Neil Gaiman's Comics At Age 16
Hayley Campbell’s The Art of Neil Gaiman offers exclusive glimpses into the author’s artistic roots and romantic education.
From The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell; drawing by Neil Gaiman, NG Archive Image. Copyright © Neil Gaiman. Published by Harper Design, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher.
Neil Gaiman's too busy making art to bother with the knowing posture of someone who wants to look like he's making art. He's a rare sort of polymath — zipping between comics, novels, films, and audio to tell stories that far outstrip the sum of their genres, and it's easy to see why even a poetry reading by him can ignite a mosh pit.
He's also, famously, a warm cheerleader to budding creators. "I hope you'll make mistakes," he said in a commencement speech at the University of the Arts. "If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something."
Hayley Campbell's The Art of Neil Gaiman offers the sort of behind-the-scene access to Gaiman's early works to inspire anyone considering writing their own stories. Before he made The Sandman and Coraline, he was a 16-year-old fan of fantasy author Michael Moorcock, and wanted to draw comics that were (by his own admission) more or less exactly like Moorcock stories:
From The Art of Neil Gaiman by Hayley Campbell; drawing by Neil Gaiman, NG Archive Image. Copyright © Neil Gaiman. Published by Harper Design, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher.