Interview with Neil Gaiman
A: Hello.
Q: Mr. Gaimnan how are you?
A: Very well, thank you.
Q: Okay, I know you’re on a pretty tight schedule so let’s just start, okay.
A: Sounds good. Not this crazy, but it’s that whole end of the year thing. One always promises people things. For some reason the end of the year always seems a long way away and then you get there.
Q: I know, it’s the same here. I won’t go into details though. Anyway, I translate many of Heavy Metal’s comics into English from French and Spanish. So I’ve become a bit sensitive to character voices. That’s something you do well. So how would you explain the concept of voice to people who are not writers?
A: To people who aren’t writers, I explain to them that that’s the thing–if you can really give a character a voice, you want to be able to know within maybe one or two word balloons in a comic who is talking. I think if all the pictures vanished and it was black, you know. The same in a book or in a short story or in a film or T.V. script. If the names fell off the page, you ought to be able to go through and put them back. You know who is talking. There isn’t any doubt in your mind after reading a line who is talking. This is how they sound. This is the kind of voices they have. I suppose that’s voice. A lot of it, when I try to explain it to young writers who ask about dialogue and ask about voices, a lot of time I tell them it’s a matter of shutting up and not getting in the way. It’s a listening. Listen to the voice in your head. Listen. Ask the character a question; hear what they say and write that down.
Q: Is that something that can be taught, though or is it something that’s instinctive for certain people who become writers?
A: Good question. I don’t know. I think that it’s definitely something you get better at in time. I learned an awful lot of what I know about dialogue from being on the other side of the phone or more often on the other side of a small table as a young journalist doing interviews. I would do this kind of interview where I would sit down and I would talk to somebody. Then I transcribed it. Then I would have 6,000 words transcribed for a two and a half thousand word interview which was also going to have to contain some context and stuff about who the person was and so forth. So then one started to learn economy. One started to learn how to reproduce a voice pattern, how to reproduce the idiosyncrasies of speech in a very small space of time. I used to–I remember once getting one phone call from somebody I had done an interview with saying, “I just want you to know that was the best interview anyone has ever done with me, the most accurate interview anyone’s ever done with me.” I didn’t dare say, “No, it really wasn’t. You never said any of those sentences.”
Q: Right, I edited them all from what you did say.
A: Yes, it was created from what you said and said much shorter and said much more accurately. What I wound up saying what you would have wanted to have said. It really, that was really what I learned, most of what I learned about that.
Q: Let me stop you on that. So when you invent a character, let’s say Delirium, the girl who talks in rainbow bubbles. How do you find that and where does that come from, do you think?
A: She was a weird one. She turned up more or less on the page. I had an idea of what she was like before she got there. I was going to have Delirium be this kind of raging, angry, punkoid creature. Just a creature with a pure sort of anger and nightmare and pain. That wasn’t what she wanted to be, you know, when she turned up on the page and all of a sudden that wasn’t the dialogue we had. It was a matter of other people said things to her and I shut up and listened to what the answers were.
Q: It was sort of this–
A: Strange sort of fairy creature, this mad pixie.
Q: Yeah, she talks in wacko rhyme or something like that.
A: So I suppose that’s, you know–a lot of characters, some characters you know going in but the most important characters, I find, are the least predictable characters, which is something else that’s a bit different. Other ones, you bring on a character because you need something to happen on half a page. You know that something needs to happen next and you make something up. Oh, look, here is a Pink Stardust, the thing that I currently have coming out with DC, illustrated novel that Charles Veston painted pictures for. This little character is like the little hairy man. He just came in because I had half a scene in episode one where I wanted some more stuff to happen before we got to the big day. So he turned up that night. He sort of went and slipped in his magic. He wasn’t ever meant to come back except that having written him, I discovered I had written an absolutely delightful little character. So when I needed somebody to turn up in book two–
Q: You had him.
A: I had him. I just went off and grabbed him. He proved amazingly useful. He gave my hero somebody to talk to and threatened to take over the book. I didn’t actually let him back in parts three and four.
Q: I don’t have three and four here. I just have one and two.
A: You should get Master [Descent]. One and two are the first ones that are out. Three and four, Martha can probably send you a black and white of three.
Q: It’s okay. At this point it’s fine. Let me get back to Stardust towards the end of this. Let me see, I want to get back to the idea of–
A: I want to say a couple of things. I had no idea. I just made up the character at that point.
Q: You wanted to wait for something later to happen. You wanted to delay something happening?
A: Yeah, I just wanted–I didn’t think we were quite up to the point of the next morning starting. I wanted something else to happen that night. So I thought, okay, well, he’s almost asleep. I’ll just have somebody turn up and stay in his heart. That was done without any forethought. But I liked the kind of voice of the character who turned up. I liked him. Those are very often the most fun characters. They come. You don’t know where they came from. They turned up because you needed them.
Q: Let’s wait a little bit on Mike. I think I know maybe where they came from but let’s wait. One character that you knew that you were going to be dealing with, obviously, was the Sandman. So he’s a death figure, right?
A: Well, no, death is a death figure. He’s a dream figure.
Q: He’s a dream figure of sort of this netherworld?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay. But he runs the show to some degree, the Sandman does?
A: Well, I wanted somebody who was aristocratic in all the best instances of the word but was also profoundly removed from what was going on. There was also with him, I think it took us about three, maybe four issues. It took me awhile to actually see what I had created and how it worked. For example, one of the key things with him, oddly enough was just creating these white on black balloons that have driven–it probably went on to drive seven years worth of production systems mad.
Q: Right. I’ve noticed that he speaks in white on black balloons. It’s an interesting use and throughout these books as the characters that talk in interestingly colored balloons.
A: It’s giving–because you can do so much with balloons. They just seem like one of those things that–one of the great advantages that Cummings has over prose.
Q: You’re jumping ahead, sir. Let me finish.
A: I was just going to say you can hear it. It’s that you have had lettering and knew you can create voices for characters in a way that you have an armory of things.
Q: So the Sandman sort of rules this netherland. Neverwhere of course, is set in a sort of London underworld. The underworld is one of the oldest subjects in literature. It’s the Gilgamesh, his adventures in the underworld. It happens again and again throughout history. So why do you think we care about this netherworld?
A: I think, okay, I think there are two completely different answers. There are probably more than that. But I can give you two completely different answers that are both true. The fundamental answer is because there are mysteries. Where do we go when we die? What happens when you die? What happens when you sleep? What happens when you dream? Who you are. You close your eyes at night and for a third of your day you are somewhere else doing something else. Maybe you’re inside your head; maybe you’re not. But whatever you do, you are doing, you know it is unknowable, and on a more fundamental level then there is death, which is every bit as unknowable. You don’t know. I think the origin of many of these stories, these walks in dark places simply comes from an effort to try and write about or try and tell stories about those places, those walks in the dark.
The other side of things is for me, at least right now is a journey that changes people. The book or a story is a journey that you take that you should not return from the same person before you began reading the book; before you began really encountering this story. I think very often the character’s journey out of the mundane into the miraculous. It kind of echoes, recapitulates or begins that journey for the reader. So you’ve got two very different answers which I believe both to be true.
Q: Okay, I’ll skip onto a question and then I’ll go back. There is a story in the Kindly Ones that starts off. Let me not do that until the end. You use classical storytelling devices like a group of tale tellers gathered. But at the same time you try to turn things upside down like that smiley face that haunts the politician in the same series. Why do you do that?
A: I love–really, I can’t see any reason for denying the tried and true methods of telling stories because they are tried and true. The joy for me of doing the whole the World’s End series was I thought to myself, Okay, I want to do a bunch of stories. Previously in Sandman whenever I had done a bunch of short stories I simply had done them. We would come to the end of whatever graphic novel, 200 page story we’re doing and then I would spend four or five months of just doing short stories and then start in again on a longer story. I thought let’s try doing something that is in some ways both a special story collection and in other ways a larger story. What are the ways this has been done before? One immediately finds oneself looking at and thinking of Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, any of those kind of stories where you get a bunch of people together and they each other stories. It’s an old and functional way. I thought let us do that. Let us then deform the stories. Let us then deform what one is doing with them. There was a very conscious effort to try and do in that inn, whatever it was, six different stories, from six completely different genres ranging from an H.P. Lovecraft story to something that Kipling would have told, to an Alexander Dumas kind of swashbuckling romance to my favorite of all them which was the one about the ceremony, the one set in the giant graveyard. I just read a book of funeral customs around the world. I loved it. I have been completely obsessed and delighted by a number of different things we do with our dead.
Q: In fact, in Herodotus, I just read about the crema data, the burial rights of pets in ancient Egypt. They all got buried in different places.
A: You know the saddest thing about that is that they discovered, they dug up the cats that had been mummified. To the best of my knowledge, two of them out of hundreds and hundreds of thousands survived, which are in the British museum. The rest of them–this was back in Victorian days, were ground up and put on the field.
Q: Oh my god.
A: They used it for fertilizer. Hundreds of thousands of mummified cats, you know, because there were filled with mechanicals so they put them on the fields and fertilized them whic I think is so strangely sad.
Q: Alright, even more about ancient story telling devices, there is a story in the Kindly Ones which starts off with this melange of a scene from Greek mythology where Adonis catches Diana bathing in the woods. You know the story that I’m talking about. So why do we keep using these images over and over like a man catching a woman bathing in the woods? What do you think that power is?
A: I think the honest answer I can possibly give you is that in some way is very difficult to explain. They are hard wired into us. I was reading recently that if you use a computer analogy they are part of the bio. It’s like why–during the Victorian age and during the early Edwardian age, I think a lot of writers and thinkers and anthropologists were driving themselves nuts trying to figure out where stories came from and why it is that you will find the story of Cinderella in every culture in the world. They go well either the very first people, in some valley in Africa, had this story and told it to each other. Then they carried on telling it as it spread across the world.
Q: Or every miserable girl in the world wants her father to come and then save her from her wicked mother and sisters.
A: The other one which the stories, like I said, they’re hard wired. You’ll find them. The aborigines have them and the Indians have them. There are these profound and wonderful–you’re reading the folk stories of an area, you know how it goes.
Q: This is a bit of a Joseph Campbellian, if I may use the word, view of the universality of all this. I have, I think other people have said that as well, right?
A: I think a lot of other people have said it. Mainly the Finnish guys in, I believe, back in the Thirties who began coming up with the ways to cataloguing stories. They’ve come out with the folktale keys catalogue.
Q: Who was that exactly? I don’t know.
A: He was Finnish with a Finnish name.
Q: Alright. Finnish and cultural and anthropology?
A: Yeah, a Finnish anthropologist came up with the–look in a modern encyclopedia under folklore.
Q: Okay, under this idea of the universality of these images?
A: What the guy did was actually start listing, breaking things down into pieces: the quest, the frustrated quest, the quest aided by animals, the quest aided by… You discover that almost all these stories or all the stories follow a whole sequence. They follow a pattern. They follow shapes. I think that a lot of those shapes are the way that we make sense of the world. I think if it’s–
Q: Okay, let’s go on to another shape. The same story in the Kindly Ones where we should be gone from this scene with Diana bathing scene, ends with the conquest of a worm over a man. The worm has the victim’s wife’s face. She says, “A meal this good must never be hurried. Just hold still and let me enjoy myself.” I must say, your sex scenes, not that that’s sex exactly, are often outdoors. There is a story you wrote for the, I think, for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I think that happens outdoors. Perhaps it doesn’t. It’s reminding me of the sex scene in the Stardust. That sex scene–
A: Definitely outdoors.
Q: That sex scene reminded me very much of that Keats poem the Le Belle Dame San Merci with the Knight.
A: The lowland field loitering.
Q: Exactly, on the hill side. Is there a reason for…?
A: Probably because most of the time I’m writing inside. You tend to write about–
Q: You tend to write about things outside.
A: That strange little story, The Flying Children, is actually something I found in dialect in an old collection of oral English folk stories. Some guy had recorded told by a gypsy. I just loved it because it was so strange and deformed and retold it and simplified it a little and made it a little sharper and brighter. I took it out. But if I remember correctly, that line about a meal this good must be savored is actually from the original. The sex scene in Stardust, I’m really proud of. The first, quite possibly the only time, I’ve ever written a sex scene which actually felt like anybody and it was having fun. I have a terrible tendency when I’m writing sex, I don’t mean of having sex, but I do mean this when I’m writing sex, to get very cold and clinical and detached. I suppose it’s partly as a writer one is always trying to avoid a hundred years of cliches of bad writing about sex.
Q: You want to avoid being sentimental.
A: You want to avoid being sentimental and you want to avoid words like throbbing. So there is so much–
Q: Fervent.
A: Yeah. There is so much bad sex writing. What I wanted to try and do in the Stardust scene was write a scene that was fundamentally about the emotion of sex. I just wrote a story for an anthology called Siren, one of these Ellen Detlow, Terry Windling anthologies which is–
Q: Who is publishing it?
A: I don’t know off hand.
Q: What is it called?
A: The anthology is called Sirens.
Q: Sirens, okay.
A: It’s erotic fantasy. I never keep track of who publishes these anthologies. You just write stories for them or not, mostly not. But this story, it took me about four years to write. Actually the anthology that I started writing for came and went. The next anthology after that that I was writing for came and went. I was writing it at roughly probably about half a page a year or maybe a page a year because I would write a couple of paragraphs and then I would get really embarrassed. I would exit and save. A few months later I would go back and think Oh and write the next couple of paragraphs and get embarrassed. So it wasn’t one of these things that you spend five years honing and polishing. I just spent most of the time not writing it.
Q: You spent most of the time embarrassed.
A: That was fun and interesting. It’s an entire story that takes place while a couple are having sex and it’s all in the conversation they’re having while they’re fucking.
Q: So they’re having a conversation about a second story while the main story is them having sex?
A: More or less.
Q: An interesting device. Well, let’s move on to–you began to start talking about what you think makes a comic well written, dialect bubbles and so forth. Do you think comics are more–it’s hard. I don’t think there is a didactic here. You can go from one range to the other but do you think comics are more art or more story, more dialogue or more picture?
A: I think if they’re comic and if they’re good comic, they occur in the magical no man’s land between the story. When I was 13 or 14 I went on holiday to France. My French was not very good but I stayed with a French family. I picked up copies of a magazine which was just hitting the stands called Metal Hurlant. I brought these comics home with me. I would read these stories, particularly the Mobius ones. Frankly, I didn’t understand what was going on, even with the aid of a dictionary I didn’t understand what was going on. But these were obviously huge, magical, wonderful, enormous, brilliant stories. I was convinced of it. It wasn’t until years later that I read them in translation. I discovered, no, no, no, these were like nonsense words with absolutely nothing going on here. There was no content. I’m not sure I can go back and look at them anymore. They were interesting to me at the time when I thought that the writing was up to, was on the same level as the art was, and it wasn’t. There was nothing there. I think that you have to have both. But I also think, I suppose as a writer, I would, if it were a choice between reading a really well written comic that was not drawn brilliantly and a beautifully drawn but completely vacuous comic, I would go for the well written comic.
Q: It’s hard to judge. I’m a writer as well. So I say, “Oh yes, I agree with you.”
A: We are biased.
Q: But what kind of debt do you think you owe to someone like to Dave McKean, the artist that you’ve worked with so much? If you two hadn’t met, would your careers be what they are now?
A: I think Dave and I is an interesting one to point to. Both of us have had and have enormously successful careers independent of each other.
Q: But before you met?
A: Well, looking at it from a point of view of outside comics. Dave as an album cover design; Dave as an advertising artist, those kinds of things and me as a novelist and prose writer. But no, I think that it’s the lucky, happy confluence of our coming together has done an awful lot. I was delighted last week when I got sent a copy of last week’s Newsweek which had an article in it where they picked our children’s book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish as one of the children’s books of the year.
Q: I heard about that. I actually haven’t seen that book. I know that the two of you both have daughters. Does that help? I have a daughter, too.
A: Having kids is the–to be honest with you, the thing that really spurred the creation of the book was that both of us these days find ourselves reading stories. You know if you’re reading a story to a kid you’re not just reading it once. You’re reading it over and over and over. So I wanted to write something that kids would enjoy and adults wouldn’t mind having to read 100 times. I think Dave wanted to do pictures that kids would enjoy but that adults could look at so that you wouldn’t have to do it on automatic. But I think that our careers have been mutually incredibly supportive. I hate to think what my life would have been like if I hadn’t encountered Dave. Obviously, yes, Good Omens and things like that would still have existed. [end Part 1]
Kayman [part 2]
Q: But Black Orchid, that collaboration, it seems like that helped your careers, both of your careers enormously, I believe.
A: I think the other thing that helped, again, absolutely enormously was having Dave setting the look and feel for Sandman. Because it’s hard now, 10 years on for people to appreciate how radical the Sandman covers were ten years ago. These days, every second copy is a bad Dave McKeene knock off. Somebody’s cranked up their Photoshop and they’re ready to go.
Q: I almost like the interstitial in the compilation, even more than the covers. There, for example, I’m looking at one that’s a woman. It’s sort of a marble–
[end side]
A: I don’t even know if it’s in the shop theater. It’s only gone out like this week.
Q: The collection Dust Covers.
A: Yeah, it’s called Dust Covers and it’s all the Sandman covers with a common tree by Dave and myself.
Q: Ah, that’s brilliant, about what influenced you or the reasons you’re choosing the covers you chose?
A: Exactly. Why some of the artistic decisions decide each sort of set of covers.
Q: Is that the DC version?
A: Published by DC.
Q: Okay, maybe I’ll get a copy of those for the art to accompany this–
A: Good idea.
Q: Yeah, because it’s brilliant shit, to be blunt.
A: I think so. It’s Dave and I get to–the joy of working with Dave as an artist is there are some artists that you work with and what you get back from them is as good as what you hoped for. Sometimes what you hoped for is pretty high. I’m talking people like Charles Vessel, Craig Russell, who you know they’re going to rock and they do. It’s terrific.
Q: It seems a little like the Jack Kirby, Stan Lee partnership. I interviewed Stan for the magazine months and months ago. He had glowing praises for his friend Jack Kirby.
A: I think that was one of those partnerships where together they produced things that neither of them individually were capable of producing. I think when I look at something like Signal to Noise or Mr. Punch, there are things that, or even the I Sold My Dad for Two Goldfish, those things that neither of us individually could have done. But the fact that you have both of us trying to surprise and impress and out do and delight the other one. Delight is probably the key word.
Q: There is actually the idea of this from Eisenstein called the Third Image. He got that idea from Asian, Chinese, Japanese language where you have two kanji that mean things individually and when combined create a third meaning that’s greater than the sum. Like fire and flower means fireworks and such. I’m sure that works between two people.
A: I think that when it works it’s a delight because you get something, you get a third thing.
Q: One last question is you seem to get around a bit. I read Need a Few which was quite funny in which you said you went off to Galveston to write just because you wanted to go somewhere orange on the weather map one winter. I’m sure it is. It’s just so in depth, the high cost of living, with a bagel shop on Carmen Street which I used to live around the corner from. So why do you live in Minneapolis of all places?
A: It’s a lot like being in the middle of nowhere.
Q: I imagine.
A: The reason is prosaic and dull but my wife who I met and married 15 years ago in England, after we lived in England–is American and lived in Los Angeles. But all of her family originally came from Minneapolis. While we were living in England, they all moved back, her sister and her mother and so forth and her grandmother.
Q: Moved back where?
A: To Minneapolis from Los Angeles. So when we decided it was time to move out for awhile so that that side of the family could meet and play with the kids, it had to be here because this is where her mom was, where her sister was. So this is why Minneapolis. But then again, one of the things I like about Minneapolis is it’s very central in terms of it’s a couple of hours from L.A. It’s a couple of hours from New York. It’s a couple of hours from–
Q: Galveston.
A: –Florida, Galveston, exactly. It’s not that far away by plane.
Q: Why do you go to a hotel for two weeks to write something? I need this as ammunition for my wife.
A: Sometimes because I have to put myself in a position where I cannot do anything else. Sometimes because I have to put myself in a position where writing becomes more interesting than anything else. Frankly–
Q: Galveston is where it’s at.
A: If I’m home stuff happens. Here I am, right now, on the phone with you doing an interview with you.
Q: Yeah, I apologize.
A: It’s okay. But what I’m saying is that in terms of the things–you can have days. I’ve now built myself a gazebo out in the woods which doesn’t have a phone line where I will go and work. But there are some days when I don’t even get down to the bottom of the garden. You know, I get up in the morning. The phone rings. I deal with it. The mail comes. There is an emergency in from D.C. I sort that out. There is something else going on. Sometimes if you’re going to get up to speed on writing one of the things I find is when I really get going and there is absolutely nothing else happening and I’m just writing and not doing anything else. If you put me in a hotel room somewhere or put me on a train or something like that, I can be writing four or five or 6,000 words a day. But during the course of a normal day with distractions, I may not get to the end of a sentence that I’m typing. By the time the day is over–and you keep sort of putting yourself, okay, well this evening, once it gets dark and everybody leaves me alone and the phone stops ringing, then I’ll get down to work. As you get older, you don’t.
Q: Just more and more clutter in your life, yeah.
A: And also you get tired. When I was 25, I would quite happily go, Okay, that was a day. Now, it’s 10:30. I’m taking the phone off the hook and I’m writing until four o’clock in the morning. And I would do it very happily without a blink. Now, at coming up at 37, when I say, Right, I will take the phone off the hook and write until five o’clock in the morning, I wake up at 4:30 in the morning with my head on a keyboard and 37 pages of the letter M. You can’t do that anymore. That’s really why. I’ll take myself out of life from time to time just to get things done and to get ahead. I wish I were the kind of writer who didn’t have to do that. Maybe as I age I’ll turn into one of those. Actually, I’m grateful I’m not Douglas Adams who spends years not writing and has to be locked into the hotel room if anybody wants to get a book out of him at all.
Q: People change. You never know.
A: Exactly.
Q: But this was quite a nice interview. If I need, I don’t know, 15 more minutes, can I call you at some point next week?
A: Of course.
Q: I appreciate it.
A: No problem at all. Tell me, are you in touch with Kevin on a daily basis or an occasional basis?
Q: Oh, once in awhile.
A: I have no idea how involved he is these days.
Q: Oh my god, well, I think he’s making this movie, this heavy metal movie. So I think that occupies most of his time. Mostly Howie, Howard Drorovski runs the magazine. I talk to him and his daughter most often.
A: Well, say hi to Kevin, give him a message, give him a wave for me because I haven’t seen him in a few years.
Q: He’s in L.A., you know.
A: Alright. So there’s a new heavy metal, a new cartoon movie?
Q: Yeah, it’s coming out I think next year or maybe the year after. I’m not sure what’s up with it at this point. But it’s I think another Columbia Sony movie. They’re doing a lot of special effects for it and so forth. It’s based on the Fakk2, F-A-K-K squared story from Melting Pot. So that’s what it’s going to be. I’m a little terrified to be quite honest, of it. It just seems like a lot of guns but that’s Heavy Metal. You know what I mean.
A: It’s one of those strange things. On the one hand you hope that Heavy Metal will one day claw it’s way back from being the Penthouse for the magazine for the kids who aren’t tall enough to reach that shelf. On the other hand, well, that’s its ecological niche. It has snuck through a lot of really good stuff over the years under cover of that niche.
Q: It’s true. I translate this stuff. It’s like one in ten comics is really great. Why do you think it’s only 10% or 20% or whatever it is?
A: Well, the honest answer is it’s [inaudible] law.
Q: Who is Lowell, I’m sorry?
A: Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon.
Q: Theodore Sturgeon, right. He lives in Woodstock where I’m from.
A: Dead science fiction writer who when asked–he was talking about science fiction at one point. He said 90% of science fiction is crap. He said but then 90% of everything is crap. That was Sturgeon’s rule. It’s actually fairly good. So the answer of why is one in ten good, Sturgeon law, the same with movies, the same with novels. Because most people don’t have to see–I was once a film critic, not a very happy film critic because I discovered that being a film critic means you have to see everything. You discover one in ten films is worth watching. The other nine are pretty awful but mostly people don’t have to go and see these other nine.
Q: Let me ask you one more question about Punch of all things. I’ve always been very curious about Punch’s story and the phenomena of Punch. It’s like he’s really a bad man, Punch is, but somehow we love him. Why do you think that is? Why do we love Punch, this bad puppet?
A: I don’t know. The fact that we do love him is the thing that fascinates me. He goes around killing people. He’s not even a lovable scamp. He’s a murderer. He begins by killing his baby. He kills his wife. He goes off to kill everybody else in the story very often ending with either the devil. I suppose there are lots of answers that have been given over the years by different people that represent the free side of yourself and so on and so forth. I have no idea. I think it’s one of those things, again, it’s hard wired into the bios.
Q: I have a theory about it and I’m actually considering writing something about it. Well, let me save it until I can send you a manuscript five years from now. Is that okay with you?
A: Yeah, that’s completely fine. If you haven’t read it already, see if you can get hold of a copy of Mr. Punch.
Q: I looked at it in a comic bookstore just the other day. When I read that you had worked on that with David McKeene.
A: Call Martha Thomason.
Q: And ask for a copy of that, too?
A: Ask her for a copy of Mr. Punch as well.
Q: I’ll get to look at your theory.
A: Well, it has a lot of stuff in it about the nature of violence, the nature of memory and the nature of what Punch and Judy may or may not mean.
Q: I’m curious about it. Anyway, this is a very nice interview.
A: Nice talking to you, too Jeff.
