Simply put Neil Gaiman is a genius whether the medium is books, film or comics. Coraline, Stardust, American Gods, Beowolf, Sandman etc.
Funny story with Gaiman. He collaborated with Todd McFarlane, whose work I love but the guy is admittedly kind of a dick, on Spawn and created several key Spawn characters. Angela, Cogliostro and a couple others.
Thing is the very next issue with Cerebrus creator Dave Sim was all about how comic creators have sold their souls throughout comic history and how the major publishers (Marvel and DC) are explicitly alluded to as basically raping the creators for their ideas.
Anyhoo, McFarlane ended up using the characters at length and they became key characters in the Spawn universe. When it came time for McFarlane to pay royalties to Gaiman for his contributions Todd basically just refused. Pretty much spitting in the face of everything he stood for previously regarding creator owned characters and not letting the big guy push around the lowly creators.
Luckily Todd lost his case to Gaiman and had to pay off Gaiman for characters that Gaiman created and essentially owned. Something Todd had previously fully endorsed.
Maybe Todd needed to cash because he needed some cash money to pay for all his ridiculous
baseball purchases.
That and McFarlane toys used to be THE standard in toys, including his McFarlane NHL figures. Anyone who has followed the downfall of the quality of those figures knows what I'm talking about. Now it is nothing but a bunch of lame repaints of a small number of molds.
Random six degrees of separation type deal: NIN frontman Trent Reznor was once linked to Tori Amos who is good friends with Neil Gaiman!