AVC: Is it a huge distraction, trying to budget your time?
NG: Normally it's good, because the things reinforce each other. It gives journalists the ability to write about two things, which often means they can sell the story to an editor who might have said no if it was just one thing. But on this one, it's frustrating, because I've got a movie coming out. Part of the fun of having movies coming out is, you get to be there at the première. You get to walk down the red carpet. It's fun. But I'm going to be doing a book signing in San Francisco on the day of the première. And I've got a movie shooting at the same time, for Beowulf, which I will be missing most of as well because I'll be on my book-signing tour. It's one of those things that really makes you wish that either they would invent a really good time machine, so you could go through everything three times, or else cloning.
AVC: If you didn't have any other commitments or strictures right now, what would you be working on?
NG: If there was nothing that anyone was waiting for, I think I'd probably be writing my new children's novel, which, with the way things are looking, I probably won't really start till December. I would so much like to be doing that.
AVC: Has having children affected your interest in children's books, or changed your writing?
NG: Possibly, but I think having been a child, and having been a certain sort of child, is probably the thing that made me the most interested. But it's certainly been incredibly useful for my credibility at home, doing children's books. Especially from my youngest, Maddy—it's been fun doing things like Coraline, and having a daughter to try them out on. It's simply lovely having somebody who thinks this stuff is fun. From Maddy's point of view, really, the cool thing is the fact that I know Lemony Snicket, that she got to have dinner with Daniel Handler, the fact that R.L. Stine says hello. I am now cool.
Whereas for the older ones... I remember when my son Mike was 12 or 13, he looked at me very sadly one day and said, "Why don't you ever do anything cool?" I said, "Well, what do you mean?" "You never write anything cool." "Well, what would be cool?" "Well, if you wrote Spider-Man, that would be cool. But you don't. You just write these comics that nobody ever reads." And I said, "If you'll wait about three years..." And he just looked at me rather gloomily and said, "Well, why, what are you going to write then?" And by the time he was 17, I was able to impress him.
AVC: Because he grew up enough to appreciate your work, or because you got the recognition he felt you lacked?
NG: He got older. It was the difference between going, "Oh my God, my dad writes Sandman and does incredibly cool things," and being 12 or 13, where you say to your friends, "My dad writes comics," and they say, "Cor! Does he do Spider-Man?" "No." "Does he do Superman?" "No." "Well, what does he do?" "It's called Sandman." And they say, "Never heard of it. What's it about?" And you say, "I dunno. It's really boring." But when he turned 17 or 18, he went downstairs to the basement, collected all the copies of Sandman, took them up to his room, and came down two days later.
AVC: You've gotten to write about several of those core DC and Marvel superheroes over the years. Do you face a lot of strictures when working with established characters?
NG: I kind of learned my lesson doing things at DC in about 1988. I came in, and it was like, "Oh, what a wonderful playground! I'm going to do all this stuff, and I'm going to keep it in continuity." Then whenever I did anything with those characters, it would always turn into a nightmare, and someone would come in and rewrite the dialogue, or suddenly have a retroactive continuity decision that these characters didn't know each other, or whatever. After three or four of these, I stopped. I didn't like people rewriting my dialogue. I didn't like the fact that we'd start a comic with the Joker, and by the time we inked it, he would have turned into the Scarecrow. It was silly. After that, I decided life mostly was easier if I kept those big-money characters offstage and did my own thing. In 1602 [Gaiman's alternate-history comics series, featuring 17th-century versions of some Marvel characters], that was part of the delight—I could do anything to these characters. While they were the Marvel characters on one level, they weren't on another. Nobody knew what was going to happen to them except me, so I loved that. That was really cool.
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