Neil Gaiman's Troll Bridge

Long, long ago, back in the early 1990s, I edited a magazine called Comic World. One of the features we ran each year was the Comic World readers' awards. In 1994, the winner for Best Writer was Neil Gaiman and Best Inker was Mark Buckingham. Death: The High Cost of Living had appeared the previous year and it swept our awards.

There was no prize as such, but we tried to interview the winners: Neil, Mark and Chris Bachalo, who pencilled the Death mini-series, were interviewed in issue 27, but in an effort to make it a little bit special I asked Neil whether it would be possible to reprint one of his stories. In issue 30, we reprinted "Troll Bridge" with two illustrations provided by Mark.

While I was packing I stumbled across the two illustrations and thought they deserved an airing. I suspect this will be the first time many of you have seen them... we moved house 15 years ago, about a month after Comic World folded, and this is the first time I've seen them in all that time! And they still look fabulous.

(* artwork © Mark Buckingham)