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IT kids' best nightmare PHILIP PULLMAN
AGE 55 WHY HIM? Plucky teenage heroes, animal sidekicks, warrior polar bears--yep, those are the ingredients from which children's books are made these days. But what Pullman also manages to pull off with His Dark Materials--a trilogy of novels inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost--is a screed against the tyranny of religious institutions. The third installment, 2000's The Amber Spyglass, recently won England's Whitbread award--a first for a children's book (take that, Harry Potter). And New Line is turning Pullman's opus into its next franchise a la The Lord of the Rings. CAREER HIGH The day of his greatest brainstorm: In determining the shape-shifting nature of the animal sidekicks (called daemons), he was finally able to suss out the trilogy's plot and deeper meanings. "It was like I had been given a golden key that unlocked all the doors in the palace." UNLIKELY INFLUENCE The Australian soap opera Neighbours. "I watch it every day during lunch. You can learn a lot from stuff that isn't very good." DREAM COLLABORATORS "I would love to write a comic book," says Pullman, who wishes Art Spiegelman or Scott McCloud would handle the art chores. NEXT A fairy-tale novel, The Scarecrow and His Servant; and a follow-up to His Dark Materials, tentatively titled The Book of Dust.
IT comic-book writer PETER MILLIGAN
AGE 38 WHY HIM? When it comes to American comics, Englishman Milligan works both sides of the street: For Marvel Comics, he does X-Force, a cogent, savage deconstruction on celebrity culture in the guise of an X-Men spin-off; through DC Comics he recently released Human Target, a cold-blooded thriller that's like an Elmore Leonard novel with pictures. CAREER LOW "Being a faithful follower of the Brendan Behan school of daytime atheism, it follows that my ongoing worst career moments happen between the hours of three and four in the morning, when I'm gripped by the fear that everything I've written and am likely to write is crap. And that anyone who likes what I write is insane." CAREER HIGH "Being told I was a genius by someone I liked, and I didn't believe it for a second." DREAM COLLABORATORS "I'd love to have worked with [painter] Wassily Kandinsky.... What would that mad Russian have done with superpowers, spandex, and negative space?" INFLUENCES "Jesus and James Joyce." CAREER HE'D MOST LIKE TO HAVE "My own, with a few additions." HERO "Trust me, you're better off with a glass of water and some aspirins." CLOSEST BRUSH WITH CAREER IMMOLATION "E-mails. There should be a function that prevents e-mails that contain certain words being sent after a certain time of night, when the sender is drunk." WORST ADVICE "'Stay away from girls. They're smelly.' That was from Carlton. We were both 7 years old at the time."
IT fantasy author JASPER FFORDE
AGE 40 WHY HIM? If the late Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) wrote crime fiction, it might read a lot like The Eyre Affair, the whimsically brainy debut from Fforde that's made him an overnight smash in England and a burgeoning cult fave Stateside. His heroine, Thursday Next (punny names and witty wordplay are Fforde's forte), investigates crimes in a historically screwy, sci-fi England, where the Crimean War never ended, time travel is ho-hum, and folks can literally get caught up in a novel; in Affair, Thursday chases the bad guy into Jane Eyre. "I liked the idea that books could be like film sets--you could blunder around and change things," says the U.K. native, who used to make a living in the movies (crew credits: The Saint and Entrapment). INFLUENCES Adams, Lewis Carroll, Kurt Vonnegut. INSPIRATIONS Vivaldi and the Bee Gees. WORST ADVICE "If you want to get published, look at the best-seller list and write what sells." NEXT Lost in a Good Book, the second in the Thursday series (due January), in which our heroine finds herself working within--how fitting--Great Expectations.
