THE STORY SO FAR

An interview with Neil Gaiman

Henrik Andreasen: Being a writer is a pretty odd occupation. Is it something you always wanted to be, or did you also consider being an artist?
Neil Gaiman: I wouldn't have minded being an artist, but deep inside I always figured maybe I wasn't a real artist, I didn't have the patience. I have the patience to write a long description of a room, but I don't have the patience to draw everything in a room. I remember when I was very little I quite wanted to be a barrister, I liked the idea of being a lawyer and wearing an English white wig, and getting up in front of a court and saying "Me Lord" and things like that. As I got a little bit older I also quite liked the idea of becomming a comparative theologian, I thought that would be very interesting.

HA: How come you drew a chapter of Alan Moore's songbook and did something like the Peter David cover etc?
NG: Because it was fun, and because I was asked to. I do doodle all the time. I draw strange little pictures when I'm on the phone and stuff like that, I just don't think that it is art, it is just me making doodles. Alan asked if I wanted to do a chapter, and I said sure.

HA: Were you also asked to do the 24 hour comic your did for Cerebus?
NG: No, that I did because everybody else was doing that, and I thought if I do it in 24 hours nobody would expect me to draw every little detail in a room.

HA: Did Alan Moore, who was sort of a mentor for you, teach you how to write comics?
NG: He never really taught me how to write comics, he showed me what a script looked like. I wasn't sure how I should tell an artist what to do, so I asked Alan how I should do that, and he showed me. You write page 1 panel 1 and then you put everything that are in your head about that panel down onto the page - where the light is coming from - what you are looking at, and stuff. Then underneath you write down who is talking and what they are saying, and he basically taught me how to do that.

HA: What's the major differences in writing comics and books?
NG: It's a different process, because in a book you are creating pictures inside a persons head. In a comic book you are putting down a sequence of pictures so you get an immediacy. You can't go inside people's heads and twist in the same way as when you write pure prose, but you have an immediacy you wouldn't otherwise have because you have visuals.

HA: Doesn't it pain you to see somebody like Alan Moore being recognized in the 90'ties as a writer of, should we say, less intelligent books, where he in the 80'ties created masterpieces like Watchmen, V for Vendetta etc?
NG: Alan is currently writing From Hell, which I think is probably the very best comic book at the moment. The ideas in it, and the craft and construction is just astounding, I don't think Alan in any way has lost anything. I think it is a pity that he is doing the other stuff, primarily for money, but on the flipside everybody got to live. Alan went through a number of years after leaving DC, and with the collaps of his publishing company Mad Love when Bill Sienkiewicz wasn't delivering the pages, when Alan didn't have any money. He had the tax people after him and all sorts of other problems.

HA: But isn't it depressing seeing him refered to as the writer of WildC.A.T.S.?
NG: By who? I still see Alan being nominated to Harvey & Eisner awards, and not refered to writing that other stuff, but as the writer of From Hell. What if a generation of 12 & 13 year olds should look at Alan as the author of WildC.A.T.S., they may still go out and look for Watchmen, and when they get older they might read From Hell or Lost Girls.

HA: Did you think about that possibility when you wrote that issue of Spawn and the Angela miniseries?
NG: I wrote Spawn because Todd asked me to, and I thought it might be fun. I wrote Angela for my son Mikey, who is 12 years old and loves Spawn better than anything in the world. It was a lot of fun to write, and there was no really work involved. Normally if I write a whole page of Sandman in a day, I feel very pleased with myself and ahead of the game. Angela issue 1-3 took maybe a day each, that was great - I loved that, and I can definitely see the attraction of doing that kind of comics. I can understand how people can write 5,6,7,8 comics a month, you have people who shout and hit each other, they run around and then they hit and shout at each other some more, and that is great. I might end up doing one of these series each year, until Mikey stops reading Spawn, and at that point I'll just stop. Meanwhile I like the idea of having my son actually get to read something I write, which is really fun.

HA: Despite that you only write one monthly titel you can hardly read any magazine without your name being mentioned due to all the articles and interviews which is done with -and about you. Aren't you afraid that your name might be overexposed or misused, just like Stephen King?
NG: The work is the work. 3 issue's of Angela does not invalidate -or make less Mr. Punch. If it was up to me, I would not have put my name on top of all the Tekno titles. It was a new comic book company who asked me to create some charaters for them, and I did. They picked bits of charaters I created and used them, and they put my name on the cover of all the titles, which surprised me a little bit, but they were contractually entitled to do so. I created 5 characters for them, so I guess that there should be 5 potential titles they could do. The work is the work, we do publicity and interviews - do I worry about being over interviewed, I surpose I do. On the other hand if say no, they start saying you are seclusive and all that kind of thing. I really don't care, -if I go to a convention I'm willing to do interviews and talk to people, and I never really feelt I needed to watch out for my image, but maybe I do.

HA: Those who don't read Stephen King's books just think of him as a guy who had a lot of mediocre films based on his novels. Your Angela series had a far greather audience than your Mr. Punch novel, which means that a great deal a people will only know you for your lesser work, isn't that frigthning?
NG: That's true, but there is always the hope that some of them will grow up and go -I really liked that Angela series, which I read when I was 13-14, now I'm 16 I wonder what Mr. Punch is like, which is the flipside. There is this point were they normally start to leave comics, and then they are mine.

HA: You have a feeling that escpecially the Vertigo writters put their heart and soul into their work as opposed to those who write 6 or 7 hero titles a month. Was that difference very apparent when you wrote Angela?
NG: Sure. Sandman has been 7 years of my life, it has been 7 years of work, it is very big and it is very exhausting, and I will be very pleased when it is over. Angela is 3 days of work, I could write a Spawn miniseries tomorrow, have a great deal of fun and have it finished by the weekend. It is not 7 years of work like Sandman, and a lot of me went into that series.

HA: Is that why Sandman is getting more and more behind schedule, because you are getting tired of writing it, but at the same time you want to make a good finish?
NG: That's true to some extent. Sandman also went to being published every 6th week 4 or 5 months ago, which was officially announced, but nobody seems to have told anybody. Nobody seemed to have passed this on, even though that's how they are being solicited, so Sandman are coming out more or less on time. Michael Zulli is drawing the current issue's in pencil, and he is drawing as fast as he can, but he can't do an issue in 28 days, and frankly since we are so close to the end it doesn't bother me. Nobody will remember 5 years from now that the last couple of issues were late.

HA: Like Watchmen?
NG: Exactly. Nobody remembers that the last couple of issues of Watchmen were fairly late, because Watchmen now excist as a whole.

HA: It seems to me that you, especially in your recent storyline the Kindly Ones, tried to explain the connection between a lot of characters instead of leaving it open for interpretation, and in doing so took away the readers chances of making their own conclusions.
NG: Like who?

HA: Like Rose Walker's connection to Desire, and her visit to the mansion in England where Sandman was imprisioned. If you had only gone for the Sandman vs. The Three Witches story, you could have done the story in 6 or 7 issues instead of 13 issues. But as it turned out, I feelt that you wanted to be sure that nobody was left out in the dark, that everybody knew who was connected to who.
NG: I think that the Rose Walker/Desire connection was pretty explicit in the Doll's House story arc, and that was left to the readers imagination, wasn't that explicit enough?

HA: It was, but you sort of made less of it by having them meet again, which wasn't necessary.
NG: It was fun, and that was what happend in the story - they meet.

HA: You don't feel pressured to tell origin stories like they do in mainstream comics?
NG: When we do the origin issue of Rose Walker we will let you know. When I was writing the Kindly Ones people would occasionally ask me - what about all the sub-plots, and I would just tell them that there aren't any sub-plots in the Kindly Ones, it is only a story. If you view the K.O. as being simply the Sandman vs. The Three Witches - then boy did I pad it out a awfull lot, but that was never meant to be the story. To me it was the story of Lyta Hall, and the story of the various female/male relationships that we touched on in Sandman through the years. For me the heart and the whole center of the K.O., is Rose Walker's visit to the old people's home and the stories she is told there by the three women sitting in the old people's home. That for me was always the heart of things.

HA: I feelt that you were telling one story and solving 10 sub-plots.
NG: No, but if that is how it worked, then I didn't handle it very well. That was never really the intension, I meant to do a big story with an awfull lot of people in it.

HA: A lot of people write in telling how a certain story affected them. Do you think about what kind of affect you have on people when you write your stories, with all the things you put into them?
NG: You don't write it for them, you write it for you. I put all the weird reference stuff into my stories, because it is the kind of stuff I like reading. I know a lot of weird shit and it is fun to write it down, so that is very much the position I tend to go from. If a reader comes up to me and tell me that reading my stuff got him through the death of his son, or if a reader comes up to me and says - I was a kid selling crack on the street and I got hooked on Sandman and now I'm finishing my third year at a university studying comparative religion. Or if somebody comes up to me and says - I met my wife because she gave me a copy of Sandman, and now we are married and have 2 children, and we want to thank you. That is wonderfull, it is really nice, but I didn't write it to do that. I didn't write it to get them over the death of their son, or of the street, or to get them married - it is just something that happens. It is nice that it does. We have gotten a lot of similar letters on Sandman recently from people saying that they have been reading Sandman for 5-6-7 years, and it has been the one constant thing in their lives, the thing they could rely on, it has changed their lives, they laughed, they cried, thank you very much. The strange thing is that nobody have written in saying - carry on or I will kill you. I was talking with Frank Miller about this - he was getting death threats when he killed Elektra, but nobody is doing that. They are just sort of going, thank you very much for doing something that was part of my life, and I suppose good things have to end sometimes, which is very nice.

HA: In your stories you often hint at other events or persons. Is that something you just make up, or do you research everything thoroughly in order to keep your facts straight?
NG: I like to have my facts in place, because I have between 100.000 -200.000 readers out there every month, and if I make a mistake they will let me know - they are not backward, and they will tell me exactly how I fucked up. It is just easier not to fuck things up, so I like to have my facts in place.

HA: In Sandman there is a lot of references to other cultures and religions, and especially in the Season of Mists storyline we have a large number of different religions. Do you find religion fascinating?
NG: I love religion. In Season of Mists I wanted to see how strong a structure suspension of disbelieve was. I kept wanting to see how far I could push it, because it is one the weird things that fascinates me about comics. I had the Nordic Gods alongside the Greek Gods, Order and Chaos, Angels and Faries all in one story and it didn't collaps. It was interesting to see that it was possible to do that kind of thing.

HA: Do you see religion as a source for interesting stories or do you believe in some of it?
NG: On the whole I think that mankinds beliefe in religion is tremendously reassuring and tremendously fascinating, the way that people will believe things, and the way that beliefe inspires people and changes the course of the world. Enormous atrocities have -and are being committed on a continuously basis in the name of religion, and the most wonderfull and selfless things that people do are often committed in the name of religion to, and I love that dichotomy. But I due tend to go to religion as a source for stories, I just get fascinated. You read things like the Lost Gospels or the Apocrypha gospels from the second and third century. The gospels of the childhood of Christ where little Christ keps going around killing people, which can be found in any good Apocryphal gospel. There is one point in the story where his father Josef of Arimathaea says "if you don't stop killing people we have to lock you in the house", because anytime anybody does anything bad to the baby Jesus they get blasted.

HA: Could you tell us about you relation to music, and what kind of inspiration you might draw from music, if any?
NG: I love to listen to people like Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Michael Nymann, Steven Sondheim, Tori Amos, Kate Bush etc. Things with cool lyrics, I like John Cale's work a great deal. Do music provide inspiration? - sure. Everything provides an inspiration, and music should be part of that. Do I write songs myself? - yes I'm afraid so, it is a vice and a habit that is hard to break. Currently a few of my songs has been released by a local band called the Flash Girls, and Dreamhaven have some of their CD's.

HA: Isn't it hard for you as an intellingent writer to write something for music, which is an emotional medium?
NG: No I don't think so. My songs do the same things that my stories do, I would hope. I'm fascinated by what songs do, songs is a lot like comics, little encapsulated moments of emotion.

HA: But people don't tend to listen to music they just react to it, where your stories is meant for the mind not the body.
NG: Yes, but the nice thing about music is that it does the same thing as comics.You can do really weird effects with music, like putting really nasty lyrics together with a sweet tune, and people will bob around and they may never listen to the lyrics. There is a song on the new Flash Girl album that I wrote, called The Girl Needs A Knife, where I tried to get that effect. It has the prettiests of tunes, and the lyrics are about why a girl needs a knife. It's a lovesong song by a girl to her knife, "I bought myself a new knife, it has a channel down the side for the blood to run" and stuff like that.

HA: I read somewhere that your good friend Tori Amos founded a support group called R.A.I.N., which helps people who have been raped and abused. Are you a member of this group?
NG: No. Enough of my time gets lost with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, but I'm sure that if Tori ever asked me to do something for her I would do it.

HA: Do you think that someone like you who has a fairly well known name, could make a difference by stating your point of view on certain issues in public?
NG: Making statements regarding these issues is the kind of thing I wind up doing in stories, and I would much rather do a story about overcomming the effect of abuse or whatever. I think it is important to provide people with a telephoneline like R.A.I.N. does, where they can phone if they have been raped or abused.

HA: So as an author you more or less work out your frustrations with society through you work?
NG: So far yes. One day I might wind up seizing guns & bombs and taking over the capital, but I think it is unlikely.

HA: At the moment you are developing at TV-series for BBC. Could you tell us how far along that is?
NG: We start filming on the 15th of January 96, and we go into preproduction and casting in a few weeks time. It is a 6 episode series called Neverwhere, set in magical world underneath London.

HA: Is it a Charles Dickens inspired story?
NG: Not really, I'm trying to think of the inspiration for the story, - maybe it just came from London itself? There are actually 2 characters in it called Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, who are very Dickens like. But it was just a desire to do that kind of thing, just like Sandman was created in order for me to tell the kind of stories I wanted to write and read. I like to create the kind of television I would like to watch. It got angels in it, and rats, Dickens like assassins, and mysterious girls who can open doors and things like that.

HA: Somebody also told me that there is supposed to be a Sandman movie in the works. Do you think that is going to happen, and what do you think about it?
NG: So far I have managed to kill it 3 times, but now it seems like it is going to be done by Warner Brothers, and I have just recently been shown the new script. The only meetings I ever had over the years with the Sandman movies, was where they would fly me out to Hollywood and meet people, and they would say what do you think about a Sandman movie, and I would say I think it is a terrible idea. My Hollywood experience was with Good Omens, where I did get as far as writing a script and I had to go through all the Hollywood madness, and I hated it. The television, especially in England, is a writters medium. Things aren't written by idiots sitting round tables wondering if saying things like "lets cut to the chase", would play inferior. The fun for me is not cutting to the chase, the fun is everything that happens before and after the chase.

HA: Do you have any influence on this new Sandman movie?
NG: I have no real influence other than I wrote the comics. I have seen the script and it is very firmly based on the comics, how based it will be when the film comes out, I couldn't say.

HA: Will this prevent you from finishing Sandman?
NG: No, it stops with issue 75.

HA: You told DC some time ago that if they begann publishing Sandman again you would no longer work for them. Do you not fear that even with the special status you have with DC, that you are not able to prevent them from bringing Sandman back if the movie becomes a succes?
NG: It is a very straightforward deal, and it is a very simpel equation. Sandman stops when I stop, and I will continue to work for DC. If Sandman doesn't stop, or if they bring it back with other writers, then I will not do anything for DC anymore, it is very straightforward. They may do that, they have every legaly right to hire Fred, Dale and Joe to do Sandman and have him fight crime. They can do that, but then I can no longer work for them.

HA: Frank Miller had a similar deal with Marvel about Elektra, which they brought back against his wishes.
NG: And Frank will never work for Marvel again. Marvel obviously decided that it was more important for them to have Elektra than having Frank. DC may well decide in the future that it is much more important to them to have a Sandman comic than me. It is a very simpel equation.

HA: If your BBC series turns out allright, will you then consider doing something for the big screen, if not Hollywood then for somebody in England?
NG: That is much more where I'm at. I think that the best way to do it, is the way my friend Richard Curtis made his film Four Weddings and a Furneral

HA: You know him.
NG: Oh yes.

HA: He's the writer of Mr. Bean....
NG: ..and Black Adder. I have known Richard since 1990. That is the way you do it, you write a script, you get it right, and then you go out and raise the money and get it made, and make sure it is cheap.

HA: How would you describe Neverwhere? What kind of series is it?
NG: I can't think of anything else like it. Some of it is funny, some of it is scary, it is kind of like Sandman, only it isn't like Sandman at all, but it is the nearest thing I can think of.

HA: In a recent article in the magazine I write for you got compared to Quentin Tarantino. How do you feel about that comparison?
NG: I liked Pulp Fiction a great deal, True Romance and Reservoir Dogs was okay, but I got pretty bored. I loved Pulp Fiction because it did real cool things with stories, the others I got really interested in, but they seemed to dissolve into stories about people cutting each other up and blowing their heads away, which is fine, but I'm not a great blowing people's heads away fan, it is not what I do. I think his dialogue is shit hot, and I love the structure of Pulp Ficture, it is beautifully structured.

HA: Could you see yourself doing graphic violence?
NG: I have done graphic violence, it is not that I can't do it. I wrote Sandman #6, which is still probably the nastiest comic of the last decade, and I wrote Sandman #14 the serial killers convention, which in a completly diffent way is the nastiest comic of the last decade. But it is not necessarily the stuff that I'm interested in, even though it is very easy to do. You can go in and operate on a very visceral level, and you can effect people with an immediacy.

HA: Cheap thrills/violence is easy to do, but to do something like Pulp Fiction commens skill.
NG: Cheap violence is easy. I thought it was interesting, but what I liked about P.F. was not the violent stuff, it was all the other stuff. I liked the acting, I liked the horror in their expression when they realized they had blown the guys head off, it was one of the funniest moments in cinema, and that is funny.

HA: Besides comics you have also written books. How do you feel about the difference in public acceptance between a novelist and a comic book writer, and did you meet that discrimination head on when you won the World Fantasy Award?
NG: Basically I don't care about it, because if I cared about it I wouldn't be writing comics. I would be writing respectable things. I like the fact that I won the W.F. award, I like the fact that Angels and Visitations, my collection of short stories, won the International Horror Critics award for best short story collection of it's year. I like the fact that I have had a short story in each of the last three years Best Antologies, years best short stories of horror and fantasy. I like that just because I can point to that if anybody is gonna start going uptete about you only write comics, but just see how many awards it has gotten me.

HA: Do you just like Will Eisner fight to get comics accepted as a literary form?
NG: I would much rather get us/-comics accepted as a literary form. I don't know if it is a lost battle, these days I'm beginning to start suspecting that literatur is a completly lost battle. I have 100.000 people a month reading Sandman, most authors would kill for those kind of numbers. We sell over a million copies of Sandman each year and that is leaving out the graphic novel collections. And they are getting read by people. People don't buy 3 or 4 copies of each issue and collect them and stuff, they just buy them and read them, and then they give them to their friends. I have more readers than anybody who isn't a author of the John Grisham or Stephen King variety in terms of people reading them. And that is wonderfull, it is what I write for, I write to be read, I write for readers.

HA: Having said that. How do you feel about the print run (15,000 copies) on Mr. Punch?
NG: That was just sheer incompetence on the part of the people who set it. An example of people not listening. I said you will need more, orders will be higher, and they said, "don't be silly go away what do you know", and then orders came in and they where much higher than the printrun. They are finally doing a softcover, I hope the print quality will be somewhere as good as the hardcover, but I don't think it will.

HA: You mentioned earlier that you did the Angela series for your son Mickey, so he could read something that you had written. Do your family mean a lot to you, and do you get inspiration from them?
NG: Yes, I do get inspiration from my family, and yes they mean a lot to me.

HA: Were they the inspiration for the childrens book you wrote?
NG: Sometimes. I wrote a childrens book recently that White Wolf is going to be publishing, where Dave McKean is going to be doing the pictures called "The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish", and that was very much about my kids. The most important thing families do, is they keep you cut down to seize, you can't really believe that you are in anyway important if you got a family. And you are not really important if you got a family, you are just a part of the protoplasma stream of life. You watch your kids grow up. I got a baby she is now 10 months old, and she has just started walking. Soon she will be talking, - then she will go to school, and before I know of it she will be dating and graduating. Then one day I'll be old and dying, and she will come to my funeral. You kind of feel like you are part of a process, like being part of a stream.

HA: Was it you or your family who wanted to move to the American "madhouse"?
NG: It was my wife really, she is American. She decided it was her turn to have me endure her country, after having put up living 10 years in England.

HA: Do you still get a lot of inspiration from reading books, as you did when you were younger?
NG: I do, but the books have changed. When I was a kid I read an awfull lot of fiction, I would read novels and stories, these days I'm much more likely to pick up an old dusty book on the very old costums of some South American tribe and read that. I read a lot more non-fiction.

HA: Can you still enjoy reading a book, or do you find yourself looking at the dialogue, trying to analyse the structure and pace of the book, instead of enjoying it?
NG: No, but you don't look at it in the same way. You don't look at it going, oh how did he do dialogue, how does he plot or whatever. What you do tend to do is this: if you were a trained magician and you can do magic tricks, and you are sitting in the audience watching a magic trick you don't go "what if he did cut her in half, what if she is dead". You may not know how he did something, but you are watching with a completly different attitude, and it doesn't involve worrying, you see it as fiction. When I read fiction, I read fiction as fiction, just like an actor you get to walk around backstage, and you know what happens on stage isn't real.

HA: As an author you have more or less made your hobby your work. Isn't it hard to have any time of, compared to "regular" people who work from 9 to 5 and that is it?
NG: I suppose. I have a great deal of envy to people who have regular jobs, - they get weekends off, - they go on holidays, - they get Christmas', - they go places in the summer and they don't work all night. That must be really nice, getting up in the morning, going to bed at night. Getting home from work, where you can sit in your sparetime watching television, that must be great, I miss that.

HA: Some authors and artists have strange working hours could you tell us a little about yours?
NG: I get up sometime between 10 & 2 O'clock, deal with emergencies and telephone calls for a few hours, eat, put the kids to bed, start working and finish working around 4-5 O'clock.

HA: How come you work so late?
NG: The phone doesn't ring, people don't ring you after midnight.

HA: Have you always worked like this, or has it evolved over the years?
NG: I pretty much always worked like this.

HA: Having been an author for a lot of years, do you feel that there has been a shift in the balance between inpiration and hard work?
NG: There is definitely places where that is true, - in Sandman I have little more to say. I said pretty much all I had to say about that theme and those characters, but I don't find that with other things. When I start a new project it is normally very easy because I haven't spoken about it, but you spend ideas less. When I started out I would spend ideas like a drunken sailor getting rid of his paypacket. You are hitting the town, you want ideas, here is a dozen ideas.

HA: A lot of artists include their friends as characters/bystanders in the comics they draw. You are often a victim of these small in-jokes, - how do you feel about that, and have anybody ever called you up and asked if it was okay?
NG: The only ones who ever asked me if it was okay was some guys at the World Horror Convention when I was there. They said "can we put you in our wampire comic" and I said sure, everybody else does. The took some photos of me, and now I will be in their wampire comic. I don't mind, it is sometimes sweet and sometimes silly, but it doesn't have anything to do with me, it is just a drawing of a guy with dark glasses and black leatherjacket. I like James Owen's Little Neil, that is funny.

HA: You also recently appeared in Wolf & Byrd as Niles Pib, who was a big fan of the EC comics. Do you yourself also happen to like the EC comics?
NG: Not as much as the character in Wolf & Byrd does, but yes I do. I was staying up one really late night, while a party was going on at a friends house, and he had complet collection of all the EC comics, and I sort of skipped the party and sat reading those comics.

HA: Could we fear that some of the things that took place in the 50'ties could happen again?
NG: Not in the same way, but that is what the C.B.L.D.F. is for, and that is why I have been out there raising $8-9000 for the fund, and that is why it is important that somebody is out there fighting and manning the battlements.

HA: Do you think that this is true for this medium because of it's juveline status it has compared to books?
NG: I think the problem that comics have is; in a book if you want to say to somebody this book is obscene you have to print a block of text and they are going to have to read it. If you are going to say to somebody this film is obscene you are going to have to show a film clip. If you want to say to somebody this comic is obscene you can take a (one) panel out of context and print it, and people will go "how obscene". They completly lack any context for that image, and they can't see the story before or after, you can just shock people with an image.

HA: Was Sandman initially intended as a place/universe to spin stories from, and when there were no more stories to tell you could just close it, - or did that happen during the course of the series?
NG: The original intention with Sandman was always the intension to create a machine you could tell stories with. Having said that, the machine you told stories with had to be a story, and a story has to have an end. In the end of every story they all live happely ever after and then you stop, you just pick somewhere and that is where you stop. The end in Sandman #1 is really as far as I'm concerned, was always the ending of Sandman #75, it is the art that begann in Sandman no. 1. Why did they go back to house, why did Alex Burgess wake up, that was the story we begann in Sandman no. 1 that ended with them going to sleep, and obviously the place where that story ends is basically the point where that character wakes up.

HA: In which issues does this take place?
NG: To some extent issue 69, and to a lesser extent issue 72. Issues 73 - 75 are 3 little post scripts, they are wrapping up other little things that we begann in the story.

HA: So the actually ending is issue 72?
NG: Really yeah, that is the end of the way. 73 wraps up the story of Robert Gadling, which we begann in issue 13. 74 is the last of the "Soft Places" stories, and issue 75 is the last Shakespeare story and it wraps up what we did in Sandman #19.

HA: Due to the fact that you have become involved in more and more projects at once, you have gone from giving the artists you work with a complet script to giving them the script one page at a time. Is this something you will try and improve on in the future as several artists have been unsatisfied working this way?
NG: Yes that is how we begann. Up until about Sandman #35 we were far enough ahead, so I was able to write a full script and then somebody could draw it. Then gradually the time we had going would get eaten down and even up. It was a matter of either DC waiting a month, which would allow me to would write the whole script, or if I had finished 5 pages of the script could I fax it of to the artist because he have to start working now. It is just an extension of the commercial wars name.

HA: What could we expect from you in the future and in what medium do you see yourself working in?
NG: I think the main thing you can expect is more stories, in lots of different medias. I can't see myself completly leaving comics, but there are lots of things I haven't done yet. I quite like to do a musical, that would be fun.

HA: Is it a big passion of yours?
NG: No not really, but it is another one of those unlikely formats like comics, which does strange things. I like the fact that you got these little weird encapsulated moments of emotions. There is an immediacy you get with people on stage who break into song, that is both unlike and can effect you on a gut level, and real life people don't break into song, and I like that. There is a few more media until I stop, a few more stories to tell before I hang up my story tellinghat.

HA: That's it. I thank you for your time.
NG: No problem Henrik.