Neil Gaiman

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Neil "Scary Trousers" Gaiman, master of modern horror

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. —The Sandman

A contemporary British writer of stories. Of all known kinds.

He's especially famous for his Urban Fantasy works, including the renowned The Sandman comic series, which was the first (and only) work in its medium to win a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story . Two of his novels, Stardust and Coraline, have been made into movies. He's also written scripts for other projects, such as Mirror Mask by Dave McKean and the Neverwhere TV series. In addition, he worked on the translated script of Princess Mononoke. Most recently, his young adult work The Graveyard Book became the first book to win both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal.

A masterful storyteller, he excels at building believable, yet fantastic settings for his stories. His works are marked by extensive use of mythological references and symbolism, often times in "modern" settings. Also a notable One of Us, and despite his work's breathtaking popularity, he has remained remarkably humble and personable, managing to remain faintly bemused every time he finds hundreds of people waiting for him to sign their books or whatnot. Also, he's a highly respectable marsh-wiggle with a very Nice Hat. Adorkable? Quite.

Gaiman has some affection for Canon Defilement- and is living proof that this particularly negative trope isn't bad. He described Snow, Glass, Apples, a Perspective Flip of "Snow White", as a mindvirus that he hoped would prevent the reader from ever experiencing the original innocently again. His External Retcon of Beowulf pulls a similar trick. The Problem of Susan is something of a meta-twist on the concept, riffing off of Susan's exile from Narnia: her embrace of adolescence means that, retroactively, she experienced the original adventure as a Darker and Edgier pagan allegory. He is also fairly preoccupied with, though not necessarily an apologist for, Muse Abuse.

Stephen King thinks Neil Gaiman may well be the greatest storyteller alive today, and has said so publicly. Considering this is Stephen King talking, that's saying something.

He's married to Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls. He has a Twitter account and a Tumblr blog.

Sung a song about Jeanne d'Arc with Ben Folds on piano. It is magnificent.

He once delivered an awe-inspiring (and quite hilarious) commencement speech to the 2012 graduates of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

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Tropes of which Neil Gaiman is an example:

• Adam Westing:
  • Specifically, his guest appearance on The Simpsons in 2011 where he reveals the whole plot was a scam for him to become an NYT bestseller, he can't read, and he's not even British!.
  • In the Simpsons Coraline parody "Coralisa," he voices Lisa's cat Snowball. While Snowball sounds wise when talking about mysterious doors and families, he gets distracted when Lisa turns on her flashlight. "Shiiiiiiiiiiiny!"
• Ascended Fanboy: He got a star-making gig at DC Comics because Alan Moore recommended him for the Darker and Edgier reboots of Silver Age heroes like Black Orchid and Sandman.
• Deadpan Snarker: Neil has more than a few remarks about haters, life, and writing. He's joked that for season 2 of Good Omens, David Tennant would be replaced by several Fennec foxes.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay
• Dogged Nice Guy: In The Art of Asking, Amanda confirms that Neil was this during their courtship. She wasn't sure how their relationship would work out given the age differences, and that in the book world he's a celebrity while at the time she was an underground musician. When he asked her to marry him, Neil agreed to all her conditions: it would be an open marriage, they didn't need kids, and she wouldn't be a wife.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation
• Hot Dad
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: One of his short stories, "The Black Cat," was inspired by the many strays that he and his family would adopt. The namesake cat was actually real, though he did find a forever home and we hope isn't getting into more fights.
• Messy Hair
• Nightmare Fetishist
• Not a Morning Person: Neil jokes that in addition to his nameless cameo in the Diana Wynne Jones novel Deep Secret, part of The Magids duology, Nick's zombielike morning state was based on his before Neil gets any caffeine.
• One of Us
• Refuge in Audacity: He explained in his "Make Good Art" speech that this was how he got writing gigs. When freelancing, he would lie that he wrote or so-and-so publications, then would write for them for real. That way it would be true eventually and he could claim to be "chronologically challenged". Neil advises not doing this in the day and age of the Internet, because fact-checking is more common.
• Running the Asylum
• Sesame Street Cred: He guest starred as himself in an episode of Arthur.
• Tall, Dark and Snarky

Tropes common in his work:

• All Myths Are True
• Back from the Dead
• Blue and Orange Morality
• Buffy-Speak
• Cats Are Magic
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe
• Cosmic Horror Story
• Continuity Porn
• Dark Is Not Evil
• Deconstruction Crossover
• Deliberate Values Dissonance
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?
• Dreaming of Things to Come
• Fairy Tale
• Genre Savvy
  • Dangerously Genre Savvy
• Goth
• Light Is Not Good
• Meta Fiction
• Trope Overdosed

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His works include:

Comic Books

• The Sandman, Death: The High Cost of Living, Death: The Time of Your Life, Sandman: the Dream Hunters (a short story illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano), and The Sandman: Endless Nights.
• Black Orchid
• One issue of Hellblazer
• Violent Cases
• Mr. Punch: The Tragical Comedy or the Comical Tragedy
• 1602: A story of the Marvel Universe, transposed to the year 1602.
• The Books Of Magic
• Creatures of the Night
• Harlequin Valentine: Began as a short story.
• Murder Mysteries
• Midnight Days
• Signal to Noise
• The Case in the Departure of Miss Finch: Began as a short story.
• The Last Temptation: A collaboration with Alice Cooper.
• Eternals
• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader??
• Metamorpho The Element Man in Wednesday Comics
• Gaiman also came up with the concept that Tekno Comix eventually turned into a small line of inter-linked titles. The original pitch differed from the end result in a number of respects, to Gaiman's displeasure.
• Wrote the story "Wordsworth" for the Clive Barker's Hellraiser comic series; it was recently republished in the short stories collection Hellbound Hearts.
• Goliath, a Matrix comic.

Novels

• Neverwhere
• Stardust
• Good Omens, in collaboration with Terry Pratchett
• Coraline
• American Gods
• Anansi Boys
• Interworld, in collaboration with Michael Reaves
• The Graveyard Book
• Odd And The Frost Giants
• Mirror Mask - the novelization
• Norse Mythology (Exactly What It Says on the Tin: his re-telling of Norse Mythology, inspired only the source material, with nothing made up by Gaiman.)

Short story anthologies

• Smoke & Mirrors
• Angels & Visitations
• Fragile Things
• M is for Magic
• How to Talk to Girls at Parties

Picture books

• The Wolves in the Walls
• The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish
• Blueberry Girl
• The Dangerous Alphabet
• Crazy Hair
• Instructions

Films

• Princess Mononoke (he wrote the Woolseyist script)
• Stardust
• Beowulf (the 2007 film)
• Coraline
• Mirror Mask
• Death: The High Cost of Living. (In "development", but IMDb puts its release in 2013.
• Anansi Boys (upcoming, no due date, but he has at least finished and handed in a rough draft of the script)

Live-Action TV

• He has written an episode for the 2011 series of Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife".
• Wrote an episode for Babylon 5: "Day of the Dead".
  • Especially notable as the only episode of the show not written by J. Michael Straczynski after season two.
  • The Gaim, one of the alien races in Babylon Five, is named for him. And just to hammer the homage further, they all strongly resemble Dream Of The Endless.
• Neverwhere.
• American Gods upcoming in 2013 from HBO as a miniseries.

Neil Gaiman has performed in the following roles:

Film

• Provided the voice for Albert, butler to Bluntman and Chronic, in the 2013 animated View Askewniverse film, Jay & Silent Bob's Super Groovy Cartoon Movie!