This is a story in which much silliness ensues.īut it is incredibly slight. Then there are the fears of what might happen if Dad's carton of milk from one time were to touch Dad's carton of milk from another (they are, of course, really one and the same carton). And, coming from around 150m years in our past, he has every right to name things his way, because he got there first. Professor Steg is the kind of being who calls a spade a spade or, to be more specific, calls a floaty-ball-person-carrier a Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier (though we might think of it as a hot air balloon). When asked why he took so long, he tells them a fantastical tale involving a spaceship of green globby aliens (who believe that plastic flamingos are the highest art form on Earth Splod (the god of people with short funny names) brightly coloured ponies vampires (or wumpires as they call themselves, with their strong accents) dinosaur galactic police on space bikes and – most important by far – Professor Steg, the time-travelling stegosaurus.
So what's the story? Simple: Dad goes out to get some milk for his kids, taking ages but eventually returning with a carton.
In Fortunately, the Milk, Riddell's contribution is greater still. When Gaiman was nominated for the Carnegie for The Graveyard Book, its illustrations, also by Riddell, were nominated for the Kate Greenaway medal, the first time such a double nomination had occurred. Though heralded as a new Gaiman book, this is also very much a Chris Riddell production. It tells how a dad is swapped from one child to the next, blissfully unaware of his fate because he is too busy reading the paper.Īnd now a dad is back, centre stage, in Fortunately, the Milk. Gaiman is not only a "ridiculously bestselling author", as it says on the cover of Fortunately, the Milk, but he also writes wildly inventive and exciting children's fiction.īefore all of these, in 1997, came The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, which, like The Wolves in the Walls, was illustrated by Dave McKean. Coraline (2002), an eerie tale in which a parallel mother seems more loving than the protagonist's actual parent but has sewn-on button eyes, is an original and exciting piece of storytelling The Wolves in the Walls (2003) is as nightmarish as the title suggests The Graveyard Book (2008), in which an orphaned boy is adopted by the graveyard's inhabitants, won both the Carnegie medal in the UK and the Newbery medal in the US. Probably best known for his adult novels, comics and films, Gaiman isn't one of those writers who occasionally "dabbles" in children's fiction. A fellow author recently commented that when Gaiman talks, people clap. he has more than 1.8 million followers on Twitter, with a cult following both online and in the flesh.
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