There was no sense that fantasy was in any way less than respectable. In this country you had someone like James Branch Cabell, who was a very distinguished figure.

Hope Mirrlees, for example, was a friend of Virginia Woolf and T. “People who wrote fantasy were just novelists. “In the first half of the century there was no genre distinction,” he said. Gaiman composed it in longhand, using a fountain pen and a leather-covered notebook, he said in New York recently, and the result was that he eliminated “a lot of computery bloat.” His aim was to evoke the manner of early-20th-century writers like Lord Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees, who wrote fantasy stories of a sort that was sometimes called “faerie.” Set in two parallel worlds, a quaint Victorian village named Wall and the fantastical kingdom of Stormhold, and with a plot that involves both a witch and a posse of murderous princes chasing after a fallen meteorite that is really a young woman, “Stardust” is also written in a consciously old-fashioned manner. ”Stardust (Being a Romance Within the Realm of Faerie)” was subsequently reissued as a hardback and trade paperback, and in 1999 was published in a text-only version, without the Vess illustrations. Gaiman’s famous “Sandman.” It’s a prose novel with Arthur Rackham-like illustrations by Charles Vess, and came out in a comics format only because traditional book publishers didn’t want to spring for so much color printing. To begin with, though it was originally published in four installments by DC Comics in 1997, “Stardust” was never a comic book series with panels and dialogue, like, say, Mr. NEIL GAIMAN’S novel “Stardust,” the source for the new movie of the same name that opens Friday, is a bit of an anomaly among the works that have made him a legend in the comics world.

Neil gaiman and charles vess stardust