The Artistry of Neil Gaiman: Finding Light in the Shadows

Contributions by Lanette Cadle, Züleyha Çetiner-Öktem, Renata Lucena Dalmaso, Andrew Eichel, Kyle Eveleth, Anna Katrina Gutierrez, Darren Harris-Fain, Krystal Howard, Christopher D. Kilgore, Kristine Larsen, Thayse Madella, Erica McCrystal, Tara Prescott-Johnson, Danielle Russell, Joe Sutliff Sanders, Joseph Michael Sommers, and Justin Wigard

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) reigns as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning series The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for Neverwhere, Coraline, and the award-winning American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, children, comics readers, and viewers of the BBC’s Doctor Who, Gaiman’s writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media, making him a celebrity around the world.

Despite Gaiman’s incredible contributions to comics, his work remains underrepresented in sustained fashion in comics studies. In this book, the thirteen essays and two interviews with Gaiman and his frequent collaborator, artist P. Craig Russell, examine the work of Gaiman and his many illustrators. The essays discuss Gaiman’s oeuvre regarding the qualities that make his work unique in his eschewing of typical categories, his proclamations to ＂make good art,＂ and his own constant efforts to do so however the genres and audiences may slip into one another.

The Artistry of Neil Gaiman forms a complicated picture of a man who has always seemed fully assembled virtually from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own voice far later in life.

Joseph Michael Sommers is associate professor of English at Central Michigan University. He is editor of Critical Insights: The American Comic Book and Conversations with Neil Gaiman, published by University Press of Mississippi, and coeditor of Game On, Hollywood! Essays on the Intersection of Video Games and Cinema and Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels. He has published in such journals as Children’s Literature Review and the Comics Grid: Journal of Comic Scholarship. Kyle Eveleth is the McNair Fellow and a doctoral candidate at the University of Kentucky. His work has appeared in Good Grief! Children and Comics and Critical Insights: The American Comic Book, as well as such journals as disClosure and South Central Review.