Locke & Key/Sandman: Hell & Gone #1

[cyberghostface]

"One of the great pleasures of my professional life is that Neil has been a friend and something of a mentor to me. He kind of took me under his wing after my first novel came out. Once upon a time he workshopped my pitches for the Doctor Who TV show. He's just very generous with his time and with his imagination. So it's been this tremendous professional pleasure for him to open the door to us and let us play in his sandbox for awhile. It's our goal to make the most of it and do something that's satisfying for readers that avoids the pitfalls of crossovers, like fan service as opposed to telling a story that has emotional weight and stakes." -- Joe Hill

Comments

[leahandillyana]

That's a GREAT cover!

[donnblake]

Even with Gaiman's help, those Doctor Who pitches were not well received...

HILL: “And so I, you know, with trepidation and my heart in my mouth, I sent in my pitches, and a couple weeks passed, and I got…the email I got back said, ‘We have never let an American write Doctor Who, and if we were going to, we wouldn’t start with you.”

[lego_joker]

They probably still remember what Warner Bros. did to Sherlock Holmes... ^^;

[mrstatham]

Arguably nothing worse than what the BBC did to him, in the end...

[deh_tommy]

I rather liked both. What does that say about me?

[mrstatham]

Not a lot; everyone's got different tastes.

I just didn't like the BBC take; too stylised, too much of Sherlock being an insufferably smug nob solving crimes by plot convenience rather than actual detective skill, and too much that was cliche and nonsensical by the end; he has a twin sister he'd blocked out of his memory! Here's Moriarty seemingly back from the dead... to do nothing. It just strikes me that a show isn't very good if a large portion of its fanbase has to latch on desperately to a convoluted theory that there's a secret episode addressing all the issues they have because the prior ones were that bad.

I think a large part of it is Moffat, however; I didn't like his Doctor Who for much the same reasons as I didn't like Sherlock. And as much as it got branded a ripoff, I enjoyed Elementary a lot more.

[deh_tommy]

You... you complete and utter madmen. Joe friggin’ Hill pitches a story for your borderline-horror anthology at Neil bloody Gaiman’s recommendation, and you said NO?

[cyberghostface]

Yeah it’s baffling. Unless this was before he became famous? Granted he’s not as nearly as popular as his dad but he’s big enough especially within genre circles that him writing an episode could only help.

[deh_tommy]

Who’s his dad?

I’m guessing this was in the Moffat years? Even if Hill wasn’t famous, the dude still had an impressive enough resumé, what with Horns and Locke & Key and whatnot. Those awards surely didn’t come from nowhere.

[donnblake]

Joe Hill's father is Stephen King.

[deh_tommy]

I don’t know why, but I always get Locke & Key mixed up with Hack/Slash.

[ladymidath]

I need to read this.