Tag: Neil Gaiman

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Neil Gaiman writes about the re-release of The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish:

There were copies of the new edition of THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR TWO GOLDFISH, with the Enhanced CD in it. It’s bigger than the original edition, has a new Dave McKean cover (mostly because people seemed convinced that the old cover had something to do with Counting Crows, and because the cover didn’t really reflect the art style inside) and I wrote a new afterword for it.

I mentioned this to Katie (a Counting Crows fan), and of course we both wondered about the comment. So I tracked down a copy of the original book cover:

The_Day_I_Swapped_My_Dad_for_Two_Goldfish

One look at this, and Katie said, “That is the album cover!” She immediately ran into the next room to pull out This Desert Life:

Counting Crows This Desert Life

Sure enough, a quick look through the liner notes yielded, “Illustrations by Dave McKean. Cover illustration adapted from the book, ‘The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish,’ by…”

For those who are interested, here’s the new edition of the book:

The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish - revised

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[MirrorMask Logo]Yesterday I mentioned the MirrorMask panel at Comic Con. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean were both there to talk about the movie and play a trailer-like clip they had put together the night before.

MirrorMask came about when Sony noticed that while Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal didn’t do very well in theaters, over the years they’ve become strong, steady sellers in the home video market. So they went to the Jim Henson company and asked if they could do a fantasy film in the same vein, on a budget. So Lisa Henson called up Neil Gaiman by way of asking for Dave McKean, and explained the situation: They only had a $4 million budget, but they wouldn’t have any studio interference. They went on to say they knew they couldn’t afford Neil to write the screenplay, but could he at least come up with a story, at which point he said (Edit: corrected quote) “If Dave’s directing it, I’m writing it.” Continue reading →

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We accidentally went to Comic Con on Thursday. The plan was just to pick up our badges that afternoon, but there was a panel on balancing action and character development with some really big-name authors – Robert Jordan, Peter David, Raymond Feist, etc. (The basic lessons: let combat grow out of the characters’ actions instead of tossing it in, and be aware that combat is confusing. Focus on individual characters as much as possible, rather than trying to present a long view. Quotes here.) So we stayed, I got massively dehydrated, and we spent the next hour slowly drinking water and recovering. We ended up running into a group from the UCI RPG club and just stayed around and talked for a while before we headed off to dinner.

Neither of us had ever been to Comic Con on a day other than Saturday, and my experience with conventions tends to be that Thursdays are very light. Not so! Continue reading →