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Neil on AOL

Straight from AOL, here’s a transcript of Neil’s interview on February uh… 24 (?) 1996. I’ve done a bit of editing to clean it up and boldface the speakers’ names.

OnlineHost:
OnlineHost: *** You are in “The Odeon”. ***
OnlineHost:
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s event with SANDMAN creator NEIL GAIMAN will begin in three minutes.
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s DC COMICS ONLINE event with Sandman creator NEIL GAIMANwill begin in two minutes!
DCOMLeib: Tonight’s event with DEATH creator NEIL GAIMAN will begin momentarily….
DCOMLeib: Welcome to tonight’s VERY special DC COMICS ONLINE EVENT!
DCOMLeib: With me here this evening, making his first DC ONLINE appearance is SANDMAN creator NEIL GAIMAN!
DCOMLeib: The highly anticipated sequel to the DEATH miniseries is on sale now!
DCOMLeib: DEATH: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE is its title!
DCOMLeib: Welcome Neil!
NGaiman223: Thanks. Hi. Fire away!
DCOMLeib: Okay…first up….from SHADES30….
Question: Why did you decide to focus on Foxglove and Hazel in the first issue of DEATH: TOYL?
NGaiman223: Because it was their story. Death crops up a bit more in ish 2 an d3.
NGaiman223: but DTOYL is the story ABOUT Foxglove and Hazel. That’s why I focused on them.
DCOMLeib: Next up from ZoesNo1Fan……..
Question: I have only one question for Neil. I know Tori Amos did a song with you and the Dream Question: King on her first LP. She also thanks you on her 2 subsequent LP’s. Have you two ever met? And do you enjoy her music?
NGaiman223: i’m in a song called Space Dog and I’m in Horses on the third. I hadn’t met Tori when she recorded and made up Tear in Your Hand. I’d encountered Tori in 1991… Summer, San Diego Comic Con. I was doing a signing and I was given a tape by a guy called Rantz Hoseley. He said It’s by a friend of mine.
NGaiman223: It was wonderful. There was a phone number in there. I calle dher up and said you’re terrific do you do this professionally? She said its going to come out and be called Little Earthquakes.
NGaiman223: We met up in England in Sep. Oct. 1991. She was doing a gig in a placed called the Notting Hill Brasserie and her audience consisted of a roadie, a press person, the owner of The Brasserie who was having a little birthday dinner, and me.
NGaiman223: After the dinner, we wandered off together through London and she acted out the video she just made “Silent All These Years,” on the subway and we went off for the first of a number of absolutely appalling meals, which we’ve had together all over the world. We eat apart very well, but put us together and our food karma is very bad.
NGaiman223: She’s meant to be coming down on the set of the TV series sometime in the next couple of weeks and the girl who plays the female lead in my Tv series is a rabid Tori Amos fan, so she’s looking forward to meeting her an awful lot. And i’ve just written a very short story for the tour booklet on Tori’s next tour. It’s basically about what I thought about when I heard the new album, “Boys For Pele” If anybody wants to know any moreo about Tori, I suppose they can ask more questions.
DCOMLeib: You’re here with NEIL GAIMAN on DC COMICS ONLINE!
DCOMLeib: Next up…from Nachro2…
Question: Is there anything similar to Mr. Punch planned?
NGaiman223: There’s a Mr. Punch CD ROM in the works which Dave McKean is making. And it’s very beautiful from what I’ve seen of it and it’s quite remarkable. And ther’es alsso a Signal to Noise radio play in the works right now. I’m writing a radio play for England’s Radio 3 based on and about Signal to Noise. I would like to go back in 4 or 5 years, maybe, as long past Mr. Punch as mr. Punch was past Violent Cases and do the next one of those books. Violent Cases takes place when the narrator is about 4 and isn’t scared of anything. Mr Punch takes place when the narrator is about 8 and is scared of everything. and the next one of those takes place when the narrator is about 12. When the narrator is about 12 his fears are becoming a lot more specific.’
DCOMLeib: From RCurrank……
Question: Do any of the other endless interact with death in this series?
NGaiman223: Nope.
DCOMLeib: From Lunar Elf…
Question: What were you like as a child?
NGaiman223: I was the kid with the book. Basically. If you talk to any of my family, at a family gathering, weddings, barmitzvahs, funerals, I’d be the kid sitting behind the armcharr or under the table reading a book. I used to make stuff up a lot. I tended to regard books as friend. I was a terrible bright kid on an academic sense.
NGaiman223: From inside I remember myself as a completely useless kid in terms of friends and so forth. That isn’t the way other kids seem to remember me so I don’t know. I think your picture from inside and from outside is always different. I think I had on the whole a fairly happy childhood. Although I hated the extreme powerlessness of childhood.
NGaiman223: I much prefer being an adult. i can set my own bedtime,(except for tonight). There’ s a photo of me age 15 going on 16
DCOMLeib: By the way, Neil is LIVE from England….and up very late..thanks Neil!
NGaiman223: wait, age 16 in the summer of 1977 with my little punk band which will be printed
DCOMLeib: Next up…from Drumore!
NGaiman223: in teh back of the kindly ones collection, which will be out very very soon. If anyone is actually curious as to what I looked like when I was 16, tyhere’s a photo of that.
DCOMLeib: Again…from Drumore….
Question: Do you have any plans for a miniseries, or stories involving Daniel, the new Dream?
NGaiman223: Not at this time.
DCOMLeib: From JASONS1…..
Question: WILL YOU EVER DO ANOTHER SANDMAN SERIES IN THE FUTURE???
NGaiman223: I don’t know.
NGaiman223: I cannot foresee a future at which I take on another 75 issue long monthly comic.
NGaiman223: But more than that I cannot say.
NGaiman223: Right now I want to catch up on all the things I haven’t been able to do for the last 7 year becasue I’ve had to do Sandman every month. Since January 1988, I’ve had to do a Sandman every montha and anything else that I was doing got shifted in around it
NGaiman223: I’m just really enjoying right now the not having a monthly deadline and getting to do all sorts of things that might hav ebeen fun to do…. write and direc tmovies… write a novel or 3, or do my own tv show. And then I’ll see what I want to do next.
DCOMLeib: From JBarron35…..
Question: How/when did you decide Death would wear an ankh, the symbol of eternal life?
NGaiman223: I decided it when … this is actually somethign that Mike Ringenberg brought to the book. I’d written about Death in the outline for Sandman and in the outline I said that I was thinking of someone kind of like Nico (icy blonde) and then I started thinking more about Louise Brooks.
NGaiman223: I knew what her personality was like but I wasnt’ sure what she looks like. One day when we were still in teh very early stages of sandman and Sam Keith was still doing the book and I got a drawing from Mike based on a friend of his called Cinnamon. I thought the Ankh was a wonderful thing. I wasn’t sure it was all there. But I went out to a dinner with Dave McKean at a pancake house called My Old Dutch… at the time it was called Asterix in the Kinds Road and our waitress was the drawing that Mike Dringenberg had sent us, this incredible beautiful pixie-ish elfen american girl dressed completely in black with a silver ankh around her neck. It was almost spooky. Dave and I were giving each other looks.
NGaiman223: All the Deaths that come to conventions… of all the Deaths I’ve ever met, the one most like here was that girl I met at the pancake house with Mike.
DCOMLeib: From Fun Boy 53….
NGaiman223: The other thing about Death which I dont’ know if anybody knows…. it looks like I’ll be doing a movie of the High Cost of Living. Warner Bros. has expressed a lot of interest in having me write and direct the Hight Cost of Living… but it may or may not happen.
DCOMLeib: From Fun Boy 53….
Question: what is your t.v. series about???
NGaiman223: My TV series is called Neverwhere. It’s a 3 hour show broken up over 6 half hours and these are English half hours… they’re BBC half hours which are sort of 29 minutes and a few seconds long and can actually stretch up to about 31 minutes I believe. And it’s the story of the idea that there are 2 different Londons. There’s the normal one that we all inhabit and then there’s a much stranger London that exists underneath.. in teh cracks, on the roof. A young man from our reality, a very boring, normal young man who finds a strange and beautiful girl, lying, covered in blood in what the English call a pavement, Americans refer to as a sidewalk. He takes her home and she won’t go to a hospital or see a doctor. He discovers that he’s stumbled intot he middle of somebody else’s story by so doing.
NGaiman223: London no longer works for him. He’s left one London and entered another. They don’t cash points don’t work, cabs dont’ stop for him. He has to go through this other stranger mroe dangerous London which contains angels., well, one angel, beautiful vampire girls, black friars, the Earl of Earl’s Court, and all sorts of other strange things. And he’s being menaced and harried by the nastiest people I’ve ever made up called Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar.
NGaiman223: And let me tell you some of the cast. This is what we’re currently filming on a 1.8 million pounds for 3 hours of strange and fantastic, scary TV. Which means everybody is working very very hard.
NGaiman223: Cast – Richard, the lead character is Gary Bakewell who played Paul McCartney in the film Backbeat.
NGaiman223: We’;ve got Hywel Bennett playing Mr. Croup.
NGaiman223: Clives Russell as Mr. Vandermar.
NGaiman223: Freddie Jones who many people will remmeber from films like Dune and the Elephan Man plays the Earl.
NGaiman223: Peter Capaldi who got an Oscar last year as a director for his film Franz Kaska it’s a Wonderful Life. He’s playing the angel Islington.
NGaiman223: English veteran actor Stratford Johns plays Mr. Stockton.
NGaiman223: Julie T. Wallace, whom Americans may remember from the original version Life and Loves of a She Devil. She played the She-Devil. She’s playing a character named Serpentine.
NGaiman223: A girl called Door is being played by a newcomer named Laura Fraser.
NGaiman223: Paterson Joseph plays a character called The Marquis de Carabas.
NGaiman223: That’s justa bundle of actors off the top of my head.
NGaiman223: And it’s wonderful so far. I actually got rushes delivered and they’re playing even as we speak with the sound down low and the imagery is amazing we have a brilliant director Dwi Humphries.
DCOMLeib: From ARogers10….
Question: Was there any artist you would have liked to work with on SANDMAN and did not?
NGaiman223: I would have loved to have worked with Bernie Wrightson from Sandman. I’m pleased that we got Barry Smith to do a pinup. I love his stuff. Those are the only 2 major comic artists who spring to mind immediately. Bernie is the only one who’s never had ANYTHING to do with Sandman. I would have loved to do something Bernie-ish somewhere along the line. Other than that, they’re all dead.
NGaiman223: I woudl have loved to work wiht Francis Bacon or Richard Dadd. Or Frank C. Pape. Windsor McKay.
DCOMLeib: Our last question of the evening from MarcEditor…
Question: Which character of yours, other than Morpheus or Death, would you like to see become popular? Thanks, and good luck!
NGaiman223: The Dreaming is taking a bunch of characters who….. a lot of the characters have th epotential to go off into their own series, it’s just a matter of time.
NGaiman223: If I wanted to do a Cluracan or Petrefax I’m sure DC would be very happy, but ther’es no time.
DCOMLeib: And on that note…I’d like to thank our special guest Neil Gaiman for being here this evening
DCOMLeib: especially since it is very late in England right now!
DCOMLeib: Remember, Death: THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE is on sale now…and don’t forget the death poster and t-shirt!
NGaiman223: Thank you and good night!
DCOMLeib: Goodnight everyone!
DCOMLeib: (c) 1996 DC COMICS
NGaiman223: Bug your local PBS feed for Neverwhere!
OnlineHost: NGaiman223 has left the room.
OnlineHost: DCOMLeib has left the room.