Comics genius
August 3, 2010, Sydney Morning Herald



Left - Coming to Sydney ... Neil Gaiman. Photo: Justin McManus

Neil Gaiman's award-winning graphic novels for brainy types have helped bring respectability, and adult readers, to a much-maligned medium. He talks to Charles Purcell.

Neil Gaiman has just sent off the finished film script for his novel Anansi Boys. The English-born comic-book icon, author and storyteller, whose work has helped bring the form from the fringe to the forefront of popular culture, says he is enormously happy with the script – even if it is one year late.

 "I was meant to have begun it last March after a book signing," says Gaiman, who lives near Minneapolis, Minnesota. "I went off to New York and got an unexpected phone call saying my father had just died of a suspected heart attack in a business meeting. And when the dust had settled and I opened up the file to write the film script in which the first thing that happens is that the protagonist's father dies in an unexpected way of a heart attack during karaoke, I found myself thinking, 'I can't do this.'
"I'd open it up every couple of days and look at the two pages that existed so far and then I'd close it and go and do something else."
The rest at SMH.