Speaking of what kids are reading: You created Timothy Hunter and The Books Of Magic. How do you feel about J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, which is incredibly similar yet wonderfully different?
People have been trying to get me... there was a very peculiar time about eighteen months ago, I did an interview with The Scotsman. The Scotsman newspaper tracked me down, and we had a very awkward interview, during which they were trying to get me to say, "Oh, yeah, J. K. Rowling has ripped off Harry Potter," and the most they could get out of me was, "Well, it makes things a little awkward for a Books Of Magic movie."
I was astonished that about six months later, to be sent a copy of... English newspapers started, for a period of about three days--as they all ripped each other off--did an article about this madwoman who's been accusing J. K. Rowling of stealing Muggles and things like that, and then finished off with "...and Neil Gaiman has accused her of ripping off Harry Potter of Tim Hunter."
At that point, I wrote a little thing, sent it out to a few places, that just basically said, "This is absolute bollocks." And it is absolute bollocks! I mean, the thing about genre fiction--it's like a great big bubbling stewpot: ingredients go in, and stew comes out. And as you go, you add stuff to the stew. If you're a good writer, you keep popping stuff into the stew while you're going.
I was certainly not the first writer to create a bespectacled kid who had the potential to be the world's greatest magician. To create a kid with magical power--and more important, magical potential--and to use owls and so on, it's all stuff that's fairly obvious going on what went before. J. K. Rowling was not the first person to send a kid to wizard school. From Jaime Olan and Diane Duane in recent years--Diana Wynne Jones is marvelous! (Witch Week and Charmed Life.)--going back to T. H. White and E. Nesbitt.
When I was eighteen, I started trying to write my first book, and I got nine pages into it, and they're still mucking around. And because I didn't really have any experience of anything other than school, I was writing a story about a kid who was sent to wizard school, and Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar (who wound up in Neverwhere) were going to be the baddies. I was cleaning up and doing some tidying in the basement, and I came across these pages, and I thought, "Now if anybody ever found these, they'd be going, 'Cool! Look at this Harry Potter rip-off!'" Which is fine, except it was a Harry Potter rip-off I was writing in 1978. And, of course, as an eighteen year old, I never finished it, and didn't actually think that I really wanted to write a school story, so I left it behind. When I went back to try another school story, it was a few years later, and it was a much, much more sick and peculiar and twisted thing called The End Of The Third Form At St. Andrew's Eve, which was much more about how I hated school than trying to romanticize it. That was in a periodical that never appeared, and its still probably knocking around in a file somewhere, and I've never gone back to it.
Which is a very long and blabbery way of saying that ideas are public domain.
What I do wish, with the Harry Potter stuff, is that we could get DC Comics to re-issue Books Of Magic with a much more Harry Potter-like cover to appeal to the kind of people who like Harry Potter. Every other comic company in the world's going, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool to have our own Harry Potter?" And with DC, I've been, "Well, actually, you've had your own Harry Potter now since 1990! Why don't you do something with that? Why don't you get him into bookstores?"
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Originally Posted by OchrisO
