Neil Gaiman: Classic Or Dud

the whole thing has an element of Myst/Riven looks about it.

I think it's supposed to be Delirium from Sandman:

http://www.obscure.org/~domino/images/delirium.jpg

...though if I remember correctly, Gaiman denies it in some of his introductions to the Sandman books and says Tori is more like Death. Anyway, the book where that strip is taken from does feature Delirium visiting an S/M club where a Tori Amos song is playing on the background.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/thewire/pip/4uyaw/

no Listen Again link on page but it's here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_promo.shtml
under 'The Wire'

http://www.ojaiwan.net/cwimages/prophecy3theasce_01.jpg

wonder if this means Coraline will be decent or not.... i <3 experimental animation and the handmade everything production... but Neil Gaiman?! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film)

Will refuse to date a Gaiman fan.

Haha, am reading a Gaiman novel at the moment. It's quite good, but basically just Terry Pratchett ripped out of Discworld and slapped onto America. Nothing outstanding, but a pleasant read.

from a place of ignorance I have always had a "ewww" feeling about this person- probably because I think that great literature is already "goth" enough, thanks.

Will refuse to date a Gaiman fan.

oooh handy filter thx

x-post would that be American Gods, Sick Mouthy? That's a pretty good book if so, the only one of his I've read.

Aye, that's what I'm reading. I've also read Anansi Boys, and the one with Pratchett from years ago.

i like Gaiman a lot but generally think his novels are a bit rub. his best work is either Sandman or his children's/YA novels - both Coraline and The Graveyard Book are aces.

Maybe I should revive my Kipling thread for this but I just started reading Puck of Pook's Hill, and the idea behind American God's is basically Puck's monologue with America substituted for England:

'But they didn't all flit at once. They dropped off, one by one,
through the centuries. Most of them were foreigners who
couldn't stand our climate. They flitted early.'

'How early?' said Dan.

'A couple of thousand years or more. The fact is they
began as Gods. The Phoenicians brought some over
when they came to buy tin; and the Gauls, and the Jutes,
and the Danes, and the Frisians, and the Angles brought
more when they landed. They were always landing in
those days, or being driven back to their ships, and they
always brought their Gods with them. England is a bad
country for Gods.

...

They were a stiff-necked, extravagant set of idols, the Old Things. But
what was the result? Men don't like being sacrificed at the
best of times; they don't even like sacrificing their farm-
horses. After a while, men simply left the Old Things
alone, and the roofs of their temples fell in, and the Old
Things had to scuttle out and pick up a living as they
could."

I liked "Good Omens" in my Pratchett years, and now I am twice as old I remember it more fondly than the Discworld series, and my embarrassment at former Pratchett fandom leads me to believe that maybe it was good because of Gaiman, and that I should read Gaiman's other work; but maybe I'm just a little too hasty to deny my disowned teenage canon and swap it for someone else's.

Anyway I saw a band called American Gods last year and they were v good, so perhaps I should have faith in their apparent name source.

(None of this is of any use or interest to anyone else, but what I mean to say is that I'll be lurking around the thread picking up recommendations so I can see which of my kneejerk suspicions is right)

i enjoyed american gods.

it's a lot like the thing he did with early sandman (and moore did with watchmen and top 10, and morrison did with zenith) - rescuing characters from obscurity. is fun on a 'spot the reference' level.

anansi boys has been languishing on my amazon wishlist from before it was published...

Puck of Pook's Hill is great, Clotpoll! The story with the Roman Centurion is particularly atmospheric...

Anansi Boys is pretty unmemorable. I'm quite up for the Graveyard Book, he writes well for children.

I'm looking forward Coraline, but that's really down to being a Henry Selick fan and the hopes that one day he will do something as winsome as The Nightmare Before Christmas again.

what's the current Gaiman/Russell Sandman comic like?

What's that, DV? I can't find any info on it. I love P Craig Russell (I assume that's the Russell in question).

zomg spacecadet we are in oppositeland of teenagedom:

my embarrassment at former Pratchett Gaiman fandom leads me to believe that maybe it was good because of Gaiman Pratchett, and that I should read Gaiman's Pratchett's other work; but maybe I'm just a little too hasty to deny my disowned teenage canon and swap it for someone else's.

Or maybe Good Omens is just good in its own way?

I'LL FORM THE HEAD

I hate Gaiman but I may go see Coraline.

Pratchett gets a bad rap, he's a smart guy - probably smarter than Gaiman, despite being a less gifted storyteller. Not that I'd actually bother to read one of his novels now, but I'm glad I did.

Good Omens is class, even if some of the jokes are pretty dated now. might be the best thing either of them have done.

Hooray for Youtube scrobbler, a great idea!

Oops sorry guys wrong thread I'll go back to the last.fm area...

'Anansi Boys' is a big dull dud, sadly. 'Good Omens' is still good, though.

Anansi Boys was a borderline-racist embarassment.

What's that, DV? I can't find any info on it. I love P Craig Russell (I assume that's the Russell in question).

Russell's writing and drawing an adaptation of The Dream Hunters, the old Gaiman-written Amano-illustrated Sandman prose book.

The voice casting for Coraline looks promising at least: Keith David (cat), John Hodgman, French & Saunders

I love Keith David!

I have high hopes.

Meantime, Newbery Award ahoy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/books/27newb.html?_r=1&8dpc

The film is good -- nice 3D -- even if they added a co-conspirator boy and kinda muffed the 'second climax.'

Of course, it's more American than the book (not just the setting change). I'm kinda curious about what the Stephin Merritt stage musical version will be like...

I am looking forward to this, the animation looks lovely.

Yeah, should be a treat. It will be interesting to compare it to MirrorMask since Gaiman's said that was essentially his own demi-adaptation of the book's story.

the single They Might Be Giants song kinda sticks out, though.

They Might Be Giants? o_O

Quite a bit of the score employs children's choral stuff. Nothing scarier.

ha I thought that was TMBG, other dad even looked just like John Flansberg.

What were the (I assume, techincal/legal) reasons for filing in the US?

I think that's where those two are currently residing

This is sickening.

The writer Elizabeth Sandifer has been writing about comics and comics people in the framing of a history of a magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, and last February wrote a sidepiece on Gaiman. If you're reading this the chances are probably high that you know of her, if not then "Andrew Hickey but for comics (and not a podcast)" is a decent first approximation - astonishing amounts of detail and research and tied together very well. The piece is here if any of you have a day off coming soon: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-cuddled-little-vice-sandman - I am only partway through and I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it, but it's great stuff.

The framing may well be off-putting to some of you - it barely impinges on the story, the word magic appears only 50 times in 60,000 words, and some of those are because he wrote the miniseries The Books of Magic. The 60,000 words may also be off-putting, that's fair enough.

i'm maybe 10% into that story and it immediately had me wanting to rewatch The Master. i also may or may not have started seeing how much vintage scientology e-meters go for nowadays.

The writer Elizabeth Sandifer has been writing about comics and comics people in the framing of a history of a magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, and last February wrote a sidepiece on Gaiman. If you're reading this the chances are probably high that you know of her, if not then "Andrew Hickey but for comics (and not a podcast)" is a decent first approximation - astonishing amounts of detail and research and tied together very well. The piece is here if any of you have a day off coming soon: https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-cuddled-little-vice-sandman - I am only partway through and I wouldn't say I'm enjoying it, but it's great stuff.

The framing may well be off-putting to some of you - it barely impinges on the story, the word magic appears only 50 times in 60,000 words, and some of those are because he wrote the miniseries The Books of Magic. The 60,000 words may also be off-putting, that's fair enough.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, February 12, 2026 12:44 AM (seven hours ago)

tl;dr - strong cosign

gushy ramble - sandifer is absolutely one of my favorite writers and one of my biggest influences as a writer. the last thing i wrote (about a year ago now) was inspired by her breakthrough piece on "the tenth planet". it's one of the few things i'm actually proud of writing.

i haven't read her last war in albion stuff, for a couple of reasons. even though i did grow up reading moore and morrison's stuff, i'm not as invested in it as i was in the previous topic she wrote about. for the past six years my life has been very, uh, personally complex, and hasn't left me the free time to read i used to have. for a while now i've been pretending to be very, very stupid, in about the same way, and with about the same level of success, as i used to pretend to be a man. i don't think pretending to be stupid is _good_, but it's kind of a survival skill i've adopted. reading almost-certainly-brilliant book-length analyses of neil gaiman as a person and as a writer is... not compatible with that goal.

i have been curious for a while about whether the process of writing last war in albion has changed her thoughts. the impression i got was that she was pro-moore and anti-morrison, which was pretty much my take when she started writing it. my feelings on morrison haven't changed, mostly because i haven't read anything of his in the past eight years, but over time i've become markedly less sympathetic to moore, who is _such_ a Cis White Man (derogatory).

Yeah, I haven't read the whole of Last War in Albion, but I did read her analysis of Doom Patrol and she was so negative on Morrison (who uses "they/them" pronouns now) as a person that I don't really want to read the rest of it. I did start reading Cuddled Little Vice though after seeing the mention pop up here as well as other places, have gotten to her coverage of the first Sandman arc, and I don't know, this is more of the same thing, nicely researched and reasoned, but I don't mind her target in this case. I'm probably not going to finish it; too much else I want to do with my limited free time, and I don't need to read 60,000 words to write Gaiman off at this point.

Can't take Morrison seriously after the "corporations are ok to screw artists over because superheroes are MYTHS that belong to EVERYONE" bullshit.