The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  It was a great ending for an eight-year old. There were ironies I relished. It would, I have no doubt at all, be a bad thing for me to try and go back and watch The War Games now. It’s too late anyway; the damage has been done. It redefined reality. The virus was now solidly in place.

  These days, as a middle-aged and respectable author, I still feel a sense of indeterminate but infinite possibility on entering a lift, particularly a small one with blank walls. That to date the doors that have opened have always done so in the same time, and world, and even the same building in which I started out seems merely fortuitous—evidence only of a lack of imagination on the part of the rest of the universe.

  I do not confuse what has not happened with what cannot happen, and in my heart, Time and Space are endlessly malleable, permeable, frangible.

  Let me make some more admissions.

  In my head, William Hartnell was the Doctor, and so was Patrick Troughton. All the other Doctors were actors, although Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker were actors playing real Doctors. The rest of them, even Peter Cushing, were faking it.

  In my head the Time Lords exist, and are unknowable—primal forces who cannot be named, only described: the Master, the Doctor, and so on. All depictions of the home of the Time Lords are, in my head, utterly non-canonical. The place in which they exist cannot be depicted because it is beyond imagining: a cold place that only exists in black and white.

  It’s probably a good thing that I’ve never actually got my hands on the Doctor. I would have unhappened so much.

  A final Doctor Who connection—again, from the baggy-trousered Troughton era, when some things were more than true for me—showed itself, in retrospect, in my BBC TV series, Neverwhere.

  Not in the obvious places—the BBC decision that Neverwhere had to be shot on video, in episodes half an hour long, for example. Not even in the character of the Marquis de Carabas, whom I wrote—and Paterson Joseph performed—as if I were creating a Doctor from scratch, and wanted to make him someone as mysterious, as unreliable, and as quirky as the William Hartnell incarnation. But in the idea that there are worlds under this one, and that London itself is magical, and dangerous, and that the underground tunnels are every bit as remote and mysterious and likely to contain Yeti as the distant Himalayas was something, author and critic Kim Newman pointed out to me, while Neverwhere was screening, that I probably took from a Troughton-era story called “The Web of Fear.” And as he said it, I knew he was spot-on, remembering people with torches exploring the underground, beams breaking the darkness. The knowledge that there were worlds underneath . . . yes, that was where I got it, all right. Having caught the virus, I was now, I realized with horror, infecting others.

  Which is, perhaps, one of the glories of Doctor Who. It doesn’t die, no matter what. It’s still serious, and it’s still dangerous. The virus is out there, just hidden, and buried, like a plague pit.

  You don’t have to believe me. Not now. But I’ll tell you this. The next time you get into a lift, in a shabby office building, and jerk up several floors, then, in that moment before the doors open, you’ll wonder, even if only for a moment, if they’re going to open on a Jurassic jungle, or the moons of Pluto, or a full-service pleasure dome at the galactic core . . .

  That’s when you’ll discover that you’re infected too.

  And then the doors will open, with a grinding noise like a universe in pain, and you’ll squint at the light of distant suns, and understand . . .

  * * *

  Taken from the introduction to Paul McCauley’s 2003 Doctor Who novella, Eye of the Tyger, back when prose was pretty much the only way to get your Doctor Who fix.

  * * *

  On Comics and Films: 2006

  I can still remember how excited everyone was, seventeen years ago, by the arrival of the Batman film. Frank Miller’s story of an aging Batman coming out of retirement, The Dark Knight Returns, had, along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, spearheaded the first, abortive, graphic novel explosion, and I believed that a good, serious Batman film was all that was needed to put it over the top, legitimize comics and change the world. Two decades later, we live in a world in which comics have spawned a generation of summer blockbusters. This summer it’s a Marvel v. DC face-off, X-Men v. Superman, with Spider-Man waiting in the wings for 2007.

  Comics and movies have always been a two-way street. Will Eisner’s seminal The Spirit, back in the 1940s, took from Orson Welles and the films noirs as much as it borrowed from radio or Broadway, and there have been movies made from comics pretty much as long as either medium has existed. Last week an interviewer asked me whether I thought that the recent success of superhero movies meant that we might see a world in which comics that don’t include the capes-and-tights brigade might also have a chance at making it onto the silver screen. “You mean comics like Road to Perdition, Ghost World, Men in Black, A History of Violence, Sin City, From Hell, American Splendor . . . ?”

  I started to suspect that there might be a cultural sea change occurring a few years ago, when The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was released. It was not the first time that a bad film had been made from a good comic, not by a long shot, but it was the first time that the world at large seemed aware of this. Review after review pointed out that the film had none of the wit or brilliance, or even coherence, of the comic it was taken from.

  Like many of my coworkers in the world of comics, I’m also involved in making films these days. This is seen, I realize from talking to acquaintances and journalists, as a step up, signaling that I’ve finally left the gutter. (Still, filmic legitimacy only goes so far. Opera seems to be the cultural front-runner, while books, with or without pictures, trail some way behind.) I like film. I am not very good at writing for film yet, which is what keeps me interested in it. Most of all I like the astonishing process—it’s hard to get near a film set without remembering Orson Welles’s description of a film studio as “the biggest electric train set any boy could ever have.” When I first went to Hollywood, the only people who read comics were the most junior assistants, the kind who weren’t allowed to speak, who just went and fetched the bottled water. But that was a while ago. Now those people are running studios.

  There was a time when those of us who made comics would try and explain what advantages comics had over film. “Comics have an infinite special-effects budget,” we’d say. But we missed the point, now that movies have, for all intents, an infinite special-effects budget. (I was writing a script for Beowulf last year, and, worried that a climactic airborne dragon battle was going a little over the top, I called the director, Robert Zemeckis, to warn him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “There is nothing you could write that will cost me more than a million dollars a minute to film.”)

  Still, the “unlimited special effects” nonsense hides a truth or two. Ink is cheaper than film. Film, especially big-budget film, often needs to compromise in order to be liked by the biggest possible number of people around the world. A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating. The comic is, joyfully, a bastard medium that has borrowed its vocabulary and ideas from literature, science fiction, poetry, fine art, diaries, film and illustration. It would be nice to think that comics, and those of us who come from a comics background, bring something special to film. An insouciance, perhaps, or a willingness to do our learning and experimenting in public.

  That was certainly how it was making MirrorMask, a film I wrote and which artist and director Dave McKean designed and directed recently for the Jim Henson Company. As long as we gave Sony something “in the tradition of Labyrinth,” Dave could make his film (it’s my script, but in service of Dave’s story and vision). It didn’t have an unlimited special effects budget, or any kind of unlimited budget at all, but Dave still managed to put things on-screen that hadn’t been seen before�
��huge stone giants floating in the sky, a librarian made of books and voiced by Stephen Fry, a horde of Monkeybirds all called Bob (except for one, called Malcolm). We made MirrorMask on location in Brighton, and in a blue screen studio in London, then Dave took fifteen animators to an office in North London and worked for eighteen months telling the story of Helena and her peculiar dream.

  Whether you’re making comics or film, much of what you’re doing is done for dollars and for US-based multinational corporations who sell back what you’ve done to the UK and to the world. MirrorMask was a very English film, albeit made with money from Sony. Alan Moore, tired of bad films made from good comics he had written, and of the accompanying Hollywood-associated irritants (including a legal suit over The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), recently removed his name from the upcoming adaptation of his graphic novel V for Vendetta, disassociated himself from his previous films and, in the kind of definitive grand gesture that indicates that you really mean business, also declined his share of the money that came with them.

  Even knowing that Alan’s renounced it, I want to see V for Vendetta. V and I go back almost twenty-five years, to the first time I picked up a copy of Warrior magazine and saw those wonderful black-and-white David Lloyd–drawn people staring hopelessly back at me. (I find it hard enough to adjust to a world in which the V graphic novel is colored; a color V for Vendetta seems as pointless as colorizing Citizen Kane.) Moore’s story of one lone anarchist up against a fascist British state—in a world poised halfway between Tony Blair’s dream and Eric Blair’s warning—meant something important to me and to a handful of other comics readers, when it was first published, and the film trailer, composed primarily of images taken from Warrior covers, hooks into that.

  Alan Moore himself is resigned, amused and wryly bitter about the process of turning comics into film. “Comics are one step in the digestive process of Hollywood eating itself,” he told me. “Are there any films made from the comics that are better than the original comics? Hollywood needs material to make into films as part of an economic process. It could be a Broadway play or a book, or a French film, or a good TV series from the 1960s that people want to see on the big screen, or a bad TV series from the 1960s that nobody cares about but still has a name, or a computer game, or a theme park ride. I expect that the next subject of films will be breakfast-cereal mascots—a film that chronicles how Snap, Crackle and Pop met and explores their relationship. Or the Tony the Tiger movie.

  “Films are no friend to comics,” he concluded. “I think they actually impoverish the comic landscape. Turning it into a sort of pumpkin patch for movie studios to come picking.”

  At my most cynical I also wonder whether the world of comics might simply become a cheap R & D lab for Hollywood. The San Diego comics convention, once a summer gathering of a few thousand comics readers and creators, has in recent years become a Sundance-style event with over one hundred thousand people in attendance and where the year’s major SF, fantasy and horror movies are announced and previewed. I confess that I am always relieved when another year passes without anybody making a bad film based on Sandman, the comic on which most of my reputation within the medium rests.

  But I remain optimistic. While Frank Miller’s film of Sin City isn’t as powerful as his comics, it was still his vision up there on the screen in the film he made with Robert Rodriguez, uncompromised by the change from one medium to another. MirrorMask is Dave McKean’s film from first frame to last, visually and musically. Nearly twenty years after the first Batman film, I realize that film doesn’t confer legitimacy on comics. But it’s still an awful lot of fun.

  * * *

  This was originally published in the March 3, 2006, issue of The Guardian.

  * * *

  V

  ON COMICS AND SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THEM

  “This is the magic trick upon which all good fiction depends: it’s the angled mirror in the box behind which the doves are hidden, the hidden compartment beneath the table.”

  Good Comics and Tulips: A Speech

  I gave this speech at the Diamond Comics tenth annual retail seminar. It was April 1993, and the world of comics was at the height of an unprecedented commercial boom.

  I want to talk about comics. I want to talk about good comics, and why you should do what you can to sell more of them.

  But first I want to talk about tulips.

  I’m often asked—via letters to the editor and at signings—to suggest interesting books to the world, or assemble a reading list.

  Well, one of my favorite old books is a remarkable volume called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written almost a hundred and fifty years ago by a gentleman named Charles Mackay.

  In it he details many of the pursuits, wise and otherwise, to which people have devoted their lives: he devotes chapters to such diverse subjects as, for example, alchemists, haunted houses, the slow poisoners, the great Louisiana land swindle, and the popular street cries of Victorian London.

  It’s a book with a huge cast of characters within its pages that includes, for example, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, who wandered around England in the early 1640s, finding witches. He charged each village twenty shillings for the privilege of having him turn up and make them all feel uncomfortable, and another twenty shillings a head for each witch discovered and disposed of, and was turning a merry profit, finding witches and sending them to meet their maker, until one day he went to find witches in a little village in Suffolk, the elders of which, who were nobody’s fools, pointed out to him that no man could find as many witches as he had unless he was getting his infernally accurate information straight from Beelzebub, and before Hopkins could come up with an adequate response for this, he was put to the test, and was a former Witchfinder General.

  The moral of which, I suppose, is that it can be unwise to start witch hunts, and also . . .

  But I didn’t come here to tell you about witches, who after all have little enough to do with the vitally important business in front of us, which is that of comics and the retailing thereof.

  No. As I said, I want to talk to you about something far more germane to the world we all share of the four-color funnies.

  Tulips.

  Picture the scene: seventeenth-century Holland. Imagine the screen going all wavy at this point, and a hasty montage of wooden clogs, windmills, dykes with fingers in them, and red-wax-wrapped cheeses that taste more or less like yellow rubber.

  However, one thing is missing: tulips.

  The first tulips in Western Europe arrived from the east in the late sixteenth century, and became very popular in Holland.

  In 1634 the rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to the lowest dregs, embarked on the tulip trade. As the mania increased, prices augmented, until, in the year 1635 . . . it became necessary to sell them by their weight in perits, a small weight less than a grain.

  One tulip bulb sold for twelve acres of prime building land in Haarlem. Another sold for 4,600 florins—about $10,000 in modern money—plus a new carriage, two gray horses and a complete set of harnesses for the horses.

  A wealthy merchant once received a sailor, who came with news, and was rewarded with a gift of a smoked herring for his breakfast.

  The sailor, who knew nothing of tulips, also took with him something he thought to be an onion, which, when he returned to his ship, he sliced and ate.

  He had eaten a 3,000-florin tulip bulb, and spent some time in prison.

  By 1636 there were tulip exchanges in every major town in Holland. These functioned as stock exchanges.

  You had . . . but I’ll quote from Mackay’s book:

  The tulip-jobbers speculated in the rise and fall of the tulip stocks, and made large profits by buying when prices fell, and selling out when they rose. Many individuals grew suddenly rich. A golden bait hung temptingly out before the
people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot. Every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever, and that the wealthy from every part of the world would send to Holland, and pay whatever prices were asked for them. The riches of Europe would be concentrated on the shores of the Zuyder Zee, and poverty banished from the favoured clime of Holland. Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips. People of all grades converted their property into cash, and invested it in flowers. Houses and lands were offered for sale at ruinously low prices. . . . . .

  You had an entire country here, obsessed with getting rich, and convinced that it was impossible that tulips could ever be less than the ultimate, perfect investment object.

  After all, when the rest of the world caught up with the Dutch, they’d have all the tulips and would be even richer than they were already.

  And instead the rest of the world stared blankly at the Dutch for fussing foolishly after something that was, after all, only a tulip.

  The entire economy of the country of Holland was destroyed. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. There was a madness and a foolishness here that seems pretty apparent to an outside observer.

  I am reminded of the time the South Sea Company infected all England with the joy of investing.

  At the height of the craze, the so-called South Sea Bubble, share certificates traded hands down a London alley, going up in value as they went, until, one day . . . well, people were wiped out. Fortunes were lost, and a lot of people were made very miserable.

  At least the Dutch could eat the tulip bulbs.

  And if you think this has nothing to do with you, well, it does. Too many comic stores are trading in bubbles and tulips. I’m not here to play Cassandra. I don’t have the figure or the legs. I merely point this out.