EXCLUSIVE: The second installment of our three-part interview with Neil Gaiman finds the writer musing on the "British Invasion" in comics, describing his love for "mythology mash-ups" and wondering if maybe he pulled off the impossible with sustained excellence of "The Sandman"
(Read Part One and Part Three)
GB: How would you describe Morpheus, your flawed Lord of Dreams, to someone who was coming to the tale for the first time?
NG: He's a lot like me, only with an immortal's superpowers and no sense of humor of any kind. Hmm. So in fact, he isn't anything like me at all but he does have very messy hair. [Laughs] That was a great point of correspondence between me and the character. He's much paler than I am too. No, really, with the character, it was an idea of trying to take something very literally: What would it be like to live in dreams? A lot of that came out of terror. I was a young writer and had never written anything monthly. I needed a story shape that could take me anywhere because my fear was: What if I run out of stories? So I thought, "I will have somebody who has existed since the dawn of time, so that gives me the entirety of human history to play with for stories."
And I wanted someone who is absolutely and utterly powerful. It's interesting because at the time, John Byrne had just taken over Superman and had announced that he was making Superman less powerful because he had become too powerful and you couldn't write interesting stories about people that were too powerful. That started me thinking, "Well, no, actually you can, because what makes a person interesting or not interesting isn't how powerful they are, but who they are."
GB: There's also the compelling problems that come with that power. Your Morpheus may be able to bend reality to his wishes but he still has to deal with the consequences of his excesses and his relationships.
NG: Which is why I created Dream, this god-like being of immortal power, and then I gave him a family. Most characters in comics simply didn't have any families, and it was something I loved. It was something I loved to write about. When I first came out to America, people told me that in "The Sandman" I created a dysfunctional family, which was not a phrase I had heard before that in England. I talked to people about it, and I realized that what people in America called "a dysfunctional family" was the same thing that we in England referred to as "a family." You didn't see a lot of functional ones. So I gave him a family, the Endless. I gave him Death and Delirium and Desire and Despair and Destiny and Destruction.
GB: It became such an amazing tapestry as the series moved on. There was the feeling of epic fantasy on a scale that wasn't really there in those earliest issues.
NG: At the beginning it was a horror comic. Those first eight issues was a sort of horror comic. After that it became more of, I guess, a fantasy tale, but one that allowed me to go off and write about Shakespeare or history or do a modern-day road trip or really go anywhere I wanted to with an unlimited special effects budget. [Laughs]
GB: I was fascinated when you began plucking the deities of different cultures and putting them together in a sort of mythology mash-up. It was something you would come back to in your non-comics work later with the "American Gods" novel ...
NG: It was something that I had always loved so much about the nature of comic-book universes. Those Marvel and DC heroes all seemed to exist in worlds where you had gods and you had fairies and robots and aliens. It was all there, and there was the potential for this amazing mash-up. All I did was take joy in it and mash it up much, much further. It was all there to be mashed, but nobody had mashed it up just yet in that way.
GB: Well, in Marvel Comics, when Thor and Hercules both ended up in Manhattan, they tended to blend in with the superhero except for their Old Vic accents. Your stories, though, presented the gods as mistrustful tribes forced into the same room.
NG: That's it, yes, the idea of putting them together wasn't something that nobody had done before; it's just that whenever it had been done, they tried to downplay the awkwardness. I wanted to revel in the joy of that awkwardness. It's something I keep coming back to. This wonderful, great-big, post-modern grab bag. It's all up for grabs; it's all metaphor and mythology, and if I can find a kitchen sink, I'm throwing that in too.
ON THIS DATE: Comic book artist Silvio "Sal" Buscema is celebrating his 72nd birthday today. Sal got his start in the 1960s as inker for his brother, John Buscema, and Sal came into his own with long runs of work on "The Incredible Hulk," "Captain America," "Spectacular Spider-Man" and one of my faves, "The Defenders." Sal was a utility player in the Marvel bullpen often doing emergency fill-in issues and inking others between doing his own pencil and ink work and while he is considered more steady than spectacular by fans, his style really evolved through the years and his knack for clear storytelling was a key part of the Marvel glory years. 
Dolemite, R.I.P.: Rudy Ray Moore is dead at 81. 
Neil Gaiman
