P. Craig Russell is known throughout the comic-book world as an artist’s artist. His lush, detailed, clean-line artwork—ranging from adaptations of Wagner’s opera and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales to fantasy comics like Conan and Elric—has inspired everyone from creators like Mike Mignola to today’s hottest indie cartoonists. He’s also done a substantial amount of work with Neil Gaiman, including Sandman 50 (“Ramadan”) and the Endless Nights collection's Eisner Award-winning short “Death in Venice”. Lately, he’s tackled adaptations of Gaiman’s prose work, and the results, books like Murder Mysteries and Coraline, have been justly praised. We caught up with Russell at this weekend’s Mid-Ohio Con (in Columbus, Ohio, not far from the artist’s home town) and asked him about his latest project—a comics adaptation of Gaiman’s eerie award-winning Japanese folk tale, The Dream Hunters…

Can you comment on how Dream Hunters came about for you?

Well the project came about for me – Dream Hunters – about ten years ago, when Neil Gaiman sent me his first rough draft.  I read that and knew immediately that I wanted to do it.  But I had a five-year project I was doing at the time and so it had to wait until that was over.  Once I did that, it was like Dream Hunters and “Death In Venice” and Coraline and all these other projects kept coming in between, and so last summer I called him and I said “When are we gonna do Dream Hunters?”  So it just happened to coincide with Sandman’s 25th anniversary, they were looking for a Sandman project.  I was the one who called them and said “Are we gonna do this?”  And it turned out that was exactly what they were looking for.  So I finally got the chance to do it.

You mentioned seeing a script ten years ago.  Was that after Yoshitaka Amano first illustrated Neil’s Dream Hunters novella?

No, this was before.  It was his first rough draft, which was what I had all these years.  That’s what I worked from, for my adaptation, and there were actually a couple differences between that first rough draft and [the illustrated novella], simple things – like a dream in which the grandfather remembers his dead grandfather died choking on a peach. My colorist Lovern Kindzierski was reading that, and he said “No, he chokes on a rice cake.”  I looked at my book and I said, “No, it’s a peach.”  But he had the published book and it was a rice cake.  And I said “well it’s gonna stay a peach!” [Laughs.]

So your version seems like it was something that was developed in your head separately but at the same time as the other version…

Well I had read the other version, but I don’t think there’s any substantial differences.  Neil has seen my adaptation and my script and layouts and all of that.  Everything seemed to pass mostly with him.  But it’s just a weird little anomaly.

Your graphic-novel adaptation of Neil’s Coraline came out recently -- how did you decide to go with the approach you took on that book's art?

Oh well I’d just been dancing back and forth on what I like to work with, whether in pencil or ink.  I’ve moved away from quill pen points to micron pens because I’m convinced they’ve changed the chemical makeup of ink, and it doesn’t flow from a pen point anymore like it used to.  I’ve also worked with pencil drawings, and now with scanning you can do anything in pencil and reproduce beautifully.  I’m still drawing in two stages, sort of penciling and “inking.”  I’m penciling in blue pencil and inking in pencil, and so it’s not like a sketchy, spontaneously drawn line.  It’s the same sort of finished line you use in ink.  It’s got kind of a nice, soft quality to it that I like.  So I like doing that occasionally.

Can you talk about any of the other stuff you’re currently working on?

There are two more Oscar Wilde volumes to come, and I wanna at least get one of those done.  There’s another new series – whose name escapes me right now, and there’s another couple of projects I’ve been kicking around.  I don’t know if they’ll happen yet, so I don’t want to mention anything.  I don’t have any large projects coming up.  I have like several thirty page stories, that kind of thing.