Every man and his dog is bugging Neil Gaiman about his upcoming projects it would seem. A few weeks ago, Rich Johnston leaked the rumour that he might be writing a Doctor Who episode, and now it seems everyone is after confirmation. According to Neil’s blog he rang his Visa issuer the other day to sort something out, and was asked if I was THE Neil Gaiman. He said yes, and the person on the other end asked, “Are you going to be writing an episode of Dr Who?”. Brilliant!

On top of this, apparently as soon as he made the announcement, at SDCC, about his new two part Batman story, the poor guy’s inbox just filled up with questions from journalists about the title. It seems a lot of people are interested in it, which is good…. except for this guy, who emailed Neil to say:

I hope this reaches neil himself. Never have i ever known of anyone as full of himself as well as shit, than you. Now another milestone in your over-hyped career, Writing Batman. Not only are you under the impression you can write, but write batman? Fuck You. You Tried before and it sucked. It was just gaiman… With Batman in it. Fuck You.

Wow! Now, I understand emailing people to say you appreciate their work, it can be a little sycophantic at times, but it is understandable. You feel the writer has given some thing special to you, or whatever reason, and you want to thank them. Emailing someone to tell them that you hate them though? You have to have mental issues to go out of your way and do something like that. Neil though, ever the Gentleman, responded thusly:

If I’d known that Secret Origins of Batman Villains #1 had made that much of an impression on people, I would have… actually, probably not done anything different, really. I was rather fond of it.

If you think you won’t like the Batman comic I’ll write, probably you’d be best off not reading it. It’ll just be a two part Batman comic, you can save your money. Although if you’d bother to write me a letter like that you might buy it just to prove to yourself that you hate it as much as you know you’re going to…

Now that is how you deal with idiots!

All this talk about Neil Gaiman is making me think I need to join the masses, and drop him an email. We ARE last.fm buddies after all I want to ask him about doing a Canadian book tour. The US and UK get all the good book tours, and no one heads up into the frozen north I also want to ask him how he coped growing up Jewish in Porchester, Hampshire. I got bullied as a teenager when I was living just up the road from there, in Alton, Hampshire. That was because I was from Yorkshire, and had lived in Spain for a couple of years. People hated me because I was different from what they had been exposed to in their regular small town lifestyles, so I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for him. You have to love those towns where all the Indian People work in the Indian restaurants, Chinese people in the Chinese take-away, and all the Turkish guys sell kebabs. You tend not to ever see them outside of these establishments. Scary!

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