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NPR Weekend Edition

From Liane Hansen’s interview with Art Spiegelman about Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night, broadcast on NPR Weekend Edition on September 21st:

…LIANE HANSEN: One example that is just delightful, and it’s two people who are well-known even outside, I think, the comic-novel world and the comics world, it’s one that’s done by Neil Gaiman, who’s very famous for doing the Sandman series, and Gahan Wilson whose cartoons appear in the New Yorker, in Playboy, for a long time, and he’s always been famous for–I always remember his characters always seemed to drip or melt. They’re green and there’s always, you know, something liquid.

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Right. There’s something also about the sensibility that makes him kind of the inheritor of the Charles Addams tradition somehow.

HANSEN: Exactly. Exactly. Had Neil Gaiman and Gahan Wilson ever worked together before?

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Actually, it was Neil’s idea, because they wanted to work together and it seemed like, `That’s the perfect place; we can do it here.’

HANSEN: Tell us the story that Neil and Gahan…

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Oh, it’s about some little kids who want to have a birthday party, and are forbidden from having it at home because too much Jell-O got thrown last time. And the kids decide to have the party in a graveyard. And the noise and music that they make in the graveyard wakes the dead, who come join the party. And a great time is had by both the corpses and the kids before they return home at dawn.

HANSEN: And the corpses are, again, the wonderful green with the one eye and they play cool games like Blind Corpses Bluff and–this is something that kids–I mean, sometimes parents can go `Eww,’ but the kids really love it.

Mr. SPIEGELMAN: Well, it’s all handled so benignly. These are all within that world of the safety zone that’s outside the world of Freddy and Jason movies…