The evening started out with a gut-busting introduction from Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Hader, who was on hand to introduce Neil Gaiman. He slunk over the podium and proceeded to tell a number of hilarious Gaiman-related anecdotes in his trademark baritone gravel. He started by relaying how he came to believe that he landed both his job on SNL and his role in Superbad due to his love of Mr. Gaiman; then he went into some of his ‘failed’ sketch pitches on SNL, including Vincent Price’s Coraline and Al Pacino as Dream — for which he busted-out his amazing impressions and had the audience rolling. He’s obviously a huge Neil Gaiman fan and there was no doubting his sincerity as he brought him out on stage.

Before Gaiman began the reading he was absolutely delighted to inform us of the serendipitous news concerning Gordon Lee, who’s lawsuit was dropped merely an hour before the event. He went on at length about the details of the case, and the integral role the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund played in keeping Lee from bankruptcy and jail all due to an honest error that found him vilified in the eyes of his community. You can read more on our coverage of that story here.

Gaiman proceeded to read two of his fantasy stories, The Day the Saucers Came, a short and sweet tale which details a day in which every form of unholy Armageddon takes place at exactly the same time, and Orange, a story about tanning cream gone very, very awry. This was followed by Being an Experiment Upon Strictly Scientific Lines By Neil Gaiman Assisted By Unwins LTD, Wine Merchants (Uckfield), which is a story that takes the author from sobriety to drunkenness in an effort to discern the effects of alcohol on a fiction writer’s creativity. All three had previously been read in one form or another and were great fun to hear as Gaiman does wonderful character voices and has a great verbal sense of both comic and dramatic timing.

After reading these three stories, he ‘nitted back’ for a short break to sift through a stack of questions written and submitted by audience members prior to the reading. When he returned he did his best to answer as many of them as he could — a good number of which included concerns regarding his injured nose (he was ‘bonked’ on the honker a few days prior in an incident involving his dog and a training tire); what are some of his favorite graveyards (currently it alternates between Highgate West, Stoke Newington, and the one he grew up across from in his youth, all of which he said were used as inspiration for his latest effort, The Graveyard Book), as well as few personal requests from fans including a picture, and even one asking for him to obtain the telephone number of a girl dressed as Delirium on behalf of a gushing geek in the third row.

Lastly, Gaiman read chapter three of his upcoming The Graveyard Book for the very first time publicly. He introduced this reading by saying that “The Jungle Book is a book about a toddler whose family is killed and wanders into the jungle and is brought up by jungle creatures and protected by jungle creatures. This is a book about a small boy whose family is killed and he wanders into a graveyard and is brought up by dead people.”

Each story in The Graveyard Book takes place about two years apart. With the first story beginning with the boy, whose name is Nobody Owens, at eighteen months old; the second at four years of age; and in tonight’s reading of the third story (titled “The Hounds of God”), we find Nobody at the age of six. This story has Nobody’s new teacher Ms. Lupescu schooling him on all the different types of “people” in the world and who he should be weary of, with a particular emphasis on Ghouls and their Ghoul Gates. Admirably, Gaiman read the story in its entirety which took well over forty minutes, and then concluded the evening with closing solicitations for the CBLDF.

In keeping with the spirit of the evening, here is the CBLDF donation link.

The Graveyard Book is set to be released on September 2, 2008.