Neil Gaiman wants transgender writers working on Netflix’s The Sandman show

Netflix is hard at work on adapting Neil Gaiman’s seminal The Sandman graphic novels for the small screen, and my curiosity is definitely piqued. The Sandman is a bold, beautiful work bursting with imagination, and making it work on TV will be no small feat.

Part of what makes it tricky is how sprawling it is. Nominally, the story follows Dream, one of several eternal beings who personify the human conditions — his siblings are Destiny, Delirium, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Death. But the graphic novel brings in other characters and tells other stories. For example, the fifth collection of issues, “A Game of You,” follows a minor character named Barbie who finds herself at a loss when creatures from her childhood fantasy world start reaching out to her, beseeching her to help them vanquish a mysterious evil threatening “the Land.” I won’t go too far into it, but by the time the story is over, fantasy and reality have bled into one another and a couple people are dead.

One of the dead is Wanda, Barbie’s best friend and a transgender woman. At the end of the story, Wanda’s parents bury her under her deadname, and Barbie changes it.

Trans characters are getting more visibility in popular media today with shows like Pose and Orange is the New Black, but in the early ’90s, when “A Game of You” was being published, it was more rare. “I had a lot of trans friends, and I was putting my friends into my comic,” Gaiman told fellow fantasy author N. K. Jemisin (the Inheritance Trilogy) in an online chat. “The biggest difference now is that I would have [trans people] write it. I wouldn’t be writing that. At the time, I looked around and didn’t see those writers.”

Looking forward, Gaiman is hoping to for trans writers to be in the room when the team eventually breaks this story…let’s say in season 2 or 3, hopefully. “My biggest request to the Sandman showrunner for when we get to the season with ‘Game of You’ in it is that we have trans men and trans women in the writers’ room. Not as consultants, but as writers,” he said. “I’m so fascinated to see what a trans writers’ room, what stories they would tell with those characters.”

That showrunner would be Allan Heinberg, who worked on 2017’s Wonder Woman movie. Gaiman himself will serve as a writer and executive producer alongside David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), so he’ll have some power. Gaiman won’t be as involved in The Sandman as he was in Amazon’s adaptation of Good Omens, but he’ll be more involved than with Starz’s adaptation of American Gods.

Clearly, Gaiman’s work is having a bit of a renaissance lately, which I’m all for. And The Sandman may be his best work, a tightrope walk of a graphic novel that balances the weighty with the whimsical, at once human and relatable while also packed to the ears with metaphor and symbolism. It will take a lot of different perspectives to pull this show off, so I’m glad Gaiman is encouraging that sort of diversity early on.

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h/t CBR