I’ve always – well, long – had mixed feelings about Neil Gaiman. Nothing to do with recent (as of 2024) allegations.
On one hand, some people get a little too excited when he writes Shakespeare as a character into a superhero comic (comics are literature now!), and when I saw that a character in American Gods, a present-day US convict and secretly a Norse deity, was called Low-Key Lyesmith, I probably said, “Oh, come on!” out loud.
On the other hand, I loved Violent Cases (and only half because of Dave McKean’s beautiful drawings), and the Sandman story A Dream Of A Thousand Cats (and some others, like the one about the imprisoned muse) is inspired.
I had the Cats story in mind when I made The Chicken King And The Prince Of Birds. I was making comics for online magazines and most used 3D renders and postwork, but for this I used digital collage instead. Some of those stories now look pretty rough even where the writing’s sound, but The Chicken King…
Well, here it is.
