SAN FRANCISCO — Fantasy author Neil Gaiman made headlines around the world last week when he announced a return to the beloved Sandman series for the comic’s 25th anniversary. It will be the first new Sandman story in a decade, and nobody was more excited by the news than Wired. We caught up with Gaiman the day after the announcement at a gallery in the Mission, where his wife, the powerhouse musician and performance artist Amanda Palmer, was preparing to take the stage for a standing-room-only concert appearance.
In our exclusive video interview, Gaiman explains the back story to his new projects — including the Sandman prequel and five new children’s books — and Palmer riffs on the massive Kickstarter success of her upcoming album Theatre is Evil.
“When I started writing Sandman, I was 26,” Gaiman says. “I had no idea if this was going to work or not. I had this idea in my head. All I cared about was the joy of getting to the next page, the next panel, the next word…. I had all these cool stories in my head, and I hoped we wouldn’t get canceled before I told them. That was really my agenda when I was 26 — ‘Will I get this story out?’”
Gaiman’s hotly anticipated return to The Sandman in 2013 will be a prequel mini-series, which explores the terrain before Sandman 1, released in 1989.
“When Issue 75 of Sandman was done, and the story was laid to rest, there was one big story that I plotted and never told because it didn’t fit anywhere,” Gaiman said. “And it was a story I called Sandman 0, and it was just what happened just before Sandman 1 started. There was a whole storyline that you never knew about. And it happens in 1914, 1915.”
Courtesy DC Comics
Gaiman’s return to the intensely popular comic-book series will undoubtedly be met with intense adoration — and scrutiny. “I’m imagining a hypercritical audience of roughly 50 million people going, ‘That’s not Sandman!’” Gaiman said. “But then I think, the great thing about Sandman was that from the moment I discovered the internet, and that people were talking about Sandman on the internet — which would have been, like, rec.art.comics.dc circa 1989, end of ’89 — what people were saying then never changed for the next seven years of comics. All they ever said was, ‘It’s not as good as it used to be.’ And the earlier stuff was always whatever somebody had picked up first and loved. And it carried on, with people talking about when Sandman was good, all the way up through 75.”
Gaiman and Palmer both have an ardent, devoted fan base. Palmer recently made a $1.2 million on Kickstarter in support of her new album, the highest amount ever made on Kickstarter by a musician. For Palmer, the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign didn’t come as a surprise, because she had been connecting closely with her fans for nearly 15 years.
“You spend enough time with your fans and they really know you and like you and trust you, and this sort of thing doesn’t seem strange,” Palmer said. “It seems very possible. But then from the outside, if you haven’t been following the plot, it looks like this crazy phenomenon.”
Palmer’s new album, Theatre is Evil, will be released in early September. “There’s this perfect alchemy of things happening where I got released from my label, I knew I had this great record in me,” she said. “Because I’d written all the songs, I did have it in my head finished in a specific kind of way. There was this sound I wanted. When you hear the record, you get it — and you understand. I think this album is the most personal and intimate, and also the most poppy and mainstream record I’ve ever made.”
Gaiman offered his own observations on his wife’s success. “I tend to think that what you do is one giant interconnected piece of performance art called Amanda Palmer,” he said to her. “Amanda Palmer gets painted, Amanda Palmer tweets, Amanda Palmer makes an album — it all sort of ties in. But it’s all about connection, and it’s all about connecting to other human beings.”
For Gaiman, revisiting The Sandman after so many years has been an exciting and sometimes odd process. He also recently inked a deal to create five new children’s books, for HarperCollins.
“The thing that’s been weirdest for me,” Gaiman said, “was when I was writing Sandman, I thought it was very transient. I thought it was disposable. For me, the joy of comics was the idea that I was working in a disposable medium, in a monthly medium. I didn’t actually think when i began it that this stuff was going to be around.
“If you told me that 25 years from now, Sandman would be in print … and they would be collected in these huge, heavy Absolute editions as well, and they would have sold all these millions of copies, I think I would have thought you were crazy. But what’s actually happened, is watching generation after generation after generation come into Sandman now. I realize I’m signing books for people who were not born when Sandman No. 1 came out. I’m signing books for people who are in signing lines with their kids who were not born when Sandman No. 1 came out!”
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(Reporter Geeta Dayal counts Gaiman and Palmer as friends.)
