Once Upon A Time...
Why chicks dig author Neil Gaiman.
      by Tara O'Shea

Harry Potter and Tim Hunter: seperated at birth? No, says Gaiman.

Neil has a funny thing about hair. Before the birth of his youngest child, he didn't shave or cut his hair. He told audiences in Finland in August that he wouldn't cut his hair until American Gods was complete, and as the novel got longer and longer, so did Gaiman's locks. "It's just a nice sort of way of marking something for me," he explained, "although this time it got a bit beyond the joke. By the end of it, people I didn't know were making Howard Stern jokes. It was long, tumble-y, curly hair, which is gone. It's great. The point I got miserable was summer. And I got deeply miserable this summer. The book was not yet finished, and it was really hot and sticky, and I'm walking around with, you know, a pillow's worth of hair on my head --"

And ponytails are so Los Angeles...

"Sometimes I'd actually ponytail while I was writing -- I look very strange in a ponytail. They don't work for me. But I would actually ponytail occasionally while I was writing just to get it off the back of my neck. I've taken a little cabin on the lake around here where I would go and write, and the joy of having a little cabin on the lake is that you go and there's nothing to look at, and nothing to do except -- and no telephone. So I sit down and I write. Except there's also no air conditioning, so when it got really hot, I would just sit there and cook. And on the really, really hot days, I'd find that I'd go to sleep, which was kind of useless. You sit there, you write half a page, and you wake up four hours later."

Gaiman did in fact cut his hair -- and narrowly escaped CBLDF chair Chris Orr putting it up on eBay. Neil declined, saying it would just be too weird. However, the leather jacket he wore from 1990-1996 was auctioned off to benefit the Fund on eBay in August. Bidding started at one dollar, and ended up at $6,101. Although the Last Angel tour was his last reading tour to benefit the CBLDF, he remains a staunch supporter and recently donated his original drafts of the Neverwhere teleplays -- complete with the handwritten first chapter of the Neverwhere novel -- to be auctioned off on-line. The scripts brought in $2,655.00 for the charity, money that will be used to help defend comic book creators and retailers First Amendment rights.

Gaiman first learned about the CBLDF when he emigrated in 1992. "I came to live in America and thought, 'Oh, what a cool thing this First Amendment is.' And then it was the First Amendment was under cheerful attack -- as it still is -- you know, by local cops and tax authorities and people like that, and I thought 'I should do something to help,' and I've been doing something to help now for the last eight years."

To date, Gaiman has raised over $160,000 to support the non-profit Comic Book Legal Defense Fund through the Guardian Angel tours, and charity auctions.

"I think the first of the [readings] I did actually wasn't my idea. It was the guys who owned The Beguiling, a comic book store in Canada, got in touch and they said 'Look, if we rent a theatre -- a local theatre -- and charged $10 a ticket and give all the Legal Defense Fund, would you come up here and do a reading?' I thought, 'Yeah, like they're gonna fill a theatre.' And I said sure. And they filled a 500 seat theatre, and came away and went 'This is great. This is wonderful.' And that's where it all started."

If you had to explain to someone exactly why they should support the CBLDF, how would you?

Tell me a story... Photo © Barrett McGivney

"Because comics are the thin end of the wedge. Comics are probably the easiest thing to attack, and the easiest thing to remove First Amendment liberties. Mike Diana, a comic book writer and artist in Florida, was arrested for doing a comic called Boiled Angel. He spent some nights in prison. After a trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to a three year suspended sentence, one thousand hours of community service, a $1000 fine, forbidden to be within ten feet of anybody under the age of eighteen, which lost him his job as a convenience store clerk. There were various other weird little conditions, the last one of which he was forbidden from ever drawing anything again that might be obscene, and the local sheriff's office was instructed to make random spot checks of his place of residence to make sure he wasn't drawing. They could bang down the door at four o'clock in the morning and make sure that Mike wasn't committing art. And if that had happened to a song writer who was forbidden from writing songs and the police were instructed to bang on his door and make sure he wasn't writing songs, it would have been an outrage. If I as a novelist -- if I with my novel hat on were forbidden from writing anything that anyone might consider obscene, I would be on the cover of Time magazine. And nobody's heard about Mike Diana except for a few comics fans and First Amendment nuts. And that's why."

Seven years after I first sat transfixed at Neil Gaiman's feet while he read to me, I sat in a darkened theatre in my hometown of Chicago with easily over a hundred others and Neil told us stories. Some of them, like Chivalry, which was originally written for the 1992 World Fantasy Convention, were old friends. But best of all was the moment when everyone there realized they were about to be told a story they had never, ever heard before. The pauses where Neil stopped to take a sip of water from the bottle on the table next to him were absolutely silent, as we reverently waited for him to continue, quiet as nursery rhyme mice.

Neil tells very good stories. They have scary bits, and heroic bits, and bits where you cry, and bits where you giggle. Sometimes the stories have soft sweet centers like candy; sometimes they have teeth. Sometimes the stories he tells are so wonderful one can't help but wonder why no one had told that story before; or why -- when they had -- it wasn't quite as good as the story one was just told.

The 11th Hour would like to wish Neil a Happy Birthday.

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