That’s right, it’s the rad as hell/heaven photo on the back of the first edition (and possibly some of the later ones?) of Good Omens. I don’t know about you, but I’ve loved it since the first time I came across it – and once I found out that it was taken in London, well… the spot was immediately on my to-find list.
Fast forward some time later, and cayra, maltedmilkchocolate, ahostofangels and myself decided to go on a Good Omens-themed walkabout. First stop, one Kensal Green Cemetery. It took a bit of wandering around, but sure enough, we eventually tracked it down!
The entrance is bricked up now, but otherwise, it still looks much like it did some 25-odd years ago (if anything, the walls are a bit cleaner). It all was slightly surreal, and also intensely satisfying. An afternoon well spent in my books 🙂
(Photo taken by cayra, featuring maltedmilkchocolate as my favourite Anathema cosplay to date, and yours truly as Crowley. We later moved on to St James’ Park, where we were mobbed by a flock of hungry pigeons. We survived unscathed, albeit with slightly diminished snack supplies.)
-An angel who is so goddamn lazy that he makes a deal with the demon he’s supposed to be thwarting so that neither of them have to do any work and he has more time to spend running his bookshop, and who wants to stop the Apocalypse because he loves sushi
-A demon who pretends to be suave and cool but who really just geeks out over his car and loves James Bond and listens to nothing but Queen and thinks gluing coins to the sidewalk is proper demonic activity
-This angel and demon are probably not gay for each other but I mean they’re holding hands on the cover art.
-This angel and demon try to stop the apocalypse but they fuck up so badly that they do literally nothing useful the whole book and somehow it’s still all about them.
-Technically it was the Satanic Nuns who fucked up, but we don’t really talk about that.
-Death (the horseperson) playing a trivia videogame in a diner.
-The four extra horsepersons that were never mentioned in Revelation.
-The antichrist who almost destroys the world because he wants to save the whales
-The only piece of fiction I have ever seen besides Supernatural that somehow manages to include both the Judeo-Christian apocalypse and space aliens.
-The context of the phrase “gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrous oxide.”
there are no lies in this post
Posted on
Neil Gaiman: “We’re working on seeing how many smart-alec answers we can come up with when people ask us how we collaborated.”
Terry Pratchett: “I wrote all the words, and Neil assembled them into certain meaningful patterns… What it wasn’t was a case of one guy getting 2/3 of the money and the other guy doing ¾ of the work.”
NG: “It wasn’t, somebody writes a three-page synopsis, and then somebody else writes a whole novel and gets their name small on the bottom.”
TP: “That isn’t how we did it, mainly because our egos were fighting one another the whole time, and we were trying to grab the best bits from one another.”
NG: “We both have egos the size of planetary cores.”
TP: “Probably the most significant change which you must have noticed [between the British and American editions] is the names get the other way ‘round. They’re the wrong way ‘round on the American edition [where Gaiman is listed first] —”
NG: “They’re the wrong way ‘round on the English edition.”
TP: “Both of us are prepared to admit the other guy could tackle our subject. Neil could write a ‘Discworld’ book, I could do a ‘Sandman’ comic. He wouldn’t do a good ‘Discworld’ book and I wouldn’t do a good ‘Sandman’ comic, but —”
NG: “— we’re the only people we know who could even attempt it.”
TP: “I have to say there’s a rider there. I don’t think either of us has that particular bit of magic, if that’s what it is, that the other guy puts into the work, but in terms of understanding the mechanisms of how you do it, I think we do.”
NG: “There’s a level on which we seem to share a communal undermind, in terms of what we’ve read, what we bring to it.”
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.
