Broken Frontier

I could give you the facts.

Neil Gaiman was born on 10 November 1960 in Portchester, England. He has won an unprecedented number of awards including the Eisner, the Harvey, the first ever (and only) World Fantasy Award given to a comic book, the Stoker, the Hugo, the Gem, the Nebula, the Locus and far too many others to mention. Sales of his comics have broken records (Death: The High Cost of Living, for example, has sold 300,000 copies, making it the best-selling “for adults” title ever). His writings have been translated and sold in Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany, France, Brazil, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Finland, Japan, Hungary, Turkey, Korea, Portugal and many others. More than 2,500 other websites link to his website, www.neilgaiman.com, which itself gets 600,000 unique visitors per month.

I could go into great detail about all of his different works. We could talk about the Sandman comic series he’s perhaps most well-known for. We could look at his books for adults, such as American Gods and its forthcoming sequel. We could look at his books for children, including Coraline. We could look at his TV work, such as Neverwhere and Babylon 5. We could look at his plans for an album of original songs. And I’m sure we all can’t wait for the release of MirrorMask on 30 September.

We could even talk about his relationships with collaborators such as Dave McKean, or his friendships with fellow comics writer Alan Moore or musicians Tori Amos (who mentions him somewhere on every album she puts out) and Alice Cooper.

The thing is, if you’re a fan, you probably know all of this already. But if you aren’t a fan and you have any hope of working in comics, then you better get reading now because one of the reasons Gaiman is so successful is because he leads instead of follows. If you want to work in this business, you have to remember: Gaiman’s the competition, the one you’re playing against, the one you have to beat.

What I really want to focus on, however, is Gaiman’s first book. I’m not talking about Violent Cases, although that was his first published comic book. I’m not even talking about Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Companion (which was actually his third published book). I’m talking about Duran Duran: the First Four Years of the Fab Five. I’m fairly certain he’d rather forget about this early work (the only mention of it on his website is within the bibliography). For Gaiman completists, the book is something of a Holy Grail. It’s easy to see why. A hardcover copy is currently for sale at www.abebooks.com for $700 making it the single most expensive Gaiman title there or on eBay.

I’m most interested in this book not because it displays an enviable example of music journalism. Having never read the book myself, I can’t make that claim. Truth be told, I imagine it’s one of his weaker works. I’m most interested in this book because it proves, even more than his later work, in a certain way, that Gaiman is a very smart writer.

You see, smart writers know that any kind of writing is good writing because it means practice. Published writing is even better because it means practice and a credit you can show to other publishers in your attempts to convince them to publish your new stuff. Writing which is published and for which you are paid is the best of all because it means you are on your way to making it a full time job. So, even while writing short stories such as “The Case Of The Four And Twenty Blackbirds” and selling them to a little magazine called Knave, Gaiman pushed on every front he could: journalism, book reviews and more. He did this not only for the reasons mentioned above, but also because he knew that the connections he made as a result of that work would help him with the business side of the writing business and he was willing to spend the time developing that part of his career as well.

I think that’s something a lot of younger writers forget. They turn down the opportunity to write for the school newspaper because they have to revise their comic book masterpiece -- again. Or they don’t keep a blog because they’re too busy working on character bios. Or they don’t even write a simple letter to the editor of their local paper about an issue on which they have an opinion because they’re too busy with their “real” writing. Let me tell you: if that letter to the editor is published, it’s more real than a mountain of manuscripts only the author’s friends have read.

Gaiman’s little book on Duran Duran proves that, I think, in a way that few other things could. According to an essay on his website about his comics work, he knew from the age of 15 that he wanted to write American comics. I bet lots of other people said the same thing when they were 15. Most of them are probably working as accountants now (which is what Gaiman’s career counselor supposedly asked him to consider). Gaiman got his dream because he stopped at nothing and he made the most of every opportunity.

Until next time, keep writing.