Carpe Noctem Interviews - Volume 1

by Carnell, Thom

  How do you feel about that?

  I think it’s a pity in some ways, but I also think that you can’t go back. I’m very pleased with Good Omens. I think Good Omens is a wonderful novel. I’m very proud of my bits and I’m proud of the whole book. I’m sure Terry’s proud of his bits and proud of the whole book, too. It’s a very funny book and I think it says some sensible cool things along the way. I suppose it’s a pity in some way that we’ve become both so hugely successful. [laughs] We would never be able to write a sequel for fun the way that we wrote that book for fun. On the other hand, it’s pretty more enjoyable all things considered being successful than it is both being starving young writers, or at least in Terry’s case, he wasn’t even a starving young writer. He was working as Press Officer for South Western Electricity Board. I’m sure he’s having more fun now than he did then.

  What about Dave McKean?

  I will work with Dave until the end of time. I love working with him. What is nice is that we’ve actually I think both been fairly pleased with the last few things we’ve did together which is good because, for years, we never quite were. We weren’t satisfied with them, which is one of those things that kept us producing so much together. We each felt that there was some really good stuff, if only we could do it. Whereas, after Mr. Punch, which we were both very, very happy with, I felt like the pressure lessened and I think Dave did, too. “There we go, that was what we wanted to do and we did it and we don’t care if you like it or not because it’s what we wanted to do and we like it.” The last thing we did was the children’s book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

  Which, by the way, both my children absolutely adore.

  I’m pleased. You know it was picked by Newsweek as one of the ten best children’s books of the year which I was sort of flabbergasted by because I didn’t know that anyone had seen it. We want to do another children’s book just because we love this whole new audience. It’s great having to do signings for four year olds, apart from the jam thing. I love working with Dave. We’re talking about a couple of more projects. I think he’s a genuine genius. I think that, in many ways, he’s set so many cool standards for what we are doing and made it so much more fun.

  It’s interesting to see how many artists now are coming out with stuff that is reminiscent of him.

  It’s fascinating to me watching stuff now in all media that looks like bad Dave. Dave was telling me about artists he’s run into said, “Oh yeah, I got this call from an ad agency.” That ad agency would phone Dave and ask “What would it cost to do something?” and he’d tell them. The next thing you know there’d be an artist hired to do it and they’d be sent Dave’s stuff and told, “Make it look like this.” I find it strange the way that things like typefaces that Dave developed or Dave popularized or Dave was the first one to use six years ago are now everywhere. The nice thing about Dave is that he will always be out there on the edge. He will always be in the forefront. There are people out there who have made entire careers of doing artwork that Dave did for six months or Dave did for four months or Dave did for a few weeks and then decided he didn’t like it and moved on to something else.

  I’m now going to enter the obligatory Sandman portion of the interview. I promise that it will be quick. Why do you think that Sandman struck such a responsive chord with the comic buying audience?

  I really don’t know. My agenda when I started was to write the kind of comic that I would like to read every month with a certain additional thing. I wanted to write something that would let me go anywhere and do, more or less, anything. I figured, here I was, I was going to have to write a comic every month, which I had never done before and didn’t know if I could. I wanted a structure that would allow me to have most of space and time and anything else besides. So, I wrote the kind of comic that I wanted to read and that was Sandman. I wrote for my tastes and I think there were lots of other people out there who had the same kind of tastes that I did. I don’t think I could analyze it any further. I’ve watched people try and copy it with different levels of success. I also think that a lot of Sandman feels right and I’m not sure I could put my finger on it any more than that. It just sort of feels right. When you encounter these characters, you tend to feel like you’ve known them for years. It tends to feel like something you’ve always known. I’m not sure I could explain that other than it all sort of fell together somehow.

  I would ask the same question about the Death character because, for so long, that icon has always been something dark and foreboding and then you took it and put a spin on it where she seems to be someone you’d love to hang out with. I mean, I know rabid Death fans. What do you think it is about her that makes people embrace her as they have?

  I don’t know. The train of thought went more or less, “OK, I have a character that is going to be the incarnation of Dreams. How about giving him a family. There should be more than one of them because if you have somebody who is Dream, you’d, obviously, have other things.” Death seemed like one of the prime contenders. I knew the first three immediately: Destiny, Death, and Dream. I thought, “OK, we have three brothers.” Then I thought, “Let’s make Death a sister.” And then, as I sort of thought about her, I just decided I wanted to make her… Part of it was simply playing against reader expectations. It seems that Sandman was a pale, brooding male, faintly Byronic. I figured that everybody would assume that Death would be more so, especially because the first eight issues I didn’t give Death a gender. You just learned that Sandman was Death’s younger brother. So, people were saying, “I want to meet Death, Sandman’s older brother.” I’d think, “Heh heh heh…” My main agenda with her was, “I don’t want to make her brooding and stuff. I want to make her somebody who knows what it is they do and they do it.” As I say in Sandman #8, “It is as natural to be born as it is to die.” Everybody does it. You’re born–you die. It’s part of the deal. Get used to it. I also wanted to create somebody who I would want to be there. Somebody who could say to me, “You know you really should have looked both ways before crossing that street.” I don’t want to be met by some skeletal guy saying, [in a deep voice] “Now, you will face your doom.” I’d like somebody cute and sensible and so I made up her. There’s also that lovely story in the Kabbalah about The Angel of Death being so beautiful that, when you finally see The Angel of Death, you fall in love so hard that your soul is sucked out through your eyes and it leaves your body from the act of love. I always thought that was a beautiful, strange little story, and very appropriate.

  How did you feel the first time you did a signing and someone showed up dressed as her?

  I don’t know.

  I would think it would be very flattering, but more than a little bit uncomfortable.

  Well, it’s happened very gradually. Now, it’s to the point, of course, where it’s all reentered the culture in lots of strange and interesting ways that nobody quite expected. Now, you’ll run into young ladies dressed as Death because they’ve seen other young ladies dressed as Death and they haven’t got a clue as to who Death is. They like the style. They like the look. It just sort of moved over into society. The strangest thing was the night Mike Dringenberg sent over his sketch for Death. I took it up to London to show Dave McKean, we were meeting that evening, and we went out for a pancake at The My Old Dutch Pancake House in King’s Road in Chelsea. This astonishingly beautiful, elfin, dark haired young lady dressed all in black with a big silver ankh was our waitress for the evening. Me and Dave would have this conversation, “Should we show her the drawing? Look this is you!” but we never did. That was the very first encounter with somebody dressed as Death. It was very nice sort of getting to meet her. There have been encounters with young ladies dressed as Death that… One almost sort of expects it.

  At this point, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that, if you go to one of your readings or signings, there’s going to be one or two.

  Yeah, but, as I say, there’s also the weird way that it sprea
ds out into society. I mean, I love the fact that the top hat thing seems to be slowly spreading because you get these Death/Goth girls wearing top hats. It seems to have started off just from people reading the Death comic, The High Cost of Living, and putting on the hat. It’s just sort of drifted out into society. How cool is that?

  Since you brought up Death: The High Cost of Living, I’m curious as to what the state of affairs is with The High Cost of Living film?

  Well, good question. Had you asked me the question two weeks ago, I would have said, “Well, I think it’s completely dead” except that this is Hollywood where there are no certainties and everything changes. So, I handed in the outline for the movie, the treatment, a year ago and, until two weeks ago, hadn’t heard anything back from Warner’s and then another bunch of people at Warner’s moved in, found it, got all excited, and it looks like it seems to be happening again. We will see.

  What about the rumor I’m hearing that you want to direct it?

  Yep, that’s true. There’s only a couple of projects that I want to direct. I really don’t want to be a director. I’m not one of those people who ‘frankly, what I really want to do is direct.’ I’m not one of them. On the other hand, I’m also somebody who has now seen two of my things actually get made. I’ve seen Neverwhere done and I hated the direction on that. I really was not happy with it. It was not how I would have done it. The tone was wrong. The shots were wrong. It just wasn’t what I would have done. My Babylon 5 episode was a lot closer to what I wanted. I’m not entirely happy with the final result, but that has more to do with just the fact that, when they finished shooting it, it was two and a half minutes over and two and a half minutes had to go. If I’d been in the editing suite, I don’t know how I would have solved the problems they had to solve, either. Watching those things I just wound up going, “You know, there are some things I just want to write and other people can direct them.” With the Neverwhere movie, what I’ve done is I’ve gone and found myself a director, which is Jesse Dylan, who is a terrific director who really, really loves the material and wants to do it, wants to work with me, and wants to get it right. I thought, “Great! Jesse has the enthusiasm. I will let Jesse go and do this.” On the other hand, where Death is concerned, I have it in my head. I know what I want it to be. I know how I want it to work. I want to make it. I’ve written a short film based on my story “Snow Glass Apples” called Mirror Mirror which, again, is one of the things that I look at and I go, “I don’t want to sell the rights to this. I want to direct it because if anybody mucks it up, I want it to be me. I don’t want it to be anybody else.” Mostly, what I want to do is just tell stories. The trouble with directing is that you tend to wind up sometimes directing in self defense, not necessarily from a love of the art form or whatever or because that’s where you want your career to go. You’ve seen people muck things up and, with Neverwhere, I went into it with this enormous humility. I’d spent years writing these scripts and now this large team of people doing all this stuff and I’m standing there saying, “I really don’t think that’s right.” And they’re going, “Hang on here. We’ve been making television for five years and you’ve never done any before and I think we can assure you that everybody will love this.” I thought, “Well, I think it’s stupid, but OK. I wrote a giant boar. You just changed it into a rather friendly looking cow.” “Nononono…it’ll be fine. It’ll work.” I came away at the end and everything other people didn’t like about Neverwhere, I didn’t like about Neverwhere and it wasn’t in the script. I sort of learned a certain amount of arrogance from that which is why, where Death is concerned, part of the deal is that I get to direct it.

  I think that some of what you’ve called ‘defensive directing’ can work such as in the case of say Clive Barker and it can not work as in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive.

  Maximum Overdrive is a fascinating film. I mean that completely without any irony. I think it is a fascinating film. I think all of Steve’s weaknesses are there and none of his strengths. I watched it in complete fascination. It’s like every single shot is slightly wrong. I also felt, and I’ve not spoken to Steve about this, but the impression I got was that people said, “All right Steve, go on and write a movie yourself, you can direct it and it’ll be great.” He did and it wasn’t. Clive, I think, is a much more brilliant director. I think the first Hellraiser film is a beautiful film.

  In Sandman, you presented characters who were both openly gay and transgendered and did them well. Was the decision to use those characters a way to address certain outlooks and perspectives that you couldn’t have done with a straight character?

  Well, in some cases, yes, obviously. Wanda, as a character… I mean, the entirety of “Game of You” was essentially a long essay on the nature of gender. Having a transgendered character as part of the story obviously made sense because I wanted somebody who had seen both sides of the fence, as it were. There were people I knew in London, particularly a very good friend of a very good friend of mine who was transsexual, who was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever met, but was very, very scared of surgery, still had a penis and would die with a penis because there was no way she was going to be put under anesthetic and have anybody cut any of her off. But, she was just as definitely a woman. I mean, this was not any doubt and that fascinated me. What an interesting place that is. That was definitely one of the starting places for Wanda. Most of it, I just wanted to put people in, the kind of people I knew. I found myself rather surprised last year when I went down to the GLAAD Awards and they gave me this award for writing great gay characters. I thought that was very sweet. There was never necessarily an agenda. It was just wanting to put some of the people I knew in life; I wanted the comic to reflect them. To be honest, it was much more unusual and rule breaking ten years ago to have cool, nice female characters regardless of sexual orientation in a comic, sensible female characters who weren’t enormous breasted amazons – like The Punisher with tits which is what the rule had tended to be in comics up until that time. Writing characters like Rose Walker or like Barbie, I found as every bit transgressive as Wanda or Hal or Foxglove and Hazel.

  OK, moving on… I’m curious as to your opinion regarding the direction DC has run with such titles as The Dreaming and upcoming Sandman Presents?

  Right. I’m really, really pleased with the way that The Dreaming is going now.

  I think Caitlin is doing an amazing job.

  Caitlin is doing an amazing job, exactly. But, it wasn’t my title; I was a consultant on it. I think Alisa had to learn her lessons too because I had very little to do with it for the first year or so. Then, gradually, I said, “Look, I’m really not happy with the way this is going and I think you’re going to be losing readers. Please stop doing these default storylines and let’s start doing something more.” I went and found Caitlin and Caitlin and Peter Hogan have pretty much taken over for year three. I think Caitlin is going to be soloing for year four, taking over completely. The main thing is making it a story that is going somewhere, that feels like it’s going somewhere and it will be one huge story that is going somewhere rather than these sort of little stories that basically go “Person A, who you’ve never met before nor do you care about, has a problem. They are going to go into The Dreaming and come out and their problem will be some way resolved from their experiences in The Dreaming” which was becoming the default plot. You didn’t really feel that anything was necessarily going anywhere even though a lot of these stories were competently written. They also didn’t display an awful lot of feeling for the characters. Many of them were very, very forgettable. The idea of Sandman Presents was just that there were stories coming in for The Dreaming that really weren’t Dreaming stories. Peter Hogan wrote this gorgeous story, really fun, called “Marquee Moon,” which is being drawn as we speak, which is a tale of the mother of the werewolf we met in The Sandman story called “The Hunt.” It’s the story of her mum in London during the punk years 1976-77. It’s a sort of w
erewolf love story with a background of punk. It wasn’t really anything we could put in The Dreaming. It was getting to the point where Alisa would say, “Maybe we can just put half a page of Cain and Abel in there somewhere to try to give it a Dreaming connection.” That was the point where I said, “No, this is silly. It’s a lovely story why don’t you create something and call it Sandman Presents or whatever and give it as a label so you can put this thing out to indicate “Yes, this is obviously comes from The Sandman, but it’s not a Sandman story.”