on Neil Gaiman and Sandman

Neil Gaiman moderating the Watchmen panel at UKCAC in 1986.

Excerpt from Some Moore - Part Two, an interview by Steve Darnall published in Hero Illustrated n. 8, February 1994.

MOORE: Neil is one of the only people who's working at Vertigo- with a couple of other exceptions-who succeeds. Neil is not writing like me anymore. He used to when he was starting out, and I think he'd be the first to admit that. It was very flattering. Everyone's got to start somewhere, and we all start out aping someone to a degree, but Neil, I think, has done more to move away from the sort of territory that I've created, and to establish something that is uniquely his own. The flavor in Neil's stories is very different to mine, and it's not unrelenting horror. Neil is somebody who understands the benefit of putting in a lovely little story like that "Midsummer Night's Dream" story [Sandman 19]. He uses interesting storytelling techniques, he's constantly trying to think of new ways to do things and there's a sense of genuine enjoyment in Neil's stories that I don't always feel in some of the other ones. You get the impression that Neil's enjoyed writing this story, he enjoyed researching all these little odd bits of obscure historical facts and putting them into his Sandman mosaic.
I read, for the first time, the whole run of Neil's Sandman about a month ago, because I've got a strange, pathological aversion to picking up DC comics [laughter]. I don't know what it is; I just see that bullet in the top left-hand corner and I start to go all clammy, my stomach contracts, I just cannot bring myself to shell out money...

DARNALL: You're back in the jungle in 'Nam...

MOORE: That's it, that's it. I can hear the 'copters going overhead. Neil, understanding this sort of pathological condition of mine, saved me the problem of going into a shop and buying them by sending me a great big bunch of them. I read them all through and I thought they were great. Reading them, I thought, "God, this must have been what it was like for Neil reading my Swamp Things." I never actually got the experience of reading Swamp Thing, because I'd written it, so I knew what the ending was [laughs]. Not that I want to compare the two, but I think I got the same feeling looking at Sandman that I hope people got out of reading Swamp Thing.

DARNALL: Neil said he chose to do "The Doll's House" and risk interrupting the previous tone of the book, because he knew if he didn't he ran the risk of becoming another X-Men. Looking back, that decision actually changed the entire direction of the book, because from there he could spring off and do "Midsummer Night's Dream" or "Dream of a Thousand Cats."

MOORE: "The Doll's House" is one of those watershed things, which Neil probably didn't realize at the time. But, sometimes you do stories because you have to and they put a spin on the series that you hadn't expected. They open up all sorts of new possibilities. I agree, and I think it's important that writers be given the freedom to develop according to their own instincts. Of course, that doesn't always work out; some people's things are not as good as others', but...it would have been so easy to crush Neil as a talent before he developed by giving him edicts and telling him, 'Do it like this, do it like that.' I mean, nobody at DC would've ever said, 'Hey, we think it'd be a really good idea if you did a sort of light fantasy story about Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream." Nobody would've done that because those don't sell, according to the conventional sort of wisdom of the marketing department. Of course, it did sell. When people think of Sandman, these are the stories they remember, the little oddities.