Is it all hype and marketing?

[Anonymous No.21362174]

I'm not understanding why this person is considered a godlike figure in imaginative literature.

[Anonymous No.21362206]

>>21362174
If he hadn't written Sandman first, his books wouldn't be nearly as popular as they currently are.

[Anonymous No.21362210]

He’s a shit author. Sandman was fine I guess. That’s it.

[Anonymous No.21362224]

>>21362174
Who

[Anonymous No.21362320]

>>21362174
He is writes YA level pop fantasy. I liked The Graveyard Book when I was 13 but I knew nothing and only read for story at that point.

[Anonymous No.21362348]

>>21362174
Someone here described his style as "airport gothic", I think it fits.

[Anonymous No.21362398]

>>21362174
tribal nepotism and occult connections. his (ex?)wife was an epstein girl and he got some benefits

[Anonymous No.21362410]

>>21362174
>why is he a godlike figure in imaginative literature?
Besides what has been said, he specifically caters to midwits in a way that makes them feel smart. He is like the "intellectual" grown-ups' JK Rowling.

[Anonymous No.21362498]

>>21362174
He is holding onto R A Lafferty's books. So I want him dead

[Anonymous No.21362505]

>>21362398
Also he probably has AIDS from his whore of a "wife"

[Anonymous No.21362557]

>>21362498
wdym, he owns the rights?

[Anonymous No.21362627]

>>21362174
>why this person is considered a godlike figure in imaginative literature
because he steals shit from more creative people and repackages it in a form easily digestible by dimwits and hoes. i remember a post (pasta?) explaining this in more detail but one obvious example is that the whole "gods of modernity" concept from american gods is shamelessly lifted from a harlan ellison story collection.

[Anonymous No.21362637]

>>21362627
i found the post i was thinking of in the archive.

>He's an imitator of far better writers, who has made a career out of re-writing other books with a mall goth twist.
>Coraline is mall goth Alice In Wonderland.
>The Graveyard Book is mall goth The Jungle Book.
>Even his famous and most popular book American Gods is a wholesale ripoff (but mall goth) of Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories. (Seriously: look up the descriptions of both books, and understand that Gaiman considered Ellison a mentor and hero.)
>The big twist is that he wears all black, speaks with a buttery English accent, and looks like the kind of below-average stage magician that came to your jr. high school and "hypnotized" your favorite teacher.
>People think he's some great writer because they haven't read the writers -- like Ellison -- he's made a career of stealing from.
>As a writer, he's essentially a fraud.
>But, you know. Turns out people like other books rewritten with a mall goth twist. So he's a millionaire and a literary luminary, or whatever

[Anonymous No.21362656]

>>21362174
Neil Gayman

[Anonymous No.21362955]

>>21362174
>y no voy a mentir, aunque me lo demanden, yo no onions el hijo de Hernández

[Anonymous No.21362985]

Endless nights wasn't particularly good

[Anonymous No.21363002]

>>21362656
Kneel Gayman

[Anonymous No.21363015]

>>21362174
All his novels read like screenplays. Probably a holdover from writing comics.

[Anonymous No.21363085]

>>21362637
>The Graveyard Book is mall goth The Jungle Book.
Maybe go on the computer and look up "Panchatantra". Newsflash lit inspires lit inspires lit. If you're triggered by a story being similar to another story then please never read anything about world religions.
>People think he's some great writer because they haven't read the writers he's made a career of stealing from
Real underground unknown stories like Alice in Wonderland nobody has ever heard of Alice in Wonderland before thanks 4chan user for making me aware of the underrated gem Alice in Wonderland.

[Anonymous No.21363102]

>>21363085
seething gaymantranny

[Anonymous No.21363126]

>>21363102
I don't even like Gaiman, but "dur his stories are like other stories" is shortbus lit crit.

[Anonymous No.21363133]

>>21363126
why are you so defensive? do you also steal?

[Anonymous No.21363149]

>>21363133
All lit is stolen retard

[Anonymous No.21363156]

>>21363149
Not true and not everything written is the monomyth.

[Anonymous No.21363258]

>>21362557
yes

[Anonymous No.21363296]

>>21363085
why are you seething at a literal copypasta? the guy who wrote it can't even see your butthurt.

>>21363149
oh wait you're retarded, that's why

[Anonymous No.21363306]

>>21362627
>because he steals shit from more creative people
He doesn't deny it. I read all of his short stories and he always writers something about them, in pretty much all of them he said something like "I tried to imitate X writer's style", "it was inspired by X writer", "I wanted to dedicate it to X writer", etc.

[Anonymous No.21363351]

>>21362174
Who?

[Anonymous No.21363367]

>>21363351
that's terry pratchett you retard. be respectful he died a few years ago from azkaban

[Anonymous No.21363376]

>>21363367

[Anonymous No.21363653]

>>21363296
>quoting an argument is copypasta

[Anonymous No.21363668]

>my face when his 10 minute gay Genie sex scene in American Goys show

[Anonymous No.21363675]

>>21363156
How do you reconcile the argument that Gaiman is bad lit because he used elements from Alice in Wonderland and the Jungle Book with the fact that most of the Jungle Book is rehashed Indian fables and Alice in Wonderland is a standard monomyth story like about a billion other stories before and after it?

[Anonymous No.21363682]

>>21363675
How do you reconcile that he ripped off Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison?

[Anonymous No.21363690]

>>21363376
counterpoint

[Anonymous No.21363793]

>>21363682
>Once I’d written the first draft I realized that a number of other people had tackled these themes before I ever got to them: in particular, my favorite unfashionable author, James Branch Cabell; the late Roger Zelazny; and, of course, the inimitable Harlan Ellison, whose collection Deathbird Stories burned itself onto the back of my head when I was still of an age where a book could change me forever.

Comedy that you think you've uncovered some huge act of plagiarism when Gaiman specifically credits Deathbird Stories in the acknowledgements of American Gods, wrote about Harlan regularly, credits him as one of his biggest inspirations for writing and was literally a close friend of his friend in real life.

>Harlan and I stayed real friends, through ups and through downs. The most recent down was his stroke, three years ago. He went to bed and didn't get up again. He had been a fighter, but he stopped fighting. Was not always there: lost memories, was sometimes confused, was still Harlan.
>I was very aware that each time I saw him could be the last. We were painfully honest with each other. You try not to leave things unsaid, when death's in the air.
>The last time I saw him he was more himself than at any time in the last few years. But a milder version of himself. He wanted me to tell him the set-up to a joke I had told him 15 years ago that, he said, was the funniest joke he'd ever heard, but he had forgotten how to tell it, and I did, and he laughed again. I told him about the Mermaid Parade, and Amanda and Ash. (I took Amanda to meet Harlan, when we first started dating, in the way you take someone to meet the family.) He said he had learned from Susan how to be at peace with things, and that she had learned, in the 32 years they had been together, how to be angry.
>Yesterday, I left the Good Omens edit, and saw that I had missed several calls. I called Susan Ellison, and she told me the news, that Harlan had died in his sleep.
>I am glad he went peacefully.
>I loved him. He was family, and I will miss him very much.
>He left behind a lot of stories. But it seems to me, from the number of people reaching out to me and explaining that he inspired them, that they became writers from reading him or from listening to him on the radio or from seeing him talk (sometimes it feels like 90% of the people who came to see Harlan and Peter David and me talk after 911 at MIT have gone on to become writers) and that his real legacy was of writers and storytellers and people who were changed by his stories.

Maybe you should try contacting Harlan's estate to let them know that you've discovered Gaiman actually made a career out of stealing his work I bet they never even noticed.

[Anonymous No.21363812]

>>21363793
>it's not le ripoff if you name where you stole it from!
have some shame

[Anonymous No.21363889]

>>21363002
>Kneel Gayman
on an old webcomic forum of which i was a member back in like 2006 (not hyperbole), we had a thread that was like 'funnie garfield comic edits', it was good and much fun was had
neil gaiman found the thread and posted about it on his blog, directing orders of magnitude more people to our forum than our poor server could handle and practically killing the forum
a friend of mine posted in the thread (which neil gaiman surely check back on)
>NEIL GAIMAN? MORE LIKE KNEEL, GAY MAN
and that is the story of how we said 'kneel, gay man' to neil gaiman's face

[Anonymous No.21363922]

>>21363812
Harlon Ellison, who famously tried to sue AOL because someone posted his writing on usenet, who sued paramount over a star trek christmas tree decoration he beleived was his intellectual property, who sued 20th century fox for making a film about a "dystopian corporate future in which everyone is allotted a specific amount of time to live", who sued James Cameron because he though Terminator was too similar to an episode of a TV show he wrote in 1957, who posted a dead gopher to his publisher for printing his writing next to a cigarette advert... etc.

You think that Gaiman somehow stole a story from this man and somehow Ellison didn't bring it up even once during the 3 years he was friends with Gaiman while he wrote American Gods or the 17 years they were friends after it was published and until his death?

[Anonymous No.21363956]

>>21363922
Ellison did win the one against Cameron, though.

[Anonymous No.21363969]

>>21363922
>You think that Gaiman somehow stole a story from this man and somehow Ellison didn't bring it up even once during the 3 years he was friends with Gaiman while he wrote American Gods or the 17 years they were friends after it was published and until his death?
Yes. Also, we don't know what they said to each other.

[Anonymous No.21363974]

>>21362174
I've always seen him as a Clive Barker type, but rated PG. None of his stuff is particularly adult or edgy. It's creative to a point, but that's all, and he certainly lacks the lyricism of his old pal Terry Pratchett.

Glad he's around, I guess. But my favourites of his are Stardust and Coraline as they're more twists on common tales.

[Anonymous No.21364029]

>>21363974
>Glad he's around
He is hoarding, like a dragon, R A Lafferty's books so that no one else can read/know them. Fucking scumbag fuck

[Anonymous No.21364033]

>>21363969
>Harlan Ellison, who knows a thing or two about dark fantasy novels, calls Gaiman's latest "alarming, charming, even winsome," and its author "serially inventive, surprising, purely remarkable."
Harlan Ellison review of American Gods

[Anonymous No.21364052]

>>21364033
A friendship is worth more than a couple of bucks. He knew it, the Gay man knew it, but both decided to let it pass.

[Anonymous No.21364102]

>>21364052
A selection of Ellison quotes:
>The only value for me is if you put money in my hand.
>I don't take a piss without getting paid for it.
>It ain’t about the ‘principle,’ friend, its about the MONEY! Pay Me! Am I doing this for other writers, for Mom (still dead), and apple pie? Hell no! I’m doing it for the 35-year-long disrespect and the money!
>If you put your hand in my pocket, you'll drag back six inches of bloody stump.

[Anonymous No.21364112]

>>21364102
>Ellison was born to a Jewish family[8] in Cleveland, Ohio, on May 27, 1934, the son of Serita (née Rosenthal) and Louis Laverne Ellison, a dentist and jeweler.[9]
>Gaiman's family is of Polish-Jewish and other Eastern European Jewish origins.[9]

[Anonymous No.21364126]

>>21364112
>>21364102
>Gayman can count the change jingling in your pocket

[Anonymous No.21364137]

He was giga cuck for more than a decade.

[Anonymous No.21364186]

>>21364029
Oh? Please explain this!

[Anonymous No.21364195]

>>21364137
>Daily Mail
There has never been a more successful business of fiction.

[Anonymous No.21364210]

>>21364195
kek what kind of cope is this?

[Anonymous No.21364225]

>>21363793
>>21363922
>>21364033
>>21364102
>Comedy that you think you've uncovered some huge act of plagiarism when Gaiman specifically credits Deathbird Stories
lol nobody thinks they've discovered a literal crime. you've been thrown into this autism frenzy compiling quotes but you're pursuing a total strawman. it doesn't matter at all that gaiman wasn't sued. op's question was what made the guy successful, and this is the answer: what makes him successful is rewriting other people's material into something more marketable. the fact that he's open about his sources doesn't make rewriting other people's shit any less of his mo, it just means he's good at pr on top of it. he can afford to be honest, it's not like all the chicks that read his stuff are going to drop it in favor of some old story collection by a dead manlet. gaiman's the celebrity and he knows he'll be the one making real money.

your autism might be making this hard for you to figure out, but when people call him a fraud they don't mean he should be literally arrested for a crime, they just mean that he cultivates an image of this imaginative genius that's totally unearned and that his fandom only buys because they're very poorly read.

(the autism is making you misunderstand ellison as well. all that shit about getting paid is about his professional relationship with publishers, big companies etc. it doesn't mean he'd treat personal friends this way)

[Anonymous No.21364311]

>>21364225
kek you didn't have to kill him, bro.

[Anonymous No.21364382]

>>21364210
Hey I believe you, I would just never reference the Daily Mail. Wikipedia has banned it as a reference source. Wikipedia. Which was perfectly ok with an american translating its pages into Scotts Gaelic without realizing he was writing english with a phonetic scottish accent.

[Anonymous No.21364400]

>>21364382
wikipedia won't let me dead name Ellen Page.

[Anonymous No.21364424]

>>21364400

[Anonymous No.21364435]

>>21364225
Three examples of Gaiman "stealing" stories:
>Jungle Book
Original story is already repackaged Indian fables
>Alice in Wonderland
Standard monomyth absurd to even bring this up
>Deathbird Stories
Author it's supposedly stolen from (who just happens to be possibly the stingiest man there's ever been in lit wrt copyright and intellectual property) literally describes the story as "serially inventive".

>the autism is making you misunderstand ellison as well. all that shit about getting paid is about his professional relationship with publishers, big companies etc. it doesn't mean he'd treat personal friends this way
Do you understand that you can just put his name into google and it tells you that you're wrong in about 20 seconds?

>Ellison married five times; each relationship ended within a few years, except the last. His first wife was Charlotte Stein, whom he married in 1956. They divorced in 1960, and he later described the marriage as "four years of hell as sustained as the whine of a generator."
>In 1985, Ellison allegedly publicly assaulted author and critic Charles Platt at the Nebula Awards banquet. Platt did not pursue legal action against Ellison and the two men later signed a "non-aggression pact", promising never to discuss the incident again nor to have any contact with one another. Platt claims that Ellison often publicly boasted about the incident.
>his 2006 lawsuit against Fantagraphics, a vital independent publisher specializing in graphic novels, seems to have been frivolous and motivated by personal malice.
>He insisted on describing my girlfriend at the time as “bugfuck, absolutely bugfuck” because she was just not up to his standards of maturity and edgy thinking. He provoked anyone around him for any reason
>Ellison put the microphone in his mouth, to the crowd's laughter. He then placed his hand on her breast during an embrace. Ellison subsequently complained that Willis refused to acknowledge his apology.

Literally what single thing about Harlan makes you think he's the kind of guy who would let someone rip off his work and not even speak up about it? Harlan is the opposite of that. If I had to name the person least likely to accept a friend ripping off his work I would name Harlan Ellison.

[Anonymous No.21364451]

Caroline is simply Alice in Wonderland but watered down for dumb goth teenage girls. He takes another writer's work and adds his own spin to it. More like a blatant remixer (diluter?) than a proper creative.

[Anonymous No.21364548]

>>21362174
His only good output was in his comic book work. I liked 1602 when I was pretty young (maybe 10 or 11) and Sandmand in my mid teens and I loved them at the time, so I still look back on those memories fondly.
When I gave his novels a read, I read Neverwhere when I was a kid (about 12) and enjoyed it then so I tried to pick up American Gods and it was fucking garbage, so I'd say I'll never read anything from him again besides Mr Punch as Dave McKean's art is fantastic.

He's a YA and children's author mainly but I'd say he's definitely one of the better ones in that world by a wide margin.

[Anonymous No.21365129]

>>21364548
Why do some writers never mature? He's 50-60 and still writes tales for teenage girls. Compared him to Alan Moore who went from comics to adult novels, for example.

[Anonymous No.21365388]

>>21364451
You're going to have to explain how Coraline is Alice. Thought it was more based of fairy tale step mother trope.

[Anonymous No.21365390]

>>21365129
Does he not have teenage daughters?

[Anonymous No.21365400]

wtf

[Anonymous No.21365414]

I was having a back and forth with Gaiman on twitter (about The Sandman). He somehow ended up making everything about himself and how I was suggesting that Jews like him weren't English (when he wasn't even the topic). I could sense an insecure, smarmy, sad person typing furiously on the other end. Suddenly I realize how weak-minded these celebrity authors are. Press them a bit and you might crush them, like cheap glassware. Whatever mystique I had previously perceived from him was gone.

[Anonymous No.21365554]

>>21365400
I know, what won't Republicans complain about next?

Cool 12 year old story though: https://boingboing.net/2010/05/10/neil-gaimans-awesome.html

Aparently he usually speaks for free, the fee is very often 'fuck off' money so private businesses leave him alone to do his work.

>“That’s an awful lot of money for a little library.”
>“It’s not from the library. It’s from the Legacy Fund, a Minnesota tax allocation that allows the library to pay market rates to bring authors to suburban libraries who otherwise wouldn’t be able to bring them in. They have to use the money now as it won’t roll over to next year and expires next month.”
>“Ah.”

tl;dr: Republicans have always been dishonest cunts preying on the stupidity of their voterbase, by confecting outrage.

[Anonymous No.21365559]

>>21365414
Link?

[Anonymous No.21367129]

bump

[Anonymous No.21367214]

>>21364210
wow. Gaiman, how did you fuck up this badly?

[Anonymous No.21367296]

>>21364029
Who daaaa fuck! cares about Lafferty now

[Anonymous No.21367302]

>>21367296
Some people. SFFG connoisseurs.

[Anonymous No.21367306]

>>21365129
Moore is still embarrassing though.

[Anonymous No.21367356]

>>21365390
How would I know? I only know he has a boy with that leper singer.

[Anonymous No.21367363]

>>21367306
In what way?

[Anonymous No.21367797]

>>21367296
me. His stuff is great

[Anonymous No.21367809]

>>21362174
I had the same question, I read 2 or 3 of his books and gave up after that. Never read Sandman like some of the earlier comments suggest.

[Anonymous No.21368556]

>>21362174
i like him more than King. I unironically believe gayman is one the best fairy tale writer of our times.

[Anonymous No.21369759]

>>21362174
If he hadn't written Sandman first, his books wouldn't be nearly as popular as they currently are.

[Anonymous No.21370990]

>>21363149
Ah yes, with this insight you've changed my perspective on one of my favorite writers - Thomas Bernhard.
Now I see how his books are basically a collage of themes from Jungle Book, stories from Bible, Gilgamesh (the repetition! "At twenty leagues they broke bread, I thought while ordering beer, at thirty leagues they pitched camp, I thought while ordering beer") and various Native American myths...

[Anonymous No.21371010]

>>21367809
sandman is very good although trannies show up 3/4 of the way through the books