gonna come out later in the year and it's gonna be an absolute format [Applause] there was a sort of point where we were going you know people really like these absolute things and they keep writing emails into my website saying will there be more will you collect death like this and then they started writing in and grumbling when death was announced in the deluxe format and it was one of those places where I started passing the grumbles on to DC Comics and people there actually listened so we're gonna do it in absolute format because that seems to be what people want and then that'll come out when any it'll come out it'll it'll it'll add some months to the schedule and I think we'll probably I don't think it's we will announce it as soon as we know when it'll be it'll be it will be later it won't be out in March now it'll probably be out later in the year everyone of course is asking and constantly asked and I know this is probably a pain in the neck but okay about movies involving the the endless characters let's see what can I tell you um death the high cost of living has been in development heck which is kind of like development hell only slightly more encouraging for about a decade actually it's gone on this amazing little magical ride where at one point in 2000 I was commissioned to write the script for Warner's and I wrote the script for Warner's and they looked it and they said this is a fifteen million dollar movie and I said very proudly yes it is and they said we don't make fifteen million dollar movies it's actually too small for a Warner Brothers movie it's gonna have to go to someone like newline or Warner independent can you talk about what the plot of that was it was basically just a slightly expanded version of death the high cost of living it's it's about a young man in New York who meets a young girl who's kind of depressed and can't see a reason to be alive and meets a girl who says she's deaf and spends a day with her and kind of cheers up more happens in that summary so then it took about 18 months to two years to actually free it from Warner's and renegotiate it and allow it to go to new line which is part of Warner's which actually did that thing and then we developed it new line they were more or less ready to go and then it was decided that maybe it will be happier over at Warner independent it wondered took a little while it wandered over to Warner independent and then new lines started to implode and there were problems at new line and then it went back and then Warner said well send it back to us well we're really interested over at Warner's so we send it back to them and they read it and because time had passed the figures were no longer the same but there was this wonderful moment where they phoned up and said you know it's a 20 million dollar picture and we don't make 20 million dollar pictures and I thought I was here five years ago having the same conversation having said all that new line having imploded and been reassimilated into Warner's is currently in the process of rising phoenix like from the ashes within Warner's and just before I came out on this tour I heard from the powers that be at new line that they still very very much want to make it and I just waiting for the last of the dust to settle so it looks like that will probably happen unless it doesn't but there's also a rumor that you would direct that there is a rumor that I would direct and I think I would Guillermo it's it's one of those things where last year qiyamah del Toro who was signed on to executive produce the Deaf movie mmm actually said to me nearly he said you know you must come out with me to Budapest I am directing Hellboy and you can like shadow me on everything I do ask me any question no matter how stupid Wow so I did I went out they make making Hellboy - and I got to what was actually incredibly cool is in addition to being able to follow him into any meetings with designers production art makeup effects and so on and so forth he also let me shadow him when he was giving actors direction which was absolutely fabulous and the actors people like selma Blair Doug Jones Ron Perlman but they let him do that also I was really very very grateful so I got to just sort of be his little shadow he double it really was watch how Guillermo took a shot from the point where I would have said okay cut and print I get a print that's great moving on he'd do another couple and somewhere in there it would get perfect and it took me really that three weeks was teaching me how you get from the point I would have said yeah we good enough to the point like yeah I'm I said it's good enough how much of that movie did you watch them shoot would you say I was there for three weeks and then went back again for another 10 days so large I mean you know I think I probably got to see about 20 minutes of it being shocked which is actually as far as the long movie goes it's actually quite a lot yeah and I got to see but it wasn't even just the shooting it was also seeing the building and the the organization and going and watching locations what surprised you the most about the that experience um I think what surprised me the most actually seeing it happen was the strategies that chiamo had put together for a long shoot to make sure that he built a team and kept that team awake and functioning as a group for what was going to be about nine months things like raffles you know where some morale buildings it just merked the morale building stuff the stuff that was that I would never have thought of that went into making him that went into went into keeping it a pleasant experience for everybody in a world in which Guillermo was always the first person on the set in the morning and the last person to bed at night because he would have also gone from the set into the editing Bay at night and knowing that this was this incredibly long the whole thing and watching watching all the other stuff the stuff I did makes given the actual the filming process there wasn't anything in there that surprised me Wow although the other thing that actually surprised me impressed me was Doug Jones who played a pians in covered in his makeup because Doug would do things like there were times when he would not claim what he should have done in order to allow them to keep shooting you know he's meant to have 12 hours or whatever between taking his makeup off and putting him on again there were times when they drop him off at one o'clock in the morning and pick him up at six o'clock in the morning and he would happily go with that and just catch sleep where he could in order that they could keep shooting Wow stunner show me selfless and again that has to do with the kind of morale that you have on the set because nobody's gonna do that if they don't love you yeah exactly changing gears yet again because I'm the one that's here and I'm a Batman geek I know that you are doing a couple of issues of Batman who do folks oh come on it was in the preview Diamond previews months ago so whatever you can tell me about it um trouble is whenever I say something even trying very very hard to to not say anything I was wind up saying too much but I will try and what will I tell you it's being drawn by Andy cubit okay the there was a cover that was leaked about 12 weeks ago that isn't actually the cover it was a drawing that shouldn't have been leaked but it was a little trial thing where the actual idea was that Andy was going to try redrawing the cover to Batman number one and he did and it didn't really work very well so that was junked and he's done this amazing new cover which actually is much more about what the thing is about the I was I was talked into doing it by Dan DiDio who did not have to talk terribly hard Wow he basically the the the his pitch to me was would you like to do for Batman and Detective Comics what Alan Moore got to do for Superman and action comics whatever happened to them whatever happened to the Caped Crusader's whatever happened in the man of tomorrow and I thought about it for a few seconds and I said yeah all right so it's really odd it's really really odd is it the last Batman story it's certainly a last Batman story it's my last Batman story it's in the sense so if I want you had if you had to end the run this is how you would do it yeah Wow but bump by bomb it it starts in a little bar in Crime Alley with Selina Kyle talking to Joe Chill and after that it gets really odd Wow Wow that's very very exciting and of course geek out here we're gonna take questions with the audience real soon Dark Knight movie opinion I I came out of the Dark Knight movie having enjoyed it but feeling like I'd watched two completely different films one was a film I had absolutely loved which was Batman vs. Heath Ledger's Joker and anything with Heath Ledger's Joker in it I just love that movie I thought that was an absolutely fantastic movie and then there was another film that seemed to be going on at the same time that took forever and had these really peculiarly clumsily shot fight scenes in it where I could never quite know the fight scenes never quite had a plot to them people would hit each other and you can what happened oh okay yeah he's fine and it went on too long and it was okay quite enjoyed that one too but I kept wishing they just made this amazing Heath Ledger movie and that it was shorter and sharper and smarter you know trying to do too much it felt like it just sort of got overstuffed but I thought it was remarkable mm-hmm I obviously I'm hoping that maybe in the next film they will be able to afford throat lozenges why [Applause] but why halls I just can't get over that he looks like a giant cockroach it's just I mean it was great to see him flying around at the building that's when he really looked like Batman to me but he's a commando with pointy ears at this point they yeah they still haven't it's weird they haven't the Batman comes one thing nobody's ever cracked on television or on film it never quite the Batman costume and keep hoping yeah you do keep hoping and and just keep hoping forever you know at least he can move his head now you can move well major Wow there's Michael Keaton ones in it you know and you just want to go anybody could kill Batman just by creeping up behind and then when he turns that way they just people really sad okay the last question from me which is actually going to be from wet origami and people say you don't learn anything from the Internet my people wet origami and this was this was actually the question I was gonna end with are there any Sandman stories you didn't get to tell that you would like to tell god yes there was some that I didn't get to tell because I decided not to tell them during the course of Sandman not many but a few there was one that I the only one that I ever decided not to tell because I thought it could be misused was a fetal dream story this amazing story and I thought oh my god this will be brilliant it was gonna be like a four tissue story which was gonna be these fetal dreams and then the fetus was never it wasn't actually gonna survive till birth it was gonna be heartbreaking and then I thought you know I don't actually want to write a comic that somebody is gonna plunk down in front of a fifteen-year-old in Arkansas who's just been raped by her uncle to explain why she's not having an abortion and [Music] [Applause] so so that was their work that was probably the only one I didn't write for actual one I don't want this being misused not didn't do that one but there were more I didn't ever get to tell I was gonna do a delirium miniseries can we hope yeah I mean we can always hope that there was I hope his hope is intrinsic to say oh man after all I would still love to do that there was the storyline that I was thought of as Sandman zero which is implied that you you you find out in Sandman that it was made very explicit that he was on his way back from a very long way away at Sandman one and was completely exhausted he had just fought a just gone through a very very hard storyline and was completely knackered which was why burgesses little hedge magic spell actually caught him at the beginning of Sandman and one he'd been a long way away and was returning and I'd always wanted to tell that story Sandman which I always think of as Sandman zero which is a big chunky story and it wasn't part of the story that started at Sandman number one and ended at 75 it was always a sort of feeling that that was a whole mhm and he had defined something and had was the map that was the territory that was the story it's sort of off to the side kind of like like endless nights was but I'd still love to tell that story do you ever think about doing a Sandman Justice League story Grant Morrison of course did one with the Sandman well with Daniel so I don't know I loved I mean I got to do kind of a Sandman Justice League in Sandman number five the you just get sort of a little nighttime of the Justice League the martian manhunter and mr. miracle and stuff I loved the decision to move away from the superheroes was not the kind of there was nothing particularly calculated about it it occurred mostly and initially because we would vertigo as was announced in when Karen came out started in 1993 and Sandman started in the end of 1988 there was a solid five-year period before vertigo when nobody that there were no rules the whole idea of another imprint was exactly and this was happily the DC Universe the problem that I kept running into was simply that whenever I would try and do anything with DC Universe characters somebody a somebody would have to approve it be somebody would always have to tell you what was going on what was gonna continue and then once it was drawn somebody would explain why something had just happened that meant it didn't work so I did a you know my the one that broke my heart although I actually liked the way that it worked out in the end was dr. D escaping from Arkham and I wrote this whole sequence and Sam Keith pencil this whole sequence with the Joker doing his April Fool's joke which was hanging himself and and the Joker having a conversation with with dr. D and we cleared that we could have the Joker and everything was okay and then Sam penciled it and suddenly we got the message that actually the Joker's just died I'm again well he's gonna get better he'll be back yeah no we know but he just plunged into the waters of the Gotham River and he's not loud out for five months so he can be the Joker okay took it away I made it the Scarecrow and nobody ever really complained that it was the Scarecrow doing an April Fool's joke but it was things like that and I think that was the like you know there were like three of them leading up to that and then a couple of other ones in the background and I just got up one day and I went you know it's easier if we don't and even even when we try and do little ones I remember in game of you I had the Bizarros mm-hm and I put because at that point the Bizarros weren't in Superman and I actually had somebody in Sandman talk about you remember the old the Bizarros from the Superman comics and suddenly the Superman people said you can't do that mm-hm so we made it the weirdos from the hyper man comics and and everybody sort of knew what we meant sure and that time I didn't even try and do anything clever you know it was just weird so number one and stuff it was vaguely frustrating because vaguely so that was why we tended not to do it and even then the last time I tried even was in the wake oh well and it was the first time since you never got to see in the wake the actual panel as originally drawn it was the first time I brought super tried to bring DC Comics superheroes in since I did the my failed attempt at the Bizarros and here at the wake and everybody's there and you've got Batman and Superman and the Martian Manhunter thank you and they didn't change the dialogue they let me have all of the dialogue where Batman the Batman and Superman is talking about how they having that experience where they're in TV shows of their lives and marsh Manhunters saying I don't get that one but what was fun about that because I was thinking what kind of dreams would would Superman have so in the panel as originally drawn he's in his Clark Kent clothes he's in a suit wearing Clark Kent but his cloak is coming out behind his suit and he's just trying to look at it and tuck it in because his cloaks out and people are going to notice that underneath his soup is Superman cloaks out and the Superman people at DC said that was irreverent and they had us close in on that panel so you can't could naturally see it as drone should have been Superman's version of like I'm naked in school yeah that was that was I figured that was and it was just a visual thing it wasn't it was smartly done by it by Michael Zoli it was really sweet but it was deemed irreverent so honestly that was the reason it was that it was always too much trouble it was always a headache and it always wind up with something being changed or compromised so it was easier just not to do it right we do want to take a couple questions from the audience I'm not quite sure how we want to do it because I really can't see anything oh now we can good heaven there nobody told me they look like that which point 50% of the people out there yes actually Sandman completely changed the way that I dreamed all through my late teens and into my mid-20s I used to have terrible nightmares really really awful nightmares and the kind that you'd wake up and I'd be sweating and I'd be upset and the whole day would be spoiled and strange and then I started writing Sandman and pretended to keep sort of pieces of paper round by the side of the bed for if I woke up with a particularly good dream but what actually would happen is I would wake up from a nightmare and I'd be going oh my god I was being pursued by down endless corridors by a thing with a face like strands of wet spaghetti and oh my god that's cool I can use that and it actually won and it took about a couple of months and I just stopped getting the nightmares and my own personal theory was that whoever was doing the nightmares were just deeply disheartened by this ago we don't know what suite we brought out the spaghetti monster he seems to have enjoyed this video let's do the dead baby next he not only like the dead baby he's put into a comic so you know that was so I would I would I would use my own dreams not a lot but you'd sort of used them to add flavor and color the strangest moment of which was when I was writing the penultimate Sandman Sandman 74 exhales and I had the sequence where somebody who was wandering into dreams and they needed to build it to build a bridge and I was writing this night I had a mild case of flu and I'd gone to bed but I was still writing in bed taking a computer him with me and I'd written up to the point where they needed to build the bridge and then I fell asleep and dreamed that I was still writing the scene in which there was one of these peculiar laughing sailors they used to have in amusement parks in England when I was a kid rather pointless laughed is I I never quite understood the point of them that there were these laughing sailors they just laughed you put him money and they go in a box and then somebody else got out one of those used a one of those claw hammer machines where you get things out they got out of bridge put it down and I woke up and I thought oh that's good I just wrote that sequence I thought no I didn't I dreamed it it was really good so I wrote it down sort of felt like all the work was being done for me then but the truth is normally story logic and dream logic are actually different they bear a superficial resemblance to each other but most of what makes dreams work when you are the dreamer is not the imagery it's what you feel it's not the fact that you're walking down a peculiar corridor with a slightly rubbery carpet it's more the fact that you're walking down this rubbery carpet and you know there's something behind you but you mustn't turn and if you do it will be really unpleasant and then you go into the kitchen and suddenly you realize that there is of course a swimming pool in the fridge and the upsetting part of that is that your grandmother never told you and it's all sort of it's the weirdness of emotion it's not so much the story in the plot it's how you feel about it this gentleman here yeah mm-hmm alia Nora she I loved her she here's one of the the great relationships that went wrong and the truth is I could probably go in and write the story of Morpheus in Eleonora but there's also a level on which anybody who has read the whole of Sandman can more or less figure out how that one went well he's not terribly good at women no and he's terrible and you know the and we know that the scar on her face was somehow inflicted by him or at least due to his is something that he did she got horribly scarred and we also know that the he felt that the scar that he got from the kindly ones possibly had some kind of echo of that in it but I you know yes I could write that story but I didn't in probably the same reason why I didn't actually tell the Thessaly story the whole sort of big Thessaly dream story he's really not pretty good at relationships this other question for those who were further back than the very front is have I ever been actually actively creeped out by something I wrote normally the answer's no because despite the fact that I am a major league was absolutely an utterly will see the moment that I get really interested in and excited by something I stopped being wussy so absolutely utterly completely a would have no interest in all of the squishy bits inside a human body and then suddenly I'm on the phone to my doctor who I discover used to be the county medical examiner when I'm writing a sequence in American Gods that involves autopsies and I'm going okay so right now talk me through this you're doing the whining shape incision you're taking them okay what are you putting the bucket yeah right you seal them off put the intestines in the bucket great what comes out next right right so when you're putting them back in what ordered you oh of course you have to put them back in the same water otherwise they wouldn't fit cool and it's just really interesting and exciting and it's the worst factor completely goes away the only time I've ever creeped myself out by something that I wrote was a short story called babycakes and what's interesting about that is it wasn't the writing of it that creeped me out it was about ten years after I wrote this story which I wrote for a PETA benefit comic and it was based a little bit on Jonathan Swift's a modest proposal and I thought well let's take that and just sort of and it just begins in a world in which people wake up one day and all the animals have gone away and they don't quite know what to do without animals you can't eat meat and you can't test dangerous products and after a while some bright spots is well what about babies they're not rational they're not thinking creatures they can't talk let's use babies and so I was I thought it's a rather good little little polemic and one day about a decade after I wrote it I came downstairs and my son was in my office sitting there listening to an audio book I did called warning contains language and babycakes is playing and I walked down and I start listening with this thing and going that is really and being absolutely creeped out by it you know what kind of sick mind comes up so I'd like to answer this on behalf of Clive Barker all the time yes you yeah oh that was it always had the same shape having said that when I began it I thought it was gonna be about 30 issues and then by about Sam I'm 15 I'm gonna maybe maybe it'll be 40 issues to tell this story and then I was saying to Karen I think maybe it'll wrap up around issue 60 and that it went to 75 surprised me but the shape of the story never changed it was I was talking to people last night at the the this comic book Legal Defense Fund benefit thing that we did which was rather wonderful actually they did a reading of two sandman stories the the Emperor Norton story and the pres golden boy story with showing the panels on the screen with eight voice actors doing the parts underneath and it really worked magnificently well I i I've been very I've been very doubtful before going into this so seeing how well it worked I've said we should we should do it for one of the big stories we should do doll's house so we should do game of you but I did a Q&A after and somebody asked something very similar and what I said then is is I said look it really the shape never changed I had the shape in my head but the it's as if you say okay I'm starting in Manhattan and I'm gonna hitchhike to Los Angeles and you know the shape of the journey you don't know everything that's gonna happen on the way you don't know that this person who enters your life at this point is gonna wind up being much more significant further down the road you don't know that you're gonna wind up getting stranded in this little town for much longer than you thought and you don't really know how long the journey is gonna take but you always know the shape of the journey and with Sandman I always knew the shape of the journey I I knew that we were heading through the for the wake from the very beginning because that was the story that I was telling over there yeah what is the what what does a fetus dream about but in in that story the the fetal drain it was it was a dream all about the things that it was gonna be it was it was all about Sandman was fundamentally designed around a pun or if not a pun it was always designed around the fact that the word dream has more than one meaning and there are dreams in the things that we close our eyes at night and go mad and experience and then there are dreams as in hopes and aspirations and dreams as in the stories that we tell ourselves that make sense of the world and the fact that I was always able to go from one meaning of Dreams to the other I think in many ways was almost the engine that drove Sandman so it would have been it would have been dreams in terms of dreams but it also would have been dreams in terms of hopes and aspirations and story you what inspired me to write the dream hunters are yoshitaka amano the his artwork Jenny Lee was the assistant editor at that point on Sandman and she was an enormous fan of Amano's work and we were coming up for the 10th anniversary and she suggested him to do a tenth anniversary poster and this glorious mr. Amano did this glorious poster of dream and I looked at it and said this is really wonderful and just thought we'd never I'd love the artwork and I love what he's doing and we've never done a Japanese Sandman story and at the time I was working I and I'd been working for a little while on doing the translation during the English language script not actually the translation but the English language script of Princess Mononoke have Mononoke he may and so I my head was roiling with strange Japanese stories and I went you know I'd love to write one of these so we approached mr. Amano and asked if he would be interested in doing a comic and he said he wouldn't be interested in doing a comic because he'd tried drawing a comic very early in his career and he just didn't have the engines he didn't have whatever made people do comics it didn't work for him but he would love to do an illustrated book if I would write a text so um that was so I did this gentleman here nobody nobody noticed was great I don't it's one of those moments where I I suspect there's somebody actually taking it down with a Superman division in the green lanten division and run it past them they might have said no you can't do that but I don't think anybody ever noticed it's great we're running down to our allotted time here I mean I could listen to you all night but we do have to wrap things up who has the single best last question ever but I mean it like no raise in the hand unless you deliver this like awesome question all right so the question for those who couldn't hear it is mythology is omnipresent in everything that I write and do when did I get interested in it and what were the stories that that hooked me I would have been about seven years old when I first picked up roger lancelyn green tales of the Norse men which was a bunch of Norse mythology which I picked up because it had Thor in and I had already run into a bunch of Marvel Comics Thor titles and some old Thor reprints in an English comic called fantastic so the the truth is that the initial you know the the the the the first jab to the veins would have been Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with their version of Norse and then going to retellings roger lancelyn green did some brilliant retellings and going this stuff is cool this stuff is cool and it's cool in a way that actually that other stuff wasn't this is really weird and the motivations are much order and then and I was seven spending my own money on tales of ancient Egypt by lancelin roger lancelyn green and reading his retelling of Egyptian myth and absolutely loving it and also CS Lewis the one of the things that I thought it was a real pity they actually took out of the Prince Caspian film was all of the cool wonderful greco-roman myth which is what got me hooked on that stuff the you know Bacchus and Salinas drunk on his donkey with the mean ads following along and stuff that was that was all part of the stuff that I read when I was again seven and was fascinated by and didn't know anything about but then wanted you know there was a man there he said that is against New York law probably the cellphone police are on their way so that anyway so that would have been the initial age I would have been six seven years old and I discovered myth and and I've loved it ever since and loved going deeper into it and love trying to find primary sources and love the different ways that we explain the world to each other love the way that stories start out holy you know you start out with these great religious stories and they're actually big and important and they they have fundamental sort of religious qualities they're how we explain the world to ourselves and then the stories start and suddenly you're into myth and you know that it's almost unfortunate in some way that some of the really cool stuff is not known the gospel of the infancy of Christ is filled with the stories that they were telling in the third century AD about Jesus when he was a little boy which were a lot like the stories he told about Superboy Superman when he was a boy only worse because you know if a teacher raised his hand against Jesus the hand would wither and at one point some kid they were playing with got pushed off a roof and people blame Jesus so he raised the kid from the dead long enough to say it wasn't Jesus it was him [Applause] there is a great point in the gospel of the infancy but what applause see one of the reasons why it hasn't you know sort of went out of currency is there is actually a moment in there where Mary the mother of God turns to Joseph and says if he's gonna keep killing people like this we're gonna have to stop him going out of their house which is not really what you don't really think of gentle Jesus meek and mild sort of zapping people at this kid but I love it because that's the mythology that's the the stories that accreted and that people told each other and the story engines I think I find far more fascinating than the actual religious stuff on top there you always had a good last question you made it one come on lighten up Neal thank you so much we all love what you do keep doing it forever and don't die [Applause] I think assuming I make it through tonight signee I'm pretty good for a while excellent thank you all for coming summer we'll be signing outside [Applause] you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 77,059

Rating: 4.9139299 out of 5

Keywords: Neil, Gaiman, Chip, Kidd, Sandman, 92Y

Id: 0ei9OQkQ2BU

Length: 85min 43sec (5143 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2009