Over on his blog, he tells the story of how he...
...fell in love with Neil Gaiman's poem "The Day the Saucers Came" and I got the idea of having this one picture in the beginning, and then just "zooming out" of it so that there's more and more stuff visible. I did couple of pictures and sent them to Neil and he really liked them. Then I did the rest of the pictures and was really happy with myself... and then Neil asked me what are we going to DO with the illustrations... and I had no idea.
We went back and forth with various ideas (basically anything and everything between... let's say from set of postcards to T-shirt printing to illustrated picturebook)... and then Neil was busy with stuff... and then I was busy with some other stuff... and then we forgot the whole damn thing for a little while... and then we remembered it again.
Now, at some point we added Cat Mihos from NeverWear to the "brainstorm" and we came up with an idea of a poster. So, I did a background image and put the illustrations on it... and that was it. Everybody was happy.
Click on it to see it larger. It's lovely.
It's being printed on card stock. I'm taking some of the print run to be my Hullo It's 2009 and I Seem To Have Missed Christmas Again thingummy for my friends, and Cat Mihos is going to be selling the rest of them through her Neverwear site. There are 500 for sale in all, numbered. Tomorrow and henceforth she will be selling them for $45 each. Today, and only today, and only because they went up on the site this morning with a typo which she is honouring, she's selling them for $25. (Here's the direct link.)
(This is the Neverwear blog. Scroll down for a great photo of Ms. Amanda F. Palmer modelling a Graveyard Book tee shirt for Cat.)
Earlier this year I gave the first Julie Schwartz Memorial Lecture at MIT, mostly about, if memory serves, the relationship between hardcore pornography and stage musicals, and how you could use this relationship to illuminate the nature of genre literature, and after the lecture I was interviewed by MIT media genius Henry Jenkins: the event was filmed and is available now on DVD. http://cms.mit.edu/news/2008/12/neil_gaiman_dvd_available_dec.php is a link to a page with a clip from the interview bit of the evening, and here's the pre-ordering information.
The DVD might make a very nice Mithrastide gift for someone, and sales of the DVDs go to fund things like airfare and food for the next speaker. (One day the Memorial Lecture will be rich enough to do actual speaker's fees, but not yet.) It'll go on sale on the 17th.
And finally, the new Rain Taxi magazine has a sort of a Sandman special, with a Dave McKean cover, in which, amongst other things, Lemony Snicket (or possibly Daniel Handler) promises (or possibly threatens) to kiss me with tongue in joyous Sandman celebration. You can buy it here.
Labels: shamelessly commercial plugs for things by other people mostly