Mirror, Mirror on the wall



Not been paying enough attention to the extra pages on Neil Gaiman's blog - an announcement from publishers William Morrow that they will be publishing tie-ins to go along with the eagerly awaited Gaiman-written and Dave McKean-directed film MirrorMask which is coming via the Henson company and is (very vaguely) set around the worlds of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. Being a huge admirer of both artists' works I am dying to see what they produce. Most regular readers will have heard me raving about Neil's works over the years (and the occassions when I have been lucky enough to host author events with him, or even, shamelessly namedropping, being treated by the publisher to dinner after the gig with him) and the Alien has been pretty darned keen too (witness Ariel, James Lovegrove and I verbal wrestling because we all want to review the new Gaiman, although this did give birth to a rather interesting (and hopefully good) and unusual style of multi-person review/discussion). Dave I have never met but hopefully some day will. His artwork for the likes of the early Violent Cases or Signal to Noise is simply superb and his covers for all of the Sandman books are fascinating and beautiful. In many ways he reminds me of Terry Gilliam - not so much in his artistic style, but in his rather wonderful imaginative take on things. It will be interesting to see the film - I know Neil has been having all sorts of back and forth problems with various movie-related shenanigans over the last few years and it is good to see him working with a mate and long-time collaborator and with a very fine company such as Hensons, so I do hope it all turns out well for them both. You can see a trailer here.