To all the new fans who didn’t read the book or listened to the audio drama: Crowley is NOT cool, I repeat, the demon Crowley is absolutely not cool. And Aziraphale is an asshole.
Crowley is chronically uncool… but does dress like he’s cool. He’s got the outer carapace of a cool person around the soft inner core of a duck-sinking penny-gluing plant-lover.
Aziraphale is an asshole – but disguises it with layers of tweed, fluff, and book-adoration.
Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.
I wrote the first 5,000 words of William the Antichrist. It had a demon named Crawleigh. He drove a Citroen 2CV, and was ineffectual. Proper demons like Hastur and Ligur loathed him. It had a baby swap. I sent it to a few friends for feedback. Then my graphic novel Sandman happened, and it was almost a year later that the phone rang.
“It’s Terry,” said Terry. “‘Ere. That thing you sent me. Are you doing anything with it?“
“Not really.”
“Well, I think I know what happens next. Do you want to sell it to me? Or write it together?”
“Write it together,” I said, because I was not stupid, and because that was the nearest I was ever going to get to Michaelangelo phoning to ask if I wanted to paint a ceiling with him.
