Neil
Gaiman
Aladdin
Theater, 3017 SE Milwaukie Ave., 233-1994
8 pm Tuesday,
Oct. 24
$16-$20
Gaiman's tour
benefits the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit
group dedicated to defending comic-book artists, readers
and retailers from the malign attentions of Johnny Law.
www.cbldf.org.
Gaiman describes
his forthcoming novel, American Gods, as "either
a fantasy novel, a theological thriller or a short horror
novel."
You expect a conversation with Neil Gaiman to come edged in
black, accented by a note of finality.
Gaiman, after all, wrote the sublimely dark early '90s
comic-book sensation Sandman and has since spun a
formidable body of fantastic fiction. Sandman, which
unseated Superman and Batman at the top of DC Comics' sales
charts, took place in a dense universe of brooding eternal
overlords, capricious gods and suffering mortals, all draped
in permanent chiaroscuro.
Sandman's title character, Morpheus, a fright-faced
king of dreams, looked a damn sight like the Cure's Robert
Smith. Morpheus spoke in white letters scrawled on black
speech balloons--a direct reversal of comic-book convention.
Likewise, the series tipped the comic industry's apple cart,
proving that a literate and ambitious title could become
oddly compelling even to those of us who rarely don special
trenchcoats in preparation for long nights of role-playing.
More to the point, Gaiman seems like he's almost as interested
in the ends of things as their beginnings. He pulled the
plug on Sandman at the height of its popularity;
now, with a novel set to hit bookstore shelves in February
and numerous movie and TV deals in the works, he's ending
a wildly popular series of reading tours with four finales
at theaters around the country.
WW spoke with Gaiman by phone before his arrival
in Portland.
Willamette Week: You say this is your last reading
tour. What can people expect?
Neil Gaiman: To be honest, part of the fun is not
knowing what will happen. I know I'll read from American
Gods, because I've got this new novel that no one knows
anything about. And since this is the last tour of all,
I want to do some things that have become absolute favorites
on previous tours. I'll probably do all the short stories
that I've sworn I'd never do at a reading again. I'm being
more of a whore this time--well, that's probably not the
right way to put it. I'm being more considerate of what
people might want to hear.
Although you've written a few novels and a lot of other
stuff, Sandman continues to receive the lion's share
of attention from fans. Is that fair?
Sandman does tend to get a disproportionate share
of the attention, but that's okay with me, because it's
a disproportionate share of the work. Sandman is
2,000 pages long, it's in 10 volumes and it took eight years
of my life to do. But when people ask me, how does it feel
that you'll always be remembered for a comic book, I point
out that I've also written a children's book. It happens,
more often than you'd think, that if writers are remembered
at all, it's because they've written for children. There's
A.A. Milne, who wrote Winnie-the-Pooh and at one
time was the most brilliant dramatist in London's West End,
the sharpest editor Punch had ever known, an essayist,
wit and all that. E.B. White is now remembered exclusively
for Charlotte's Web.
Someone wrote that Sandman scratched a growing
itch for stories of the unknown, stories that suggest that
there's a lot of mystery lurking behind reality. All of
your work seems to imply that what we see is only a fraction
of what's going on. Why?
What fantasy writing is all about is trying to give back
more magic than you found. It's about trying to say to people
that, hey, this is a wonderful, mysterious, cool place.
Fiction, and particularly fiction of the fantastic, shows
you the world as you've never seen it, and sends you back
changed. That's the joy of it, and sometimes the heartbreak,
too. When someone says to me that Sandman helped
them deal with their father dying, or their baby dying,
well, that's not why I wrote it. But I'm glad to hear that,
because I helped.
Your work is usually thick with literary, historical
and mythological references--Sandman alone could
keep an annotator busy for years. What the hell do you read?
You tend not to read with a point of view. You read and
read, and then you get to a place where you need something,
and you go rummage around in the pack-rat attic of your
head and find things. Once at dinner, I was explaining something
odd to my son, and he looked at me the way only 13-year-olds
can look at their parents and said, "Why do you know this
stuff?" And I said, "Well, scoff all you want, but my knowing
this stuff bought you that dinner." If I didn't have a place
to tell these stories, I'd be an incredibly boring, Cliff
Claven type of person, spouting useless ephemera. "Did you
know that Emperor So-and-so used to drown people in rose
petals, well, yes he did...." That sort of thing.
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