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Sims is a weird one. He demonizes woman as unproductive and emotional, yet Cerebus (especially early on) is filled with powerful and rational women. The Cirinist (matriarchal) nation may be frightening, but it's powerful, growing, and holds a self-consistent (if scary) belief system. His essays in Reads and the later in Tangents depict someone completely divorced from reality, someone you cannot rationally debate. His letters responding to people asking for free comics he offered are well writte, witty, and suggest someone I'd enjoy talking with, even if we disagreed. (The offer of a free comic is real and still open.)

Sim's beliefs are certainly relevant, especially since they were printed in his comics. However, it's also important to not write off his work because of those beliefs. Much great art has been created by racists, homophobes, sexists, and all sorts of negative -ists. You can condemn the beliefs, but you still have respect the work itself. Cerebus, especially its early years, is an important milestone is comic art.

For anyone interested in checking out Sims's work, do not start with the first book, Cerebus. It's an only adequate parody of low-fantasy. My local comic shop owner pointed me to book two, High Society. That's where his political and social parody begins and the series becomes noteworthy. In fact, you can basically skip the entire "Sims gets weird" and enjoy what are arguably his best (or at least most popular) works by getting books 2 through 4 (High Society (parodying government and politics), Church & State I and II (parodying religion and politics. Book II gets a little weird...), and Jaka's Story (Really good, not really parody, and hard to describe. Themes include growing up, priviledge, women in society, and truth.)).

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

Psst, it's a hoax.

Neil Gaiman's winning short story is up on his site, if anyone cares to read it. It's quite good, particularly if you're a fan of Sherlock Holmes, Cthulu mythology, or both.

Wasn't this shown to be a fraud? -F

How can you have a post on graphic novels without including Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" series? ;)

Seriously, this is some of the most amazing stuff ever to come out, both with respect to storyline and art. Gaiman is a master wordsmith and weaves elements of ancient religion, existential philosophy, and wry british humor into his works. More here, here, and at Gaiman's Blog.

Seriously, check it out. This stuff is awesome :)

-JT

Yes, funny and insightful ones. Like Neil Gaiman's, and Anne's.

I found that line... amusing. Because we all know that American comics are "just for kids," right?

I liked American Gods better when it was called The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul by Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker's Guide fame. It was more cohesive, funnier, and kept my attention by keeping the story moving. American Gods seemed like a poorly written attempt to rewrite the story by adding some poorly written sex subtext. Of course, it also has American in the title, so it is more patriotic for us Americans. LDTTotS was written way back in 1988; Gaiman must feel that everybody would have forgotten it by now, since he did not even put it in the bibliography for AG

Douglas Adams died unexpectedly in May, 2001, so he could not complain when Neil released AG the next month. Anybody want to create a conspiracy theory about the timing of the Adams' unexpected heart-attack. Maybe the book writing business is cut-throat in the literal sense.

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How can you go from Terry Pratchett to Neil Gaiman? Pratchett is more like Robert Asprin, Christopher Stasheff, Jody Lynn Nye, or anybody with a sense of humor.

Gaiman is more like required reading for high school: very slow moving with an ending that makes you wish you had quit in chapter 3 when you thought you had figured out the rest of the book, and you were correct. (My opinion is from American Gods. I think I have read another of Gaiman's books, but it was completely forgettable. At least AG made a bad impression.)

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If you have not read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to get the ideas without the boredom. If you have already read American Gods, then read The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul to see how well the story could have been told.

In Gaiman's Sandman series (I forget which book exactly), a character spoke of the behaviour of a parliament of rooks. A whole load of rooks will gather in a field, encircling one of their number, who will 'speak' at some length. When he finishes, the rest of the parliament, as one, will either take off in flight or descend on the speaker and kill him dead.

William Gibson just stopped blogging, stating that informal blog/journal writing gets in the way of writing fiction.

Is there a conflict for you between maintaining your journal, and writing fiction? How do you manage your time / ideas / approach, in order to stay active in both?

I was extra amused because he mentioned on his journal that he was going to be doing an Ask Slashdot about a couple of weeks ago. <g>

You have a journal online at http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/journal.asp. What kind of an impact has your journal had on your interactions with the public? What thoughts do you have regarding online journals (aka weblogs) in general?

Just as long as it's not this.

Seriously, Gaiman rocks. I'm reading American Gods right now and it's very consuming. Sandman, MiracleMan, Neverwhere, etc, he doesn't stop putting out original quality stuff. He's also got a blog http://www.neilgaiman.com. Isn't Amazon always cheaper than bn? The O'Reilly books especially.

Assuming you're not a troll, Sandman was/is a comic written by Neil Gaiman about Morpheus, the ruler of the realm of dreams. It borrowed a lot from folklore and mythology, ran for 75 issues and was the flagship for DC comics' Vertigo line. Critically acclaimed, it won a World Fantasy Award for short story before the powers-that-be banned comics from eligibility. For more info: neilgaiman.com

Author Neil Gaiman, who also blogs, has some comments on this point in his blog.

One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.

Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)

Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.

Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.

One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.

Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)

Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.

Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.

Neil Gaiman wrote the original script for Mononoke, but it was changed before it actually got to the final version. there's a good writeup of what happened on neilgaiman.com (go figure) on this and other of his film exploits

Weirdest of all is hiring Neil Gaiman to "adapt" the script. God knows what that means. He didn't even make the obvious change: correcting the translators misnaming of various smoothbore weapons as "rifles".

Being a huge fan of both Gaiman and Miyazaki I can shed some light here. Much of the script for the film (and any film really) has to be changed for a dub. Jokes, word-play, historical references, and the like usually have to be either somehow explained (with added exposition) or modified to similar item in the new language. That sort of thing is what Gaiman did. They used him in particular so he could help maintain the mythic feel and tone the movie had.

So essentially what happened was a few professional translators went through the film and did the literal word-for-word translation of the whole thing. Then they sat down with Gaiman (plus Gaiman did a lot of research on his own) and walked through it all and converted that into an english script that was both comprehensible to an american and stayed true to the original vision. As for calling the muskets/blunderbusses rifles, that was Disney's call. They had final editorial control and for some reason were adamant about calling the things rifles. Gaiman actually mentioned this in particular in his blog as one of the things he was confused by/unsatisfied with, believe it or not. There's more detail to be had if you search in his archives here.

I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the link between this article and a book by popular-with-geeks author Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (information on Everything).

If you've never read it, I recommend it, very reality bending and a good read besides.

Here we go-- this is as I understand it, and trimmed down considerably.

The background:

-Todd McFarlane is a comic writer and artist. He and six others left Marvel Comics in 1992 and cofounded a company called Image Comics, based on creative rights and ownership and whatnot. (He's the creator of "Spawn," if you're familiar with the comic, movie, or cartoon.)

-Neil Gaiman is a writer. He's worked mostly for DC Comics, and created the wildly popular "Sandman" series. He's since left comics, mostly, and these days writes novels that win lots of awards.

-Miracleman is an old character published by some of the big companies. In the 80s two writers took a swing at him-- Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman-- and created some very, very good work out of it, stories whose reputations have only grown in time. It was work for hire, though, and so reprint rights remained with DC Comics. Reprint rights since then have been shuffled about here and there for whatever reasons, and eventually landed in Todd McFarlane's lap.

The History:

-In 1992 Gaiman wrote an issue of "Spawn" for McFarlane. In doing this, he created several characters for the series that grew very popular. The characters continued to appear in "Spawn" and were even given their own series. McFarlane promised Gaiman a cut of the profits, but never wrote the check.

-In 1995 McFarlane and Gaiman reached an agreement (the "Oakland agreement"). Gaiman would give up most of his interests in the "Spawn" characters he created (except for a small percentage of profit), and in exchange, McFarlane would hand over his rights to Miracleman (which Gaiman wanted so that he could allow somebody to reprint the old stories). Again, McFarlane never bothered to cut a check, and apparently denies the agreement was made altogether.

-And so Gaiman filed suit. And he won yesterday. Apparently the punishment will be handed down next. From the sound of things, he's going to be basically asking that the terms of the Oakland agreement are held up. What Gaiman has wanted from the beginning has been reprint rights to some of his old stories.

So there you have it, basically. You can follow the links in the original story for updates. If you're interested, Gaiman keeps a very pleasant online journal.

If I may throw in my two cents-- McFarlane here has been greedy and hypocritical. He co-founded Image Comics as a creator's haven, and then proceeded to do to exactly what he'd always complained about during his time at Marvel. At least Marvel is up-front about their contracts.

It's not like McFarlane doesn't have the money. He dropped something like two million bucks for Mark McGwire's historic home run ball way back when. He runs a little publishing mini-empire, fueled by "Spawn's" success.

To the poster that called Gaiman the "little guy," that's a little distorted. Gaiman is about as big a name is comics as they come-- but he's also a reasonable fellow, and wished it wouldn't have come to this.

So that's that. Most of the comics industry these days thinks of McFarlane as a bloated, success-spoiled asshole, because of things like this. Yesterday, he got what's coming to him.

In horror: Bram Stoker Award (winner)
In fantasy: World Fantasy Award (nominated, the winner has not been decided yet)
In sci-fi: Hugo Award (winner)

Look at the tons of other awards in Neil Gaiman's collection.

Author's website
Signed edition available
Article on CNN about marketing the book
buy at Amazon
Buy at B+N
Review on Salon
Excerpt available

I suggest consulting Gaiman's weblog which he tends to update at least daily. That way you get his writing without having to wait for the next book, comments, opinions, essays, little short stori es he throws in just because, cool things he's found, etc. a

I can understand why, as B&N is a little obfuscated in their language, but Neil's site seems to imply that while there will be a coraline release in Union Square at 6pm, he himself will be in San Fran at 6:30... which strongly conflicts with a personal appearance in New York...

Never heard of the dude. Did come across the Baen Free Library once and didn't see anything on there worth the downloading... It's just a gimmick.
When it comes to pirated books on the internet, here's Neil Gaiman on the theme. Read from Monday April 8th to Wednesday April 10th.
And yes, he's already had the hatemail from 'information wants to be free' freeloaders who like nothing more than to deny people of their income.

"If you buy one of my books (or are sent it to review) it's yours. You bought it (or were given it). You can sell it on. I don't have any more of a problem with Amazon listing the used copies than I do bookstores having used book sections. It's their store.

You can buy a book new, buy it in hardback or wait for the paperback, find it used or as a collectible. I don't mind. What I care about most is that people are reading.

As I said when I discussed this at length in the piece I put up on this journal, that was quoted in Wired, last month, books don't come with single-end-user licenses, and I think that's a good thing."

Makes sense to me.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

Are Authors Abused by Used? is an article by M.J. Rose up on Wired.com that means that I am quoted on the front page of Wired.com... although I'm quoted on the front page as "An Author" (presumably on the basis that my name wouldn't mean anything to Wired readers)...

Seeing that only that one quote makes it into the article, here's the full text of my reply to M.J. Rose's e-mail asking whether or not I thought that authors were being abused by used booksellers...

Well, bear in mind that the background I come from is that of comics, where a trade in back issues is part of the terrain. When Sandman #1 was trading for $100 a copy, I saw none of that, and had long since assumed that the trade in old books and comics went with the territory, and was a good thing in the long run: if someone reads a book of mine in paperback, or borrows it from a friend, or gets it for half-price on a book-trading site or in a store where they sell second-hand paperbacks along with aquariums, pet-food and vacuum-cleaner parts, or picks it up in a battered hardback from a remainder table, they're finding out whether or not they like what I write. And if they do then one day, if they can afford it, they'll be lining up to buy a new hardback, or a new paperback.

Lord knows, most of the books I bought in my teens were bought second hand. Sometimes they smelled kind of weird, but it was the only way I was going to read old Sheckley or Lafferty or Peter O' Donnell.

Books, like magazines, have pass-along rates. They don't come with single-user software licenses. I think this is a good thing. If I read a book and like it, I'll lend it to you and hope you give it back. (GOOD OMENS has probably sold a couple of million copies by now, internationally, but its pass-along rate is tens of times that, judging by the copies people bring to signings, which have been lent to everyone they know, are held together with tape and dried soup, and have obviously been dropped into the bath at some point.)

Obviously, it makes me uncomfortable when I see Amazon erroneously listing books that are in print as out of print and sending people to used book dealers to buy them, just as it makes me uncomfortable when I see people on E-Bay paying $75 for my spoken word double CD "Warning Contains Language", which they could get from DreamHaven new for less than half that. There's not a lot one can do about these things, other than write to publishers telling them to ask Amazon to update their database.

This is probably much more than you wanted. Still, to make it explicit: I don't regard every second-hand book sold as a dollar taken from my mouth. I've already been paid for that book at some point. I regard second-hand sales as things that make future readers.

posted by Neil Gaiman 6:06 AM

Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman comics, wrote the english dialog. Apparently, he had to spend a LOT of time making sure that the mouths matched up with the words he was writing in, so it's understandable that most low budget dubs don't bother.

I thought the new dialogue was excellent -- it was written by Neil Gaiman.

But I can't judge between the two, as I've not (yet?) gotten the chance to see the film with the original dialogue.

Once again, I'd like to refer to what Neil Gaiman wrote in his journal once he heard of Douglas' death: I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print. (the Saturday, May 12, 2001 entry).

Once again, I'd like to refer to what Neil Gaiman wrote in his journal once he heard of Douglas' death: I hope that his death isn't followed by the publishing of all the stuff he hadn't wanted to see print. (the Saturday, May 12, 2001 entry).