New From Neil

I'm a long-standing fan of Neil Gaiman's work, and just thought I'd take a second to note that his excellent website has just been redesigned. Neil is of course the writer of the comic par excellence, The Sandman, and has also turned into quite a good novelist. Back in '99, Marc and I wrote the stage adaptation of Neil's graphic novel with Dave McKean, Signal to Noise, and Neil, in keeping with his broad reputation as a thoroughly nice guy, encouraged us to make the changes that needed to be made to translate the material into another medium; he provided some of his notes and unpublished scenes; and when we opened, he came down to Chicago for a benefit performance in aid of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

(An amusing note: a couple years later, the BBC had Neil and Dave do a radio adaptation of Signal to Noise, then released a CD of it; in the booklet for the CD, Neil wrote a short story in which time has passed, and the characters respond to a stage play based on their lives that is clearly a reflection of our own play. Neil's criticisms of our work were valid, and the whole post-modern reflection of a reflection of a reflection was fascinating--and frequently hilarious, at least for me.)

Neil's blog is superb (I particularly admire his light-handed brevity--he's brilliant at boiling something down to its crystalline essence), and has as much to do with why I started blogging as anything else. And while we're on the subject, Mr. McKean is an artist of the highest order, and one of my dreams is to get one of his works for my walls.