Neil Gaiman remembers starting The Sandman, looks forward to Netflix adaptation

Ahead of Netflix’s new adaptation, Neil Gaiman remembers how his iconic Sandman comic first came to be, reassuring fans that Netflix is on the right track.

Few writers have been popular across fantasy novels, children’s fiction, and comics all at once. Neil Gaiman is one of the few, with classic works in several different mediums. In comics, his biggest achievement has to be The Sandman, widely considered one of the most influential comics of all time.

The Sandman is no longer just a wonderful comic, either. It can now be enjoyed as an audio drama from Audible. And Netflix is adapting it as a TV show, with Gaiman as an executive producer.

The Sandman follows Dream of the Endless (aka Morpheus, aka Sandman; you gain a lot of nicknames when you’re immortal). He and his siblings personify various aspects of human existence: the family also includes Destiny, Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium (formerly Delight). Dream rules over his kingdom and tries to see if he can change his ways after millennia of being stuck in them.

As the Netflix show draws closer, a lot of people have been asking about Sandman in recent weeks. Speaking to Livemint, Gaiman answered a lot of their questions, including how Sandman first came to be and what it was like to write comics in the late 1980s. “When I started off writing The Sandman, we were in a world in which critical success and commercial failure were basically the same thing,” he remembered. “And I wanted Sandman to be a critical success. And I was young, I didn’t know if I could tell a story a month, or how.”

Obviously, he managed to pull it off, although he wasn’t expecting a windfall. “In the late 1980s, nobody was doing comics for money. If you were doing comics, you were doing it for love.”

Of course, The Sandman was a huge success and helped change that. Together with comics like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which had come out a few years earlier in 1986, The Sandman helped expand comics to be thought of as something more than just entertainment for kids. “It was incredibly exciting!” Gaiman recalled. “It felt like something huge was changing and that we were changing it. And in retrospect, something huge was changing, and we were changing it.”

In the beginning, Gaiman worked on Sandman with Sam Keith and Mike Dringenberg, who illustrated several issues. They were challenged with creating Dream’s look. “I remember imagining Dream, and doing lots and lots and lots of drawings of him, and sending those drawings to Sam Kieth, who then did a whole bunch of drawings, and me picking the one that was sort of closest to the thing in my head, and then Mike Dringenberg coming along and doing some more.”

Dream ended up looking dour, slender, and pale, with stars in place of his eyes. Is that how he’ll look in the Netflix adaptation? At the moment, we don’t know, but Gaiman assures us that the behind-the-scenes crew are all fans of the comic, which is a good sign. “There’s a level at which everybody making Sandman is in love with Sandman, everybody. The artists, the VFX people, they are all Sandman fans! And they think they are on the best thing in the world, and maybe they are!”

"You know, all I can say is that my fears are bigger than anyone, my hopes are bigger than anyone. So far, I am incredibly happy."

We still don’t know a ton about Netflix’s Sandman show, although we went into production in October and that English actor Tom Sturridge may be playing Dream.

We’ll wait for more news. In the meantime, if you’re looking for more Neil Gaiman, why not check out his hefty new book, The Neil Gaiman Reader, which compiles 57 of his short stories? But be warned, there are no comics in this one!

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