{"id":3516,"date":"2005-09-29T11:51:17","date_gmt":"2005-09-29T18:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/09\/29\/cage-match-gaiman-vs-whedon\/"},"modified":"2022-03-07T09:50:40","modified_gmt":"2022-03-07T17:50:40","slug":"cage-match-gaiman-vs-whedon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2005\/09\/29\/cage-match-gaiman-vs-whedon\/","title":{"rendered":"Cage Match: Gaiman vs. Whedon"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:7700,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.time.com\\\/time\\\/arts\\\/printout\\\/0,8816,1109313,00.html&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/time.com\\\/time\\\/arts\\\/printout\\\/0,8816,1109313,00.html&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:7701,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.sonypictures.com\\\/movies\\\/mirrormask&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.sonypictures.com\\\/movies\\\/mirrormask&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:7702,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.serenitymovie.com&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.uphe.com\\\/movies\\\/serenity\\\/&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:7703,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.popastronaut.net\\\/?p=148&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20060710071002\\\/http:\\\/\\\/www.popastronaut.net:80\\\/?p=148&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/joeeastham.com\\\/?p=148&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-17 04:43:43&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-21 06:25:57&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 22:04:41&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 22:04:41&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:206},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>Okay, so no, it&#8217;s not really a cage match. What it <em>is<\/em> is a really good <a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/arts\/printout\/0,8816,1109313,00.html\" title=\"Time: Interview: Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon\">interview in Time with Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon<\/a>, on the eve of the release of their movies, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sonypictures.com\/movies\/mirrormask\/\" title=\"Sony Pictures: Mirrormask\">Mirrormask<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.serenitymovie.com\/\" title=\"Serenity\">Serenity<\/a> (respectively).<\/p>\n<p>Plenty of good stuff in this interview &#8212; I knew I was going to enjoy it right from the start&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  TIME: Joss, this is Lev from Time magazine. You&#8217;re also in the virtual presence of Neil Gaiman.<\/p>\n<p>  Neil Gaiman: I&#8217;m not virtual. I&#8217;m here.<\/p>\n<p>  TIME: Sorry. You&#8217;re virtual, Joss. Neil&#8217;s real.<\/p>\n<p>  Joss Wedon: Okay. I wondered.<\/p>\n<p>  TIME: I&#8217;m glad we settled that.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Neil on writing, and the drive to avoid repeating yourself:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  I saw a lovely analogy recently. Somebody said that writers are like otters. And otters are really hard to train. Dolphins are easy to train. They do a trick, you give them a fish, they do the trick again, you give them a fish. They will keep doing that trick until the end of time. Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they&#8217;ll do a better trick or a different trick because they&#8217;d already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We&#8217;ve done it, so let&#8217;s do something different.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Neil and Joss on their primary fan base:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  TIME: Let&#8217;s talk about your respective fan bases. A lot of them self-identify as kind of on the geeky side.<\/p>\n<p>  NG: I think the fan base is literate. You need to be reasonably bright to get the jokes and to really follow what&#8217;s going on. That, by definition, is going to exclude a lot of people who will then get rather irritated at us for being pretentious and silly and putting in things they didn&#8217;t quite get. But it&#8217;s also going to mean that some of the people who do get the stuff will probably be fairly bright.<\/p>\n<p>  JW: Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you&#8217;re seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don&#8217;t bother to read. So yes, I think it&#8217;s kind of the same thing.<\/p>\n<p>  But I also think there&#8217;s a bit of misconception with that. Everybody who labels themselves a nerd isn&#8217;t some giant person locked in a cubbyhole who&#8217;s never seen the opposite sex. Especially with the way the Internet is now, I think that definition is getting a little more diffuse.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>On mainstream culture&#8217;s growing acceptance of genre work:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  TIME: I almost miss the stigma that used to attach to these things. Now everybody&#8217;s into Tolkien. And I feel a little like, hey, I&#8217;ve been into that stuff my whole life. And in fact, you used to beat me up for it.<\/p>\n<p>  JW: I miss a little of that element, the danger of, oh, I&#8217;m holding this science fiction magazine that&#8217;s got this great cover. There a little bit of something just on the edge that I&#8217;m doing this. That&#8217;s pretty much gone. Although when I walk into a restaurant with a stack of comic books, I still do get stared at a little bit.<\/p>\n<p>  NG: I always loved, most of all with doing comics, the fact that I knew I was in the gutter. I kind of miss that, even these days, whenever people come up and inform me, oh, you do graphic novels. No. I wrote comic books, for heaven&#8217;s sake. They&#8217;re creepy and I was down in the gutter and you despised me. &#8216;No, no, we love you! We want to give you awards! You write graphic novels!&#8217; We like it here in the gutter!<\/p>\n<p>  JW: We&#8217;ve been co-opted by the man.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Neil on &#8220;family&#8221; films:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  &#8230;in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn&#8217;t want to do that. I like the idea of family as something where a seven-year-old would see a film and get stuff out of it, and a fifteen-year-old would get something else out of it, and a 25-year-old would get a different thing out of it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Joss on his upcoming &#8220;Wonder Woman&#8221; treatment:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  NG: She&#8217;s such a character without a definitive story. Or even without a definitive version.<\/p>\n<p>  JW: That&#8217;s how I feel. I hope to change that because I really feel her. Let&#8217;s face it: She&#8217;s an Amazon, and she will not be denied.<\/p>\n<p>  TIME: I&#8217;m really hoping her bustier will slip down a little bit further than it did in the show.<\/p>\n<p>  JW: You&#8217;re just after a porno, aren&#8217;t you?<\/p>\n<p>  TIME: Yes.<\/p>\n<p>  JW: It&#8217;s all about priorities. Yes, it&#8217;s very empowering for her to be naked all the time.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.popastronaut.net\/?p=148\" title=\"Pop Astronaut: Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman interview\">Pop Astronaut<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;in America, it almost seems like family has become a code word for something that you can put a five-year-old in front of, go out for two hours, and come back secure in the knowledge that your child will not have been exposed to any ideas. I didn&#8217;t want to do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2036,2037],"tags":[23,1478,39,3241,1895,2750],"class_list":["post-3516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-tv-and-films","tag-film","tag-joss-whedon","tag-links","tag-mirrormask","tag-neil-gaiman","tag-serenity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}