Neil Gaiman Reveals His Contributions to Alan Moore’s Watchmen Script

Though best known to many comic readers for his landmark series The Sandman, Neil Gaiman also had a minor hand in helping Alan Moore with his own seminal comic series, Watchmen. Gaiman and Moore have been long friends, with the former crediting the later in helping him learn how to even write comics, so some offhand back-and-forths between the two have no doubt occurred. Speaking in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Gaiman not only talked about his friendship with the legendary comic scribe but also confirmed that he did act as an unofficial research assistant for Moore while he was putting his classic series together.

“That was my entire contribution to Watchmen, although one I was incredibly proud of having done,” Gaiman told the outlet. “Initially he phoned me up and said, ‘You are an educated man. There’s a quote, ‘Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?’ I can’t remember where it’s from, but I want to quote this.’ And I went and checked and I said, \OK, it’s from the Book of Job. Then after that, he’d phone me up saying, \I need a quote for…’ I think I found him the quotes for [issue seven]: ‘brother to dragons, companion to owls.’ And I got him some material on owls that he then used in the back. It was fun, just being Alan’s researcher. I was owl researcher and finder of things. And then I found him the Halloween poem (Eleanor Farjeon’s “Hallowe’en,” quoted in issue eight). It was fun. And then my name is in the front of Watchmen, which is lovely.”

In a counter to Moore’s relationship with DC Comics, Gaiman has maintained a cordial relationship with the publisher and also holds a measure of control over Sandman, unlike Moore and Watchmen. Gaiman went on to reveal in the same interview that part of that came after a contract renegotiation with the publisher. After writing Sandman for a year, Gaiman went back and asked for a better deal, and in what amounted to probably the last time it happened, DC agreed, giving him slightly more measure of control of his series than many other writers would have.

When asked if that deal was why there aren’t different silly spinoffs like Sandman Babies or After Sandman, Gaiman noted: “That’s more respect. That wasn’t written into anything. And it’s one of those things where I do not take it for granted. It is absolutely possible in this weird corporate world that tomorrow Warner Discovery would sell DC to some other organization and the other organization would go, “Well, Sandman’s huge. You did that Netflix series. And we’ve only got this stuff. We want five monthly Sandman comics out there just like we did with Watchmen,” or whatever. And I could see that happening, but right now nobody’s planning to do it. I like living in a world in which nobody plans to do it, because it’s one in which I continue working with DC.”

The Sandman‘s first season is now streaming on Netflix, Gaiman teased to Rolling Stone that the series is “certainly on track” for a renewal.