I first met Neil Gaiman back in 1989. I had received a grant from the Delphi Institute to study American pop culture with cartoonists from around the world. The group traveled across the USA visiting various companies and museums.

One of our stops was DC Comics. Since I already worked there, it didn’t strike me as a particularly unique experience. So, while the others got a lecture from Archie Goodwin, I wandered off to scare up some gigs and meet people. One of the people I met was the not-yet-famous Neil Gaiman who was hanging out in Karen Berger’s office.

I didn’t know who he was. After leaving the office and getting halfway down the hall, I suddenly realized he was that Neil Gaiman, author of the comic I thought was keen, but the rest of the world had yet to discover. After my double take, I ran back to the office and shouted “You’re that Neil Gaiman! Sandman!”

We did the mutual admiration thing. He told me he enjoyed A Distant Soil, a revelation which made me all tingly. He said would like to work with me sometime, which made me tingle even more.

It was rather comical to watch I am sure, because as I recall, we both burbled a lot.

Sandman was on the ropes, alas. To stave off cancellation, DC decided to try publishing a special edition of issue #8 as a freebie and introduction to retailers.

He gave me one of those promo Sandman #8’s which wasn’t in stores yet. In it he left his name, address and phone. Don’t you wish you had one of those?

Later I began receiving a series of charming postcards – all the way from England – written in Neil’s own dainty hand.

I considered donating these to a charity auction. By golly, they are just too cool. I’ve decided to keep them.

And with Neil’s kind permission, I am posting the first of them here, the one where he asks if I would work on Sandman sometime. A little bit of comics history.

Well, everyone loves the new blog but my host server.

I have received several letters of complaint from him over the last week about the traffic and the strain on his cpu. He is CORRECTION recommending that I get a dedicated server for my website. That would cost $260 a month.

Since we are not getting significantly more traffic than we did in any single month last year, I do not know what the heck the problem is. He is saying the new site simply uses so much more memory that he must dedicate an entire server to it.

He clarifies here because he says I do not understand what he is telling me, which I think I have also made clear, as I don’t know what the problem is.

“If I thought a vps would do the trick for you I would have recommended it. I sell vps servers also. They are much cheaper than a dedicated. They are NOT powerful enough or will be considerably slower than what you are currently enjoying.”

He continues: “I personally believe it is the way the wordpress blog is doing something. I really don’t know. Lots of folks use wordpress on this server. I use it for two of my own personal sites on this server. Heck, I recommended it to you in the first place and got you off that phpbb message board. I’m a fan of wordpress. But something is screwy on your blog that is causing a large cpu spike each time someone visits or clicks on any link on your blog.”

I have no idea why the new site would use so much more memory than the old one did. Is it the ads?

Any suggestions? Am I simply going to have to move to a different hosting service? If so, got any ideas?

So, since we have always had good service from this server, I have had no complaints in the past. We just don’t know what’s going on. I’ve redone ALL my images to be lower res.

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I just spent a couple of hours reloading my images at lower res. Quite a long ways to go, but on the whole, I’d say they look OK.

If this solves the load on the CPU problem, dandy. If not, it looks like I will need to move to another server.

I’ve reloaded all of the February A Distant Soil pages, but now have to do January. I also have to redo all the older posts (ugh.)

The site does seem to be loading faster. If you guys have no complaints about image quality, I am cool with the lower res.

Three hours later…Who am I kidding? they look like crap. I can’t stand me when I try to be Pollyanna. The low res pages look like crap. There, I said it.

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