There are many cool things about Neil Gaiman’s bookshelves, but for me the only thing truly revelatory is that they aren’t really built-ins. If you zoom in, you can see that they are held up with many heavy-duty shelf standards. I had no idea shelf standards could achieve awesomeness if only you used enough of them, and paired them with nice-looking shelves (and tons and tons of books).

I didn’t realize Neil Gaiman had been picked by DC Comics to handle Batman’s final appearance in the Detective Comics monthly. I’ll have to check those out.

Neil Gaimen takes note of a couple reviews for his new one, The Graveyard Book:

The New York Times made it an Editor’s Choice, but not The Boston Globe, in the first example of Thumper’s “if you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything” motto book-reviewing I can remember. The entire review is:

“I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I’ll pass on without further comment.”

…which just left me wondering how something can be metaphorically ghastly. (“It was ghastly — and I mean that metaphorically!”) and concluding that Liz Rosenberg is probably trying to use metaphorically as the opposite of literally, whereas what she actually meant was that it was ghastly in several senses of the word (ie. filled with dead things and ghosts and she didn’t like it one little bit). Ah well. I hope she likes the next thing, whatever that is.

3D printers, “machines that use inkjet print-heads to spray layer after layer of a UV curable liquid that hardens into a solid”, were used for some of the model making in Coraline. So Coraline ended up having 200,000 facial expressions at her disposal, while Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas only had around 800. Here’s a featurette on the subject on YouTube (also embedded in the article).

I saw Coraline with Amelia yesterday, and it was excellent. We agreed, not scary per se, but it had creepiness to burn. Anyway, via neilhimself, the “making of” featurettes that will be on the DVD have been released on YouTube, including a bit on the remarkable microknitting.

P.S. I wonder if Pixar can hold off on releasing Up until 2010 so they can both win best animated feature?

Off to see Coraline with Amelia this afternoon! In celebration, a little GIMP work:

She finds it creepy. Mission accomplished. :-)

I saw on Neil Gaiman’s weblog that the Coraline Web Trailer is the first trailer he has really liked. I can see why.

Neil Gaiman strikes just the right tone in his promotional monologue for Coraline on buttons. Our family is split on this one. Two of us can’t wait, and the other two are totally creeped out. (via twitch)

Neil Gaiman’s Coraline gets the Henry Selick treatment. Could be a very, very nice pairing of author and director.