Most important, in comics there’s one of you, or at most two or three people, with one vision. As a writer I think I’d been spoiled by the “because I say so” factor. The point I realized that wasn’t there in the TV show was the point I looked at the costume sketches and realized that they bore no relation to what was called for in the script.

I think one reason one becomes a writer may well be to have a certain amount of control over a vision, and unless you are working with a director whose vision parallels yours, then the odds are probably against you.

And bear in mind that the TV series is from a show that everyone was at least on the same page about. The Sandman film, which I am happily not involved with, has gone through eight script drafts, three writers, and a director so far. And I heard the other day that they’re about to hire a new writer with instructions to make it a romance.

After Neverwhere was done, I told my agent to pull out of another TV series I was creating for the UK, because I didn’t want to do it unless I had more control than you get as a writer: in fantasy, the tone of voice, the look and feel, the way something is shot and edited, is vital, and I wanted to be able to be in charge of that.

I’ve agreed to work on the Death movie with the carrot being dangled in front of me that I could direct it. And we’ll see if that happens, and if I’m a good director or not when the time comes.

So that’s my wisdom on movies.

Books are a bit more straightforward.

A few years ago, when I still hung out on bulletin boards, I was on CompuServe’s comics forum, and I read a message by a writer of comics announcing petulantly that he was going to go and write real prose books because he wanted “an audience.”

I told him his audience writing comics was much larger than he would have, barring some exceptional circumstances, for a first novel in prose. He took this as an attack on his as-yet-unproven abilities as a writer of prose, which it wasn’t meant to be. It was simply a flat statement that in those days—and even in these dark days—any fairly healthy comic sells in numbers that most prose authors would be very happy to get.

For me, though, comics are much more interesting than prose, at least as a creator. One has greater control of how the information is received in comics than you do in prose—whether it’s keeping control of the reader’s eye to stop them skipping ahead, or simply making sure that they see the same character in their heads that you do in yours.

And comics have the joy that you never see in prose: the joy of being able to enjoy your own stuff. I can’t enjoy a prose story I wrote, but I can enjoy what Dave McKean or Charles Vess or Jon Muth or P. Craig Russell does to one of my stories.