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Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman (November 14, 2004)
Neil Gaiman (November 14, 2004)
BornNovember 10, 1960
Portchester, Hampshire, England
OccupationNovelist, comics writer, screenwriter
NationalityEnglish
Period1980s—present
GenreScience fiction, fantasy
Website
http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Neil Richard Gaiman (/'geɪ.mən/) (born November 10, 1960, Portchester, Hampshire) is an English author of numerous science fiction and fantasy works, including many graphic novels. As of 2006, he lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA[1][2][3]. He is married to Mary T. McGrath and has two daughters, Holly and Maddy, and a son, Michael.

Biography

Early life

As a child and a teenager, Gaiman grew up reading the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock 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, H.P. Lovecraft, 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 of Jewish origins, he was educated at several Church of England schools, including Ardingly College, West Sussex, an independent boarding school. There, he studied both standard school topics as well as religion classes. 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.

Journalism and early writings

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 Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion 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 [4].

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.

Graphic Novels

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 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 (along with one special) 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 a number of new characters and worlds for Tekno Comix, though Gaiman did not write the stories. Featuring Gaiman's name prominently on the cover, the short-lived books were Lady Justice, Mr. Hero the Newmatic Man, Phage: Shadow Death, Teknophage, and Wheel of Worlds.

Gaiman wrote a semi-autobiographical story about a boy's fascination with Michael Moorcock's anti-hero Elric for Ed Kramer's anthology Tales of the White Wolf. In 1996, Gaiman and Ed Kramer co-edited The Sandman: Book of Dreams. Nominated for the British Fantasy Award, the original fiction anthology featured stories and contributions by Tori Amos, Clive Barker, Gene Wolfe, Tad Williams, and others.

Novels and films

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 is currently in post-production and will star Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer and Claire Danes. Coraline is currently in production with Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher in the leading roles.

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.

Adaptations

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 Death: The High Cost of Living. Matthew Vaughn is directing the film adaptation of Stardust and Henry Selick is directing a stop-motion version of Coraline.

Friendships

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:

  • "If you need me, me and Neil'll be hangin' out with the dream king / Neil said hi, by the way" ("Tear In Your Hand," 1992)
  • "Seems I keep getting this story twisted, so where's Neil when you need him?" ("Space Dog," 1994)
  • "Will you find me if Neil makes me a tree?" ("Horses," 1996) — Gaiman based the character of the talking tree in Stardust on Amos at her request after Neil stayed with her while beginning work on the novel
  • "Where are the Velvets?" ("Hotel," 1998) — the Velvets being vampire-like characters from Gaiman's novel Neverwhere
  • "Get me Neil on the line... / have him read Snow, Glass, Apples" ("Carbon," 2002)

The lyric "Where's Neil When You Need Him?" is also the title of a 2006 tribute album to Neil. 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.

Snow, Glass, Apples is Gaiman's retelling of Snow White published in the collection Smoke and Mirrors in 1998. It was also performed by Seeing Ear Theatre as an audio play.

In reciprocation, when Tori went on tour in 1994, Neil wrote the introduction in her concert program, which began with the sentence, "Hi, by the way." He also modeled the Sandman character Delirium after Tori's personality, and the character often resembled her (especially when drawn by Jill Thompson during the Brief Lives story arc).

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.

2005 onwards

In 2005, his novel Anansi Boys was simultaneously released worldwide. 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 of American origin, as they explore their common heritage. It hit the New York Times bestseller list at number one [5].

In June 2006, Gaiman returned to Marvel Comics, writing a relaunching of Jack Kirby's the Eternals.

He is scheduled to be 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 Dream Country). (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 has won the Comics Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer for the years 1991-1993, and received nominations from 1997-2000. His work on Sandman was awarded the Favourite Comic Book Story for 1991 and 1994.

The illustrated version of Stardust won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature 1999.

American Gods won the Hugo Award for Best Novel 2002, the Nebula Award for Best Novel 2002 and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel 2001

Coraline won the Hugo Award for Best Novella 2003, the Nebula Award for Best Novella 2003 and the Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers 2002.

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).

Marvel 1602 Volume 1 which Gaiman wrote and had illustrated by Andy Kubert won the Best Graphic Novel at the 2005 Quill awards.

Anansi Boys won him a second Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature in 2006.

In addition, he has won 14 Eisner Awards for his comics work.

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 inspiration 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.

Bibliography

Main article: Neil Gaiman Bibliography

Neil Gaiman has written many comics and graphic novels, as well as numerous books (including 5 novels). He has also created a number of audio books, a TV miniseries, and the scripts for several movies.

See Also

References

  1. ^ McGinty, Stephen (February 25, 2006). "Dream weaver". The Scotsman. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ "A writer's life: Neil Gaiman". The Telegraph. December 12, 2005. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "Neil Gaiman - Biography". Biography. Retrieved 2006-06-21.
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ [2]
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