Copyright Chicago Tribune Co. For the first time, a comic book has won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction, a prestigious, judged award that more often goes to short stories or novellas. The humor is dark, and there is occasional violence and references to black magic. The award statuette is a caricature of the head of H.P. Lovecraft, the horror-fantasy author who died in 1937. The significance of the award, Gaiman says, is for comics as a medium.
Pictures are OK, they hang in art galleries.
But as soon as you put words and pictures together, people think it's for illiterates. There's a cultural prejudice against comics. And the bias continues, he says. Gaiman's victory caused such a furor among wordsmiths that the judging rules were recently rewritten to exclude a comic book from winning in a literature category again. When he was approached to do a monthly series, he kept coming back to the dream idea.