Neil Gaiman Lecture at MIT

I went to the first Julius Schwartz Lecture at MIT on Friday night. Neil Gaiman was the speaker. Julie Schwartz started Sci-Fi fanzines and was the editor at DC comics responsible for the Silver Age of comics, reinventing the Flash in 1956 and starting the Justice League of America. As Henry Jenkins said in his opening remarks, Schwartz is responsible for your concept of the modern superhero. You can read more about Schwartz here.

Neil Gaiman is probably best known as the author of the Sandman comics of the 90s but also for the books American Gods and Anansi Boys and the recent films Mirrormask, Stardust and Beowulf. Gaiman gave a speech and then answered questions from Jenkins for about an hour then took a few questions from the audience. He started by reading Alan Moore's comments from Schwartz's memorial service in 2004.

He said it's the job of a creator to explode and it's the job of academics to examine the blast site to see what kind of explosion it was, what it was designed to do and did it accomplish it. He revisited this a couple of times including some stories of people analyzing his work realizing things he never did. Apparently he often uses a non-sexual kiss 3/4 of the way through to introduce the third act; or rather did, now that he knows this he'll probably never do it again.

I learned about Sturgeon's Law: 90% of sci-fi is crap, but 90% of everything is crap. This is also Darwinian, as the 90% crap is ultimately removed from the shelves, leaving just the good stuff. I guess this probably would work for television if it weren't for all the cable channels needing to broadcast something.

Gaiman told the story of how genre stories really became clear to him when he read a book about pornography and compared it to musicals. Musicals have solos, duets, trios, and full choruses. There's man-woman songs, woman-woman songs, and many-men songs. Some songs are slow, some are fast. In a musical the plot exists to get from song to song and to prevent all the songs from happening at once. If you go to see a musical and there are no songs, you'd feel cheated. See the comparison to porn? Genre stories must give audiences what they expect.

The definition of genre is if the plot exists to get from set piece to set piece. There are spy novels and novels with spies in them. There are cowboy films and films with cowboys in them. Subject matter doesn't make genre. Some British romance novels were retold fairy tales with "shopping and fucking". Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns is great genre, Alan Moore's Watchmen isn't since nothing is filler and it's not connected set pieces.

Comics are often called a genre, but they're not, they are a medium. Prose is the most collaborative medium, as the reader fills in a lot. This is why when you go back and read something, it's sometimes not as good as you remember. Comics add pictures but (as Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics) the reader still fills in the gutters.

He also told the story of recently attending a sci-fi convention in China. It was the first official one, because the government hadn't approved of sci-fi and fantasy but had recently changed their mind. The reason was, they were good as a nation of copying things but not creating them. When they looked at creative companies like Apple, Intel, Microsoft, etc, they found a lot of the creative employees were interested in sci-fi and fantasy. Gaiman wasn't surprised at all since these stories help you imagine things and as he said, look around the room, everything in here (the projector, microphone, etc.) was at one point someone's imagination.