The person on the phone—it was Larry Marder—said, “Well, these are weird times. A lot of comics pros are looking at the world outside comics and wondering if that’s where they’ll be making their living in a year or so. You could at least tell them what’s waiting for them out there.”

And I thought, Well, he’s got a point.

And, after I put down the phone, I thought, Well, it’s also the prerogative of the elderly and the retired to share their knowledge, to drive from the backseat, and to offer unsolicited advice. “And,” as a poet put it, “being good for nothing else, be wise.” And there are certainly a number of things I learned in the decade I was actively working in comics.

So that’s what we’re going to talk about. Other media, and comics.

Many of you have done comics for longer than I have, and have experiences or knowledge that contradict mine. Many of you will have toiled in the vineyards beyond comics and may have had diametrically opposite experiences to mine.

So these thoughts are being offered as one set of opinions.

I began doing comics, continued doing comics, and finished doing comics for the wrong reason. It’s a foolish reason, and a strange one.

I didn’t do comics to have a career, nor to make money, nor to support my family. I certainly didn’t do comics for awards or for notoriety.

I began doing comics because it fulfilled some kind of childhood dream and because it was truly the most exciting and delightful thing I could imagine anyone doing. I continued doing comics because it was fun, and because I discovered I loved the medium, and because I felt like I was getting to do things that were completely new, that, good or bad, no one had done before. And I stopped doing comics because I wanted it to continue being fun, I wanted to continue to love and care for comics, and I wanted to leave while I was still in love.

When I began writing Sandman, it would take me a couple of weeks to write a script, leaving me with two weeks each month to do other things. As time went by I got slower and slower, until a script was taking me about six weeks a month to write. Which didn’t leave much time for other things.

So there were a number of projects I wanted to do that I simply didn’t get the chance to. Which meant that once Sandman was done I could throw myself into them headfirst.

My experiences with the world outside comics so far since finishing Sandman—I’ve written a bestselling novel and a children’s book, written and cocreated a not-wholly-satisfactory six-part BBC TV series, and had lunch with an enormous number of people from Hollywood. I wrote the British Radio 3 adaptation of Signal to Noise, currently nominated for a Sony Award as best radio drama. I’m currently working on a bunch of stuff, including a couple of movies.