Quick morning soccer ponder

I hear from sources on the Stardust set that this Sunday will see a football match between the two films currently at Pinewood -- Stardust and the current James Bond film.

And the idea of a Stardust vs Bond football match keeps running through my head, "...and it's Ernst Stavros Blofeld and he passes to Felix Leiter and... oh, he just got turned into a goat. And there's a cluster of excited ghosts over by the goal-mouth, one of them just ran through Le Chifre, and the ball, the ball's gone up..."

I also hear that the release date of Stardust has moved back to Spring Break -- March 9th 2007. And that there will be a whole Stardust-the-movie presentation, with footage from the film and special guests at the San Diego Comic Convention this year.

So now you know everything. (Holly says she had the best birthday in her whole life this year. Including use of the studio golf cart for the day.)

Hello there, Mr. Gaiman.I don't have a question. I just thought you'd like to know that I named my two guinea pigs after you and Ray Bradbury.I am also rather technologically inept, so this is probably in the wrong section. Sorry about that. -Sarah

Not a problem.

why I am not a restaurant critic...

So I had two of the best meals of my life in New Orleans. The Cafe Adelaide meal was one of the three best Top Restaurant Experiences I've ever had. And then, two days later, at the Delachaise, I had one of the best food times I can remember. Poppy's husband Chris is a chef, and I don't get to see him very often (and I like him) so when Poppy told me he couldn't eat with us as he'd be working that night one one of us suggested we go and eat where he cooks, and let him feed us. And so we did.

The Delachaise is a long bar, the shape of a railroad dining car, and Chris was all the kitchen staff. All of them. Which meant that the meal was the best food I've ever had completely prepared and served by one other person (if you see what I mean). We were lucky in that the bar crowd hadn't really arrived yet, and the other people eating had pretty much finished by the time that we got there, and we were in a booth near the kitchen.

There's a lot to be said for just letting good chefs just feed you, if you trust them. They get to do their best to impress you and if you're lucky you get to be impressed. I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favourite dish out of the dozen plus dishes (none of them too big) Chris brought to the table on Sunday evening -- the BLT-style tomato things were remarkable, the pomegranitey dip the name of which I've forgotten was astonishing, the halibut-and-sweetcorn an amazing foodie mixture of textures and tastes, the forbidden-rice thingie was a delight, the two soups in one bowl gazpacho-roasted cold tomato soup was pretty much perfect, and the desserts and cheeses just kept coming and surprising (and all were delectable, especially the little soft cheese and rosemary honey thing). Oh, and we started with the the two-sauce French fries. The satay sauce.... oh, the satay sauce...

It's such a good thing I don't live in New Orleans. I would rapidly become astoundingly rotund.

I also met many of Poppy's cats and was attacked by her flamingo.

ALA was fun, what I saw of it -- mostly, what I saw was the work in front of me in my hotel room, alas. I went to the Alex Awards presentation, and like the other four people on the panel, I made a short speech. Unlike them, I completely forgot to say anything about the actual book that won the award (which this time was Anansi Boys. Last time I won one, it was Stardust.) (I told them about the last time I was at ALA, though.)

Also attended (as an audience member) a panel for librarians on Graphic Novels, which left me with the distinct feeling that, if I had been a librarian and had known nothing about what was out there in graphic novels and gone to that panel for information, I would have come away with the impression that most graphic novels are manga. Which seemed to do a disservice to the huge range of graphic novels out there -- the panellists were very well-informed and articulate, but only Jackie Estrada in her initial talk about what was out there seemed to be talking about anything that wasn't manga. And when a Japanese librarian got up and asked pointedly whether there were any other kinds of more respectable graphic novels than the boy-love manga the panel had been talking about, they told her about the educational manga that were now available in the US, as if there weren't any other educational or non-fiction graphic novels out there. Good intentions but, sitting in the audience, it felt a bit blinkered. I felt the same way I would have done if all they'd talked about was superhero comics. Good but I'd hoped for much more.

Suw drew my attention to the most bizarre piece of spam she's ever received:
http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/6/27/2058856.html

As the co-creator of the Dread Sigil Odegra, I would also love to find "...matching illustrations from independant sources. I have thus far seen a bas-relief serpent, a crude ink drawing, and a written description that likens the Odegra to the M25 London orbital motorway, but I would really like some more input, preferably one from a historical source, or a fraud so well done that it can pass for historical."


Hi Neil!

I need your help! I am a volunteer at 826LA (www.826LA.org), located in Venice, CA, and we need help finding some artists to help with our English Language Learner camp we are offering this summer.
The program is designed children whose second language is English. During the program, kids will do lots of different projects so that they can improve their english in all aspects.
One of the projects we wish to do involves comic books! We want to help the kids create their own superhero.
The problem is, we don't have any artists that can pump out reasonable looking superheroes in a short amount of time. I've tried finding any contact info for local comic book artists, but have failed to find anything beyond a pr email. I was wondering if you could post this on your blog and ask for the help of any artists in the Venice, CA or even the SoCal area who would like to help?
Anything would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

-Jeremy
www.826LA.org

Consider it mentioned -- and I'm sure some of the other places that comics artists gather will happily mention it further.

HMG

It was twenty one years ago that I was woken up at about eight-thirty one morning by Mary, my wife, letting me know that she was in labour and that she had already phoned the maternity hospital to let them know, and we were leaving now. And, possibly because I seemed rather agitated by all this information, she said she thought it might really be better if she drove and I timed the contractions. We owned an elderly, tiny yellow MG midget at the time, which she fitted herself into somehow, and she drove us like a maniac through tiny curving Sussex backroads to get to the Maternity Hospital, while I timed the contractions and worried.

I'd somehow got it into my head that the baby would be a girl, and, after the kind of long and protracted negotiations that normally result in the drawing up of borders in Eastern European principalities, we'd settled on "Gemma" as a name.

We pulled up in front of the hospital by nine, and by about ten I was amazed and delighted to find myself proudly holding a small, baldish, grey-eyed baby who seemed to be taking in everything that was going on and had a very sober look on her face, as if she wasn't quite sure whether she entirely approved of any of it.

"She doesn't really look like a Gemma," I thought. "Bugger." I checked. Mary didn't think she looked much like a Gemma either.

And I drove home pondering the naming issue, with Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side running through my head.

Somewhere in there twenty one years went by, and I continue to be amazed and delighted by her, and really most appallingly proud. Right now she's on a different continent beavering away...

Happy 21st Birthday Holly.

...

Dear Neil,

Thank you for responding to my question and for clarifying your statements. When I read your post I was under the impression that you were linking Randy Constan's website to the paedophilia controversy surrounding Alan Moore's "Lost Girls", and obviously, this worried me. I agree that Randy is not an "innocent bystander" in that he IS publicly displaying an unconventional take on Peter Pan, but I will maintain that he is an "innocent bystander" in the paedophilia debate going on with "Lost Girls". Many people (including high school bullies) immediately assume that gay or effeminate men are paedophiles or child molesters, and I was sincerely concerned that you were (perhaps unwittingly) propagating this mentality. This also confused me because I'm familiar with your (and Alan Moore's) contributions to the wonderful "AARGH" benefit comic book. It's a relief to know that this isn't a case of serious mixed signals, and that you were only linking it to Alan Moore 's possible Peter Pan-related legal problems, and not to anything else.

Thank you for keeping us posted on all of the press (both positive and negative) "Lost Girls" is receiving. I feel that we (especially in the US) need to maintain a mature and open-minded discourse in the topic of sex and sexuality, and I hope that "Lost Girls" can be a catalyst for this.

Sincerely,

David McHale

Not a problem. It hadn't occurred to me it might be taken that way.


Dear Mr. Gaiman,

I am a co-editor for a magazine called BBT Magazine (Blood, Blade, & Thruster – The Magazine of Speculative Fiction & Satire), with it’s first issue to hit the stands in Mid-August.
I am writing with the hopes that you would be willing to do a brief e-mail based Q&A. Some questions will be fairly silly since we are combination of satire and Spec-Fic. (Think Realms of Fantasy meets The Onion.)

“10 questions with Neil Gaiman,” would be lovely if you are willing. We would simply email them to you and you could reply the same way.

If you don’t think you would have time for that, “5 questions with Neil Gaiman,” has a nice ring to it. Slightly better than, “Neil Gaiman answers one question!”

If you decide not to take part in or Q&A interview, I suppose we could do something like “Neil Gaiman snubs tiny little start-up magazine, crushing the lungs of editors and fans alike!” on the cover, although it sells far less magazines and we would be reduced to tears.

We have a link to your website on our website already because we truly are huge fans. This would be a real coup for our little magazine and we hope you’ll consider taking part.

Besides, think of all the good Karma you’d receive from helping troglodytes such as ourselves.

Thanks you so much for your time,
Lucien Spelman Editor, BBT Magazine
www.bbtmagazine.com

The sad thing is yours wasn't the only FAQ line request for a five-question email interview yesterday. There were four others, and I actually wound up saying yes to the Spanish one because I've not done a Spanish interview in ages, whereas I've done lots of US interviews, many for little start-up magazines. So this is a sorry for you, and for the other three requests for interviews from yesterday, and all the ones that came in last weeka nd last month that I haven't even had time to say no to. Good luck with the magazine, though.

Probably the best way to get an interview with me is to go to Harper Collins (or Headline or Bloomsbury in the UK) and let them know you'd like an interview the next time I go on the road or head out to promote a new book (it'll be in September this year in the US, for Fragile Things). And then there will be a few days in which I'll do nothing but interviews.

Dear Neil,I know you know about the Sultan's Elephant - if you were sorry you missed it in London, and want to catch it somewhere, it said in the Guardian yesterday that it will be in Antwerp (Belgium) from 6 – 9 July, and then in Calais at the end of September and Le Havre at the end of October. Just gorgeous, it is. Lorna.

...

And more on librarians and food next post, I think.

Indisputedly, my dear Watson

Woke up from strange, riotous, brightly coloured dreams (of the kind that follow a dinner at the Cafe Adelaide with Patrick and Poppy so substantial and remarkable that I can at present never actually imagine eating again) opened my eyes and stared at a grey and black hotel wall, black and white photograph, black fittings and fixtures, and was, for a moment, convinced that the world had slipped into black and white and there was something wrong with my eyes.

I think that eating in New Orleans is something that should always be done in company with Poppy Z. Brite. You get astonishing service, amazing food and a big green ribbon on your table that tells the serving staff that you are to be looked after as if you were some kind of a god. A magical experience.

...

You've got a wrong phone number in your blog.The Comic Shop Locator Service isn't 1-800-COMIC-BOOK, it's 1-888-COMIC-BOOK.(Oddly enough, you can also reach it by calling 1-888-BOOGA-BOOGA)--Nat Gertler

...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/networks/radio4/aod.shtml?radio4/twentyeight_acts was fine comedic value for money. (Twenty eight acts in twenty eight minutes, recorded at the Edinburgh Fringe. Some duds, but not as many as you'd imagine, and they're over quickly.)

...

My friend Kit (who writes as C.E. Murphy) recently moved to Ireland and went to see the Coraline puppet show in Cork, which she really liked: http://mizkit.livejournal.com/98594.html -- I don't think she moved to Ireland just to see a puppet show, that was just an extra bonus.--Carl Rigney

Thanks, Carl. It sounds wonderful. Hope I get to see it this year. If I get a list from the Puca people of where it'll be showing around the world I'll put it up here.

Kind sir,I expect you'll get this question a lot after your most recent post. About the CNN article on Lost Girls...I was a little blown away to hear that Alan had used characters in his book that are apparently undisputedly owned by someone else. Isn't this just blatently and unarguably wrong and illegal? Or am I missing something? Thanks for all you do. John

Well, that could have been a fair summing up if it wasn't for the adverbs undisputedly blatently and unarguably. There's rather a lot of argument and dispute here, I'm afraid. If you want to take a deep breath and read this first -- http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2004/12/copyright.html -- you may be somewhat the wiser as to what they are.

The current status of Peter Pan is hugely disputed. That's why Disney was able to publish "Peter and the Starcatchers" and its sequel "Peter and the Shadow Thieves" along with a whole line of spin-off books, without any permission or (as far as I know) legal challenge from or compensation to Great Ormond Street Hospital, for example. There are many unauthorised Peter Pan sequels, and the Hospital has not been vigorous (or successful) in prosecuting them, particularly outside the UK (I note the Dave Barry Disney prequels are being published now in the UK.)

(Meanwhile, while Disney doesn't have a copyright on the underlying characters, it does have copyright on its depiction of them.)

It's further complicated by the fact that there is apparently some out-of-copyright Peter Pan material, and that the "perpetual copyright" granted to Great Ormond Street is probably only for the play "Peter Pan" and possibly the spin-off book "Peter Pan and Wendy", not for any of the other Peter Pan material Barrie wrote; and as I said, the "perpetual copyright" means the hospital continues to receive the income stream from the book and the play it would otherwise lose. (But it's a UK law, and it only applies to the UK.) And GOSH have also now licensed their own "authorised" sequel to Peter Pan.

It's even further complicated, because a graphic novel like Lost Girls or a book like Wendy (here's the Amazon link) is not a retelling of Peter Pan, using the characters from the book, but a reinterpretation of it. In Alan's book an adult woman called Wendy remembers playing in the park with a bunch of neighbourhood kids, and a scary adult paedophile with a hand deformed like a hook. There are resonances with the events of Peter Pan, but they are resonances.

So...

As far as I can see (and I'm not a copyright lawyer, and I am as capable of getting the wrong end of the stick as the next blogger), you can't do The Further Adventures of Tinkerbell and also use a Disney Tinkerbell on the book cover. But outside the UK, you could probably write and publish The Further Adventures of Tinkerbell. You definitely can in Australia. But wherever you were, you wouldn't have too much trouble writing a book about a wild, tempestuous, fairy-like girl that people called Tink, and her sad fixation on a local boy named Peter that might have somehow inspired J. M. Barrie.

And I keep wondering what would have happened if Shakespeare had given the revenue to Romeo and Juliet to the Cheap Street Home for Indigents and Mendicants, and Parliament had enshrined some kind of perpetual copyright in the law for that play. I don't think it would have been a good thing in the long term, even if many mendicants and beggars were helped by it, because it would have removed a piece of world culture from the table.

...

And finally, I keep forgetting to wish a Happy Fifth Birthday to the gang of assorted rapscallions and red-balloon-wagglers at the www.Neilgaiman.com message boards. They've been talking for five years now. Wish them belated birthday wishes at http://neilgaimanboard.com/6/ubb.x?cdra=Y&s=733605825

A quick shufty

Email just came in from editor Nick Lowe letting me know that the Entertainment Weekly Eternals piece is out today. (And that they took off the Junior from Mr Romita's name.) And Nick asked if I could mention the comic shop locator (1-800-COMIC BOOK) for people wanting to find a copy of Eternals but not sure where to start.

Busy copy-editing the UK and the US editions of FRAGILE THINGS at the same time, trying to make sure they're very similar books... (although the stories that were already published in the UK edition of Smoke and Mirrors won't be reprinted in Fragile Things to avoid too much confusion). Argh. let's do a quick shufty through the mail...

Dear Neil,

Could you explain the link between Alan Moore's pornographic comic book and the site you linked all of your fans to and why it is "traumatising"? I poked around the site you linked, and don't see how a ballet dancer/jazz guitarist/children's charity worker who makes his own costumes is related to Alan Moore's sex book.

Unless of course you were simply poking fun at an innocent bystander, which I guess makes sense, in a high-school bully sort of way.

I did notice some of the people pictured with him in costume, and I've seen people like this at your signings. I don't think it would be beyond imagination for any of these people to be among your fans and supporters.

I was merely wondering what your intentions were in posting this link.

Possibly disappointedly yours,

David McHale

Er. The link is "controversial" takes on Peter Pan.

I think that Lost Girls is uncontroversial and untraumatising, despite whatever tabloid flak comes its way over the next few months (here's the CNN article and I'm sure that The Sun, News of the World etc will be jumping in very soon), and that it's less traumatic than a middle-aged man dressing up as the Disney version of the character Peter Pan, and doing a website that plays you "When you wish upon a star" which is also obviously not a traumatising thing, but that was sort of the point.

The "Peter Pan" website was popular in a "have you seen this?" sort of way about five years ago, and it made me smile to see that it was still up from the Wikipedia Peter Pan article. I figured if it still made me smile, it might make other people smile. Which I assume is its purpose, or one of them -- if you put up a website like that you aren't an "innocent bystander". You're inviting people to link to it and to react to it with amusement or delight or revulsion or to find it charming or whatever. I think it's funny. Your mileage may vary. (Not sure how you got to high-school bullying from there.) But, yes, the connection you missed was Peter Pan.


Hi Neil-

I was curious to see if you had any response to the question about typos in the first issue of The Eternals:

http://comicfoundry.blogspot.com/2006/06/typos-are-eternal.html

Yup. Those are typos. Nothing compared to some of the ones we got in Sandman or 1602 though. They happen. Luckily, God invented the trade paperback as a way to let us fix these things.

Dear Mr. Gaiman,

I read your advice to the 23 year old writer ('tricia), about how to deal with feeling like a crap writer when you're so young. But what do you do when you're 30? I've written a novel that only my friends want to read (bear in mind, one of those friends is a book editor at a major US paper), but no agent or publisher wants to touch?

What does one do when they can't get a break? I want to write, but no paper will hire me to write. Right now I'm an editor at a website, but I'd barely call it editing. I write screenplays and am working on other prose projects, but I guess what I'm getting at is, should there be a point when one must say "enough is enough. This isn't going anywhere. It's time to stop before this starts to hurt more than I can bear"?

I bear responsibility for my actions as a writer, I know, and I've squandered many chances. I am at a low point, and I'm not sure that words of encouragement will mean anything to me at this point. They don't sound sincere. Overnight success takes years to happen, and I haven't been able to get that groundwork done. Is it worth my time to continue this fool's mission?

Sincerely,

Christopher

You can give up if you like. It's okay. The world won't end. I'm not really sure what being 30 has to do with it, though. Some of my favourite writers barely started being published until they were in their forties.

Sometimes it's a good thing that no-one wants to publish your first novel. I'm really glad nobody wanted to publish mine. There are an awful lot of publishers and agents out there, and I suspect if I'd sent my first novel to more than two publishers someone eventually would have published it. (This would not have been a good thing, but persistence would probably have paid off.)

Writing short stories is often a very good way to learn. And the thrill of seeing a short story in print can keep you going for a while -- and there are certainly paying short story markets out there.

But you can give up, too, if it makes you feel better.

The lady on the plane next to me yesterday explained, when I told her I was a writer, that as a former English Major she had had dreams of being a major novelist, but she was making a living instead, and she hoped to one day have enough free time to write.

And I remembered Gene Wolfe getting up at 5.00 am every day and writing two pages before going in to work, and I told her that if she wanted to be a writer she ought to write. ("It's like most jobs," I told. "It's amazing how much of it just consists of showing up." But she didn't believe me.)

Neil,
Only just saw that Coraline is being shown in Cork for a very very
limited run - http://www.corkfestival.com/coraline.html One show was
on today at 1600 (too late now) and there'll be two shows tomorrow.
Anyone in Cork should try and get to see this and drag all their
sticky nieces and nephews along too.

Damien.

Bugger. I'd meant to put something about that up last week. Yes. (Also I really want to see it.) If anyone goes and is reading this, let me know how it is.
It'll be playing at the Donegal festival in July.

Hi Neil,

I'm a frequent reader of your journal and often think about asking a question but can never think of anything that you probably haven't been asked umpteen times before. Then I see your a Boosh fan and finally I have what I hope is an original question (and admittedly a rather irrelevant one).
Who is your favourite Boosh villain? Of course we all love the Hitcher but I feel the Spirit of Jazz and Evil Tree are often overlooked because of this.
Love your work and am looking forward to all the new things you have in the pipeline for us.
I'll stop wasting your time now. :)
Cheers,
Simon

Either Old Gregg (I mean, he's a cross-dressing sea-monster) or Mr Susan, ruler of the Mirrorworld, with his 17 mirrors.

Alan on the radio...

Woke up to several dozen versions of this:

Hi Neil, in case you don't know, Alan Moore was on BBC Radio 4 this morning talking about some legal trouble Lost Girls might have with UK publication. There's a link to the broadcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/audio/full_alan_moore_interview.ram

but you'll need RealPlayer.

Thanks, John Wilson

Great interview. He talks about a lot more than the potential legal troubles [which, honestly, I can't see actually happening: the point is not that this is Peter Pan, the point is that it uses the reader's familiarity with the events of Peter Pan to impart significance to a completely different story... and according to the possibly correct Wikipedia entry, "...in 1988 the government had enacted a perpetual extension of some of the rights to the work, entitling the hospital to royalties for any performance or publication of the work. This is not a true perpetual copyright, however, as it does not grant the hospital creative control nor the right to refuse permission"].

Alan talks about the inspiration for Lost Girls, the accusations that a paedophile could use these books to "groom" a child, sexuality and its part of growing up, and the potential of pornography as an art form. And then the interview wanders over into Alan's troubles with Hollywood and gets very funny indeed.

It looks like there have been an amazing number of Peter Pan "sequels". But nothing in Lost Girls will ever be quite as traumatising as this.

A midsummer afternoon's post

Spoiled by the TIVO-Slingbox combination (whatever you want to watch, wherever you want to watch it), I started wondering why I couldn't play the music on the house's music hard drive wherever I was in the world. Why be limited to a mere 60 gigs of iPod content, if I was in a hotel room somewhere with broadband? So I asked my son Mike, home from college for some of the summer, who has been having much too much fun in the last few weeks in his spare time overhauling the house network, moving the email accounts so they are now hosted by gmail, and doing similar fun things. He went off and found a server for the house music. Then I grumbled (after using it in Seattle) that I couldn't search for anything using it, so he cheerfully went off to build something that would search ID3 tags and then stream it for me when it found it.

I think I am also spoiled by having a son around.

In case you weren't aware, I wanted to let you know that Coraline's "Other Mother" has been nominated in Bloomsbury's search for the most popular literary villain. Of course, Zaphod Beeblebrox is also on the list, so I'm not sure how much faith I'd put in the results.Also: huge fan, thank you for writing, etc. And on the unlikely chance that there absolutely MUST be a question in this email for you to read it, Ninjas or Pirates?

Pirates, of course. But my respect for ninjas has shot up since I learned from The Mighty Boosh that they also hand-deliver cutting-edge style magazines.

That's actually a really good list of villains. I was going to request that everyone reading this go to http://www.bigbadread.co.uk/ and vote for the Other Mother, having learned my lesson about mobilising the internet from the Greatest Living British Author list, but I cannot find it in my heart to do so, mostly because there are such great villains on the list it would seem like cheating. (Bit puzzled about the listing of the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, though. It's been many years since I read the book, but I could have sworn he was only in the film and the subsequent musical-of-the-film, and not in the Ian Fleming novel.)

Thought you might be interested in the first of our multi-art series of podcasts with Terry Gilliam...

Direct link: http://www.quickstopentertainment.com/?p=135
Frontpage link: http://www.quickstopentertainment.com

As the conversation evolves in the coming weeks, there's plenty of discussion about his plans for the film of Good Omens as well.

Oh good. He owes me and Terry Pratchett a groat each, though.

Hey Neil,I just wanted to let you know that I think the first issue of The Eternals is fantastic! JRJR's drawings and Matt Hollingsworth's coloring complement each other beautifully. This is the first time I'll be able to follow a monthly series of yours as it's released, and I couldn't have asked for a better beginning. Can't wait for next month! Paige

It's out? Oh. Good. Glad you're enjoying it. I'm just having too much fun asking JRjr to draw impossible things, and then he does.

Over at http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=7629 you can see the loveliness of the Rick Berry covers to Eternals #2 and #3.

More on the Savannah production of Neverwhere -- it looks like the new theatre it's in is in need of money, or it will lose the space the day after the last performance...

http://www.connectsavannah.com/show_article.php?article_id=830

...

LA artists interpreting pre-schoolers channeling Pooh: http://www.nineteeneightyeight.com/storybookshow.html

I like the art and the idea, not quite sure how I feel about the Disney connection (probably good -- the characters are copyright after all, but I had to think about it) and went and checked the Fabulist at www.fabulist.org before posting this, because really it's only impressive these days if Olga hasn't put it up first.

And finally, it being the summer solstice, my assistant Lorraine has finished the house hunting process, contracts were exchanged, and she got to walk around her new house today deciding what colours she was going to paint the walls.

Lost Girls redux

I was asked to write about Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls for Publishers Weekly. And once I had written the article, I discovered that they needed something half as long. So I cut it and rewrote it, and that's what's on the stands this week. Here's the original version of the article, for the curious, and because there were some good bits that I missed.


LOST GIRLS

When I first started writing comics for adults, I found myself forever needing to explain that, no, I wasn't writing those kind of adult stories.

The boundary between pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you're standing. For some, perhaps, it's a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it's also something to do with the means of distribution – internet pornography is unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica.

Alan Moore knows his words.

Moore has always championed underdog media: his work in superhero comics exemplifies this. That Watchmen was on Time Magazine's list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century is less surprising than its existence (it is a masterful superhero comic about time, mortality, age and nuclear fear, amongst other things) in the first place.

Almost ten years before Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, (a story that took many of the figures of Victorian popular fiction, including Alan Quatermain, Mr Hyde, the Invisible Man, and combined them in one huge romp), Moore, in collaboration with expat San Franciscan underground artist Melinda Gebbie, began Lost Girls, with a similar, although less fantastical, conceit – that the three women whose adventures in girlhood may have inspired respectively, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Peter Pan and Wendy, and The Wizard of Oz, now grown, meet in a Swiss hotel before the first World War. Wendy, Dorothy and Alice, three very different women, one jaded and old, one trapped in a frigid adulthood, one a spunky but innocent young American good-time girl, provide each other with the liberation they need, while also providing very different (and, needless to say, sexual) versions of the stories we associate with them – we go with the girls, in memory, down the Rabbit Hole, to Oz, and to Neverland.

Lost Girls began life, next to Moore's From Hell, in Steve Bissette's ground-breaking anthology Taboo. The first few chapters were collected by Kitchen Sink Press, but Kitchen Sink sank, and many readers wondered if Lost Girls would ever be completed. That it has been is cause, in the world of comics, for slightly disquieted celebration. Lost Girls is, after all, self-avowedly, pornography.

As an exercise in the formal bounds of pure comics, Lost Girls is remarkable, as good as anything Moore has done in his career. (One of my favourite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.) In addition to being a master-class in comics technique, Lost Girls is also an education in Edwardian Smut – Gebbie and Moore pastiche the pornography of the period, taking in everything from The Oyster to the Venus and Tannhauser period work of Aubrey Beardsley.

It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls, however, is all about consequences. It's also about more things than sex – war, music, love, lust, repression and time, to pick a handful of subjects (I could pick more). It's the kind of smut that would have no difficulty in demonstrating to an overzealous prosecutor that it has unquestionable artistic validity beyond its simple first amendment right to exist.

Melinda Gebbie was a strange and inspired choice as collaborator for Moore. She draws real people, with none of the exaggerated bodies of superhero comics or of the hyper-endowed people in the body of pornographic comics from Tom of Finland to Japanese Tentacle Porn. Gebbie's people, the women, and the men, have human bodies, drawn for the most part in gentle crayons.

Lost Girls is a bitter-sweet, beautiful, problematic, exhaustive, occasionally exhausting work. It succeeded for me wonderfully as a true graphic novel. If it failed for me, it was only as smut; the book, at least in large black and white photocopy form, was not a one-handed read. It was too heady, dense and strange to appreciate or to experience on a visceral level. (Your mileage may vary; porn is, after all, personal.)

That the material is problematic – no more so than many unillustrated novels, but then, it is, most definitely illustrated, and the -graphy part of pornography is what makes this a graphic novel – is obvious. Top Shelf has taken the traditional approach of a respectable publisher when faced with the problem of bringing out pornography, and has chosen to package it elegantly, expensively and beautifully, thus pricing, shaping, signaling and presenting it to the world, not as pornography, but as erotica. Whatever you call it, there has never been anything quite like this in the world before, and I find myself extraordinarily pleased that someone of Moore's ability actually has written that sort of comics for adults.

What she said. They said. He said.

Home in time for Father's Day Dinner with 2/3 of my children. (1/3 of them are in London, working hard on a movie set.) I got cards and everything. It made me very happy.

I really enjoy being a father. And I have remarkable children to love. ("Oh, that's so sweet," says Miss Maddy, perhaps not entirely sarcastically, reading over my shoulder.)

Neil
In case someone else hasn't already mentioned this.
I believe the quotation is:
"Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work"
-Gustave Flaubert


David

There we go. It's listed in lots of Flaubert sites and quotation sites, often without the phrase "like a bourgeois". (Although Wikiquotes also erroneously attributes it to Clive Barker.)

Which reminds me -- one thing that seems fairly new is, not exactly hate mail, but a fair quantity of chiding email coming in from people over the last few months, telling me off for hating love. The people sending me the emails know I hate love because they've read a quote from me where I say I hate love somewhere on the web. Some of them tell me they feel sorry for me. A few of them write to tell me they agree with me enthusiastically. None of them, as far as I can tell, have read Sandman.

I crinkled my brow and went off and investigated.

If you google Gaiman "hate love" you get about 28,000 examples of the same quote. Some of the 28,000 mention that it's a quote from a character named Rose Walker in the Sandman book The Kindly Ones, but many of them don't. It's a speech by a character in a book I wrote which seems to have slipped its moorings, and in its wanderings around the web, become attributed to me personally.

It's probably worth pointing out that there's sometimes a slight difference between the author burbling on the blog or in essays and introductions (the kind of things that get quoted over at http://quotableneil.blogspot.com/ for example) and the things his characters say or think or believe.

...

And I was just about to go and write about Mark Millar's Crohn's Auction,
http://www.newsarama.com/marvelnew/CivilWar/MillarCrohnsAuction.html, when my assistant popped her head around the door and said "If you're writing a blog entry, can you end it with And now I have to go or Maddy and I will be late for our haircuts?"

What she said.

Wild Ginger and Jimi Hendrix

I'm in Seattle. Had a lovely dinner last night with mostly that wild Locus crew, not to mention Eileen Gunn and her John, and Gardner Dozois, at Wild Ginger, then went on the Science Fiction Museum and did a short presentation for "A Short Film About John Bolton". I'd not seen it in a few years, and took some pleasure watching it with an audience of people who knew nothing about it at all.

Dear Neil, i'd like to become a writer,but i have also a lot of doubts:in your opinion,someone who is teetotal,and that doesn't drink can write something significant? It seems a stupid question, but sometimes i think that a lot of writers did this in the past.It seems that you have to respect these conventions to become a writer.Okay,this is a silly question,but a writer has really to be a dandy or a "wild one"? Thanks Neil,Francesco from Fondi, near Rome

I've often heard it said that there are no stupid questions, Francesco. But that one, if it's not a joke, does actually come pretty close.

You should meet some writers. I'm afraid that you may be disappointed on many levels, but you will undoubtedly stop imagining that we are the "Wild Ones" very, very fast.

(Well, we are, but it's mostly in our heads. That's how we get writing done. Be bourgois and restrained in your life that you may be wild and unconstrained in your fiction, as someone or other more or less said.)

And, in my experience, those of us who are wild carousers tend not to stay that way for very long, because if we do, one way or another, we stop writing, sometimes rather permanently.

...

Time just passed.

So the Locus brunch happened. (I didn't serve omelettes, I'm afraid. It was worse than that.) Then the Locus Awards, where Anansi Boys won Best Fantasy Novel (which I wasn't at all surprised by) and "Sunbird" took best short story (which completely took me by surprise -- I'd forgotten that it was even in the running). The Locus Awards have more voters than the Hugos or the Nebulas, as Charles N. Brown himself reminded us, shortly before smashing event MC Connie Willis's small Hawaiian figurine mascot to china fragments, like a rotund, Hawaiian-shirted Jimi Hendrix -- or possibly Pete Townsend -- if they used to smash little ugly china hula-ing figurines instead of electric guitars.

Half an hour until I MC the SF museum Hall of Fame thingie.