Circus Fish

The answer to yesterday's question is,

Dave McKean,

(or David Tench McKean, as Wikipedia and thus everyone else now seems to be listing him as, thus turning a small fish joke into an alternate universe fact)

for Dave illustrated The Graveyard Book, and also illustrated (and even made comics for) Hester Blumenthal's Big Fat Duck Cookbook. I saw a copy of the Big Fat Duck Cookbook when I was at Bloomsbury a couple of days ago, and it is unbelievably beautiful. Also unbelievably expensive. My own plan is to be incredibly nice to Dave and see if he'll give me a copy for Christmas.

Which reminds me, Dave McKean is signing in London on Hallowe'en, just as I am. He'll be at Forbidden Planet from 5.00pm to 6.00pm so if you're coming to see me anyway that evening, you could always go and see him first. And if you aren't going to see me, you could go and see him instead.

(Dave did design work for the third Harry Potter film, which links all three authors on the list.)

Graveyard Book UK Tour: London Talk and Signing (31 October)

Hi Neil, I just spoke to Blackwell, and they tell me the event is sold out. *cries* They do have a waiting list with 30 people already on it so I'm not holding out any hope... I thought you might want to know.

NB I love the Graveyard Book very, very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Enjoy the tour!
Susanne (A fan)

I'm really sorry. We stopped doing London events at 600 seat halls back in 2003, because they filled up too fast, and we switched to the 930 seat Logan Hall. This time I was told by Bloomsbury that Blackwells simply couldn't find anywhere of that size free for Hallowe'en, and could only get the LSE Old Theatre, which seats about 550 people... which meant that I was fairly sure we'd be upsetting as many people as get seats. But that's all there was.

Again, apologies.

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

You mention in your latest blog entry you'd be 'so there' for a line of fountain pens. Montblanc has a line of famous author/patron of the arts pens that are to die for, mostly. http://www.penslimited.com/index.html The Semiramis is a particular favorite of mine.

The famous authors/patrons they've honored with pens do tend to be dead which could be a drawback in getting a pen designed for you. If there are any Gaiman fans working for Montblanc perhaps they could whisper a word in the right ear?

Regards,
Laurie

The awkward truth is that, while I love Montblanc ink and their ink bottle design (especially their dried-blood-coloured Bordeaux, which I signed my way across the US with on the recent tour) I'm not a big fan of their fountain pens: the ones I've encountered seem made to look impressive sitting on desks. They aren't things I'd want to write novels with, and the ones I've used or been given skip too much to use as signing pens. (I've got a couple of Montblancs, both gifts.)

On the last signing tour I signed books with a Namiki Falcon until the nib went sproing in Chicago, whereupon I switched to a Lamy. (And I became a convert to the Pilot Vanishing Point Fountain Pen when I was in China, as it was a perfect writing implement for using in notebooks on the run.) I wrote The Graveyard Book mostly with a Lamy 2000, an elderly Watermans flexinib, and the Pelikan that Henry Selick gave me.

...

Neal Hefti's dead. His Batman theme was, I think, the first record I was ever bought (for, I suspect, my sixth birthday) that I actually wanted, and I was deeply offended because whoever had designed the cover had drawn Batman's cloak as a two-piece, wing-like thing.

XKCD vs The New Yorker in a to-the-death-cartoon-face-off. Yes! (Only not actually to the death, because that would be a sad waste of talent and human life.)

Here is a song I like by Vermillion Lies, called Circus Fish.

(I am also now listening to Mitch Benn's Sing Like an Angel)

Peter Straub in Time. (And belated congratulations to Emma and Michael!)

(Also Happy Birthday, Cat Mihos...)

Tasha Robinson at The Onion sent me a link to the Onion AV review of The Graveyard Book.

And looking into the mirror this morning, it occurred to me that as we age we slowly turn into Mort Drucker caricatures of ourselves, and I found that strangely comforting.

Labels: batman, Dave McKean, how to get a fish as a middle name, neepery, signing as much as I can, xkcd

The roof of all evil

I'll be working with Amanda Palmer on the WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER Book for the next couple of days. It's a book of photos of her with occasional words by me, which are currently being written. Some photos were taken over a decade ago, most are more recent and most of them are by photographer Kyle Cassidy, who in between taking proper important shots of Amanda doing book things on the roof this evening, took this photo of Amanda and me. I am wearing socks because I have incredibly painful blisters on my feet because I can be an idiot sometimes. Possibly more information than you wanted to know, but there you go.

(A much fuller description of the late evening and more photos from Kyle at http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/)

Neil,
Went to CBLDF booth. Got T-shirt. It smells like your basement. Can I wash this thing without your signature coming off?

Also, my Fiance got the New wave hookers shirt. Seriously Neil? A porno? There's gotta be a good story there.

You rule,
Noelle

You should certainly be able to wash it -- the thick fabric paint I used to sign it says it's washable, anyway. If it's any consolation, that smell is attic, not basement. And more than half of the tee shirts were originally gifts, and many of them were mysteries swallowed by time or never explained even to me: where I got the "New Wave Hookers" tee shirt is anybody's guess. But I wore it happily anyway.

I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman... With Batman in it. Fuck You.

If I'd known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have... actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.

If you think you won't like the Batman comic I'll write, probably you'd be best off not reading it. It'll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you'd bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you're going to...

Dear Neil,

I just wanted to drop a line to pass on this article on the relevance of comics in academia, which you might find of some interest, despite the fact that the author places a line break between every sentence. Some of the facts are old news, but there are some interesting tidbits to be gleaned. Here's the link: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0729/p01s06-ussc.html

Sharyn

That took me back. I thought that newspapers had finally given up on variants of WHAM SMASH POW! COMICS HAVE GROWN UP! in headlines...

Hi Neil.

When you talk about "places where you can be arrested for drawing cartoons", surely you don't mean to imply that in the USA you can't be arrested for drawing a cartoon? You can, just as you can for any other art form.

The First Amendment doesn't provide protection for (among other things) incitement to commit a crime, threats, or so-called "fighting words" intended to provoke violence. Any of these things is possible in a cartoon, and could constitute a criminal offence depending on the details and applicable State law.

I'd suggest that cartoons which are indiscriminately hostile to members of a particular race or religion could, depending again on the exact content, constitute any of those three things, and that the police were probably right to at least investigate once a complaint was made.

Whether Nekschot actually did any of them, whether his cartoons would be criminal in the US, and whether they are in the Netherlands, I'm not equipped to say.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that you can't be arrested in the USA for drawing a cartoon, and not for the reasons you suggest: Mike Diana was convicted of obscenity, for example. Take a look at this blog post where I talk about the Mike Diana case and the time I came close to sending a publisher in Sweden down for a long jail term for depicting acts of violence against women by retelling a bible story. That's why I'm a member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund -- because there are always worms nibbling away at the First Amendment, and because comics are particularly vulnerable.

Here's a summary of the "fighting words" history: http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=13718. I don't believe you could create a cartoon that would, however robust, actually fall into the category of "fighting words" unless it was "addressed to a particular individual" and presented "an actual threat of immediate violence, not merely offensive content".

Argh. Up too late. To bed, to bed.

Labels: batman, first amendment stuff, tee shirts, who actually did kill Amanda Palmer?, Why I Support the CBLDF

After Clarion

I'm in the airport on my way home, very tired and very happy to be going home and sad to be leaving my 18 Clarion students (who will now have Geoff Ryman and Nalo Hopkinson for the last two weeks).

My mailbox is starting to fill up with questions from journalists about the announcement at San Diego that I'll be writing a two-part Batman story for Andy Kubert to draw, that will come out in January. They have lots and lots of questions.

So I don't have to write lots and lots of emails back to all the journalists:

1) Yes, I am writing a two part Batman story.

2) Yes, Andy Kubert will be drawing it.

3) Yes, it will be two oversized issues.

4) No, I don't plan to say anything else about it until it's all written and drawn.

(I just called my Visa card to fix something, and found myself being asked if I was the Neil Gaiman. I said yes, I was. "So," said the Visa person, "Are you going to be writing an episode of Dr Who?")

Labels: batman, bigger on the inside