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Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman (November 2004)
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Neil Gaiman (November 2004)

Neil Richard Gaiman (/'geɪ.mən/) (born November 10, 1960, Portchester, Hampshire) is an English Jewish author of numerous science fiction and fantasy works, including many graphic novels. As of 2005, he lives in or near Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. He is married to Mary T. McGrath, an American, and has two daughters, Holly and Maddy, and a son, Michael.

Contents

Biography

As a child and a teenager, Gaiman grew up reading the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton. He later became a fan of science fiction, reading the works of authors as diverse as Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison and especially Gene Wolfe. Gaiman also read and enjoyed the works of Thorne Smith, to whose zany supernatural wit he attributes partial inspiration for Anansi Boys.

Although Jewish, he was educated at several Church of England schools. There, he studied both standard school topics as well as religion classes. At the same time, he trained to become Bar Mitzvah with an Orthodox Jewish cantor. This training gave him a wide background in both Jewish and Christian theology/apocrypha, which he incorporates heavily into his works, perhaps most notably in The Sandman.

In the early 1980s, Gaiman pursued journalism, conducting interviews and writing book reviews, as a means to learn about the world and to make connections that he hoped would later assist him in getting published. In 1984, he wrote his first book, a biography of the band Duran Duran, as well as Ghastly Beyond Belief, a book of quotations, with Kim Newman. He also wrote interviews and articles for many English magazines, including Knave. In the late 1980s, he wrote in what he calls a "classic English humour" style. Following on from that he wrote the opening of what would become his collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the comic novel Good Omens, about the impending apocalypse [link].

After forming a friendship with famed comic book scribe Alan Moore, Gaiman started writing comics, picking up Miracleman after Moore finished his run on the series. Gaiman and artist Mark Buckingham collaborated on several issues of the series before its publisher, Eclipse Comics, collapsed, leaving the series unfinished. He wrote two British graphic novels with his favorite collaborator and long-time friend Dave McKean, Violent Cases and Signal to Noise. Later, he landed a job with DC Comics, his first work being the limited series Black Orchid.

He has written a plethora of comics for several publishers, but his best-known work is the comics series The Sandman, which chronicles the tale of Morpheus, the anthropomorphic personification of Dream. (See The Endless.) The series began a small cultural sensation, gathering a devout following and making comic books respectable to many new audiences. The series began in 1987 and ended in 1996 when Gaiman ended the successful series as he had intended; a first for near-mainstream comics. All 75 issues of the regular series have been collected into 10 volumes that are still in print and selling well.

In 1989, Gaiman published The Books of Magic (collected in 1991), a four-part mini-series that provided a tour of the mythological and magical parts of the DC Universe through a frame story about an English teenager who discovers that he has a destiny as the world's greatest wizard. The miniseries was popular, and sired an ongoing series, also called The Books of Magic, written by John Ney Reiber. Many people have noted similarities between series protagonist Tim Hunter and the later and more famous Harry Potter; when referring to this similarity, Gaiman indicates that the young man as sorcerer has precedent in literature.

In the 90's, he also created some comic book characters and the world they were living in for Tekno Comix, even if he didn't write the stories. These were Neil Gaiman's Lady Justice, Neil Gaiman's Mr. Hero the Newmatic Man, Neil Gaiman's , Neil Gaiman's Teknophage, and Neil Gaiman's Wheel of Worlds.

Gaiman also writes songs, poems and novels, and wrote the 1997 BBC dark fantasy television series Neverwhere, which he later adapted into a novel. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie MirrorMask with his old friend Dave McKean for McKean to direct. In addition, he wrote the English language script to the anime movie Princess Mononoke, based on a translation of the Japanese script. Several of his works have been optioned or greenlighted for film adaptation, most notably Stardust which will feature Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer, according to Variety.

Gaiman is a Board Member as well as an active supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and he regularly participates in fundraisers for the group including creating materials such as the original Snow, Glass, Apples along with a book called "Gods and Tulips" to which the CBLDF owns the copyright.

In February 2001, when Gaiman had completed writing American Gods, his publishers set up a promotional web site featuring a weblog (some time before they became as popular as they are now) in which Gaiman described the day-to-day process of revising, publishing, and promoting the novel. After the novel was published, the web site evolved into a more general Official Neil Gaiman Web Site, and as of 2006 Gaiman still regularly adds to the weblog, describing the day-to-day process of being Neil Gaiman and writing, revising, publishing, or promoting whatever the current project is.

The original American Gods blog was extracted for publication in the NESFA Press collection of Gaiman miscellany, Adventures in the Dream Trade.

Gaiman has also written at least three drafts of a screenplay adaptation of Nicholson Baker's novel The Fermata for director Robert Zemeckis, although the project was stalled while Zemeckis made Polar Express and the Gaiman-Roger Avary written Beowulf film. Beowulf is a motion capture film starring Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie with a scheduled release date of October 2007.

Several of Gaiman's original works are in various stages of being adapted for film. Gaiman may direct the film adaptation of . Matthew Vaughn is directing the film adaptation of Stardust and Henry Selick is directing a stop-motion version of Coraline.

Gaiman forged an intense friendship with singer Tori Amos in the early nineties. Before she achieved stardom, she sent him a demo tape of her album Little Earthquakes via a polite gentleman at a booksigning who handed over the tape with words along the lines of "you're mentioned in some of the songs - please don't sue!", and they became fast friends. As such, references have been made to Gaiman (often rather cryptically) in at least one of her songs on each of her albums. He also wrote the forewords to several of her tour programs as well as short stories to accompany her album Strange Little Girls and Scarlet's Walk. (Excerpts appeared in the album booklet.) Some of her lyrical mentions:

The lyric "Where's Neil When You Need Him?" is also the title of Neil's 2006 album. Tori and sixteen other artists wrote songs about their favorite Gaiman stories or characters; Neil wrote the liner notes and Dave McKean did the artwork.

Gaiman is also a friend of science fiction and comic book writer J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the television series Babylon 5. There is a species of aliens on that series called the Gaim; their heads closely resemble the helmet worn by Gaiman's Sandman character. However Straczynski has stated the aliens' appearance was based more on gas masks than on the King of Dreams' helm (itself inspired by the gas mask worn by the original World-War-2-era Sandman), and that the name came after the resemblance was noted. Gaiman is also the only writer other than Straczynski to have contributed to the series' final three seasons; he wrote the season 5 episode "Day of the Dead". Additionally, Gaiman wrote the foreword to the first volume of Straczynski's Rising Stars.

In 2002, Neil Gaiman filed and won a lawsuit against Todd McFarlane involving three supporting Spawn characters: Cogliostro, Medieval Spawn, and Angela. In 1991 McFarlane had asked Gaiman (as well as other recognized authors like Frank Miller and Dave Sim) to write one issue of his Spawn series. While doing so, Gaiman introduced the three previously-mentioned characters. McFarlane had agreed that Gaiman was not signing away any rights but later claimed that Gaiman's work had been work-for-hire and that McFarlane owned all of Gaiman's creations entirely. McFarlane had also refused to pay Gaiman for the volumes of Gaiman's work he republished and kept in print. Gaiman won a sizeable judgement against McFarlane and against Image Comics.

This legal battle was in part funded by Marvels and Miracles, LLC, which Gaiman created in order to help sort out the legal copyrights surrounding Miracleman (see the ownership of Miracleman sub-section of the Miracleman article). Gaiman wrote Marvel 1602 in 2003 to help fund this project. All of Marvel Comics' profits for the series go to Marvels and Miracles.

As of 2005 he has completed a new novel, titled Anansi Boys which had a worldwide simultaneous release. The book deals with Anansi ('Mr. Nancy'), a supporting character in American Gods. Specifically it traces the relationship of his two sons, one semi-divine and the other an unaware Englishman, as they explore their common heritage. It hit the New York Times bestseller list at number one [link].

As of June 2006, he has returned to Marvel Comics, writing a remake of Jack Kirby's the Eternals.

He is one of the Guests of Honour at [Orbital 2008] the British National Science Fiction convention (Eastercon) to be held in London in March 2008. He is one of very few writers to be honoured by being invited to be a Guest of Honour for a second time, other writers so honoured have included John Brunner and Bob Shaw.

Awards

Gaiman received a World Fantasy Award for short fiction in 1991 for the Sandman issue, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (see ). (Due to a subsequent rules change disqualifying comics for that category, Gaiman is the only writer to win that award for a comics script.)

He received the 2002 Hugo Award for best novel for American Gods, which also won the 2002 Nebula Award.

In 2003 Coraline won the Hugo best novella award.

In 2004, his short story "A Study in Emerald" won another Hugo (in a ceremony the author presided over himself, having volunteered for the job before his story was nominated).

In addition, he has won 13 Eisner Awards for his comics work, two Nebula Awards and three World Horror Awards.

Stardust won the Mythopoeic Award.

He has also won the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1992 and 1993, and received nominations in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000.

From the comics fans in the rec.arts.comics* newsgroups, Gaiman won the Squiddy Award for Best Writer five years in a row from 1990 to 1994. He was also named Best Writer of the 1990s in the Squiddy Awards for the decade.

Neil Gaiman and Shakespeare

Like Terry Pratchett (with whom he collaborated on Good Omens), Neil Gaiman draws on Shakespeare as a literary source.

Allusions to the writings of the bard can be found in Anansi Boys, where several lines of Hamlet have a cameo appearance and where the situation of the protagonist is compared to Macbeth more than once.

In The Sandman, Shakespeare himself appears in three stories throughout the series. In these appearances he makes and fulfills a deal with Morpheus, who grants Shakespeare the gift of writing in exchange for two plays 'celebrating dreams': A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest. The first of these instances is in comic issue #13, "Men of Good Fortune"; the other two are entitled after the plays in which he fulfills the bargain.

It is worth noting that The Tempest, the last of the comics to be written as the main series, is also Shakespeare's last solo play.

Bibliography

Comics & graphic novels

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Prose

(includes works consisting of illustrated text as opposed to comic-book form)

Audio

(Citation information taken from WorldCat.)

Film and television

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
[] at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  • [A Conversation with Neil Gaiman], published in Otium
  • [I, Cthulhu] - short story by Neil Gaiman

    • References

     

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