Hy Bender: During that same period, you became friends with Alan Moore, who - present company excluded - is arguably the finest comics writer in the history of the medium. How did you and Alan first hook up with each other?
Neil Gaiman: When my book
Ghostly Beyond Belief which I wrote with
Kim Newman was published in 1985, I sent Alan a copy accompanied by a note that basically said, “You’ve given me an enormous amounts of pleasure, I think you’re terrific, and this is something I’ve done. Hope you like it.” Alan called me a week later and went [
doing an uncannily accurate impersonation]: “You bastard. I lost an entire afternoon's work reading your book!” [
Laughter] From then on, we were phone pals.
NG: Oh, certainly. About eight months after we first chatted, I mentioned to Alan that two of his favorite writers,
Clive Barker and
Ramsey Campbell, were going to be at the British Fantasy Convention at Birmingham. As a result of my journalism work, I knew both Clive and Ramsey,so I told Alan, “Come on down; I'll look after you and make sure you don't feel out of place."And he did, and I did, and we had a great time.
Toward the end of the day, we were about comics, and I said, “I don't understand what a comics script looks like. How do you tell the artist what to draw?" So he showed me a scripts format, step by step, in a sheet of paper: “Put down 'Page 1 panel 1' like this, then describe what happens in the panel then write the name of the first character who talks, then put down his dialogue,» and so on.
After receiving that tutorial, I went home and wrote a short comics script titled “The Day My Pad Went Mad” based on Alan’s wonderful
John Constantine character. In retrospect, the story wasn’t very good, and the ending was wrong. But I sent the script to Alan, and he told me, “Yeah, it’s all right. The ending’s a bit off.” And then he actually used a few lines of my story in
Swamp Thing 51, "Home Free," which was very encouraging to me.
I next wrote a sixteenth-century
Swamp Thing script titled “Jack in the Green” and sent it to Alan. When I asked him if it was okay, he said “Yeah, I would’ve been proud to write that.” That made me very happy.
And then - proving the driven nature of my ambition to begin a fiction career - I wrote absolutely no other scripts. I went, “Okay, now I know how to write a comic book" and left it at that.