British-born Gaiman is one of the most acclaimed writers alive. His restless imagination refuses to be limited by genre or demographic. He has written horror fiction for adults (American Gods), children’s literature (Coraline) and narratives of ancient myth (Norse Mythology). He has won the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards and the Newbery and Carnegie medals. And that’s just the books. Gaiman’s Midas touch extends beyond literature: his play The Ocean at the End of the Lane recently opened in London to rave reviews. Film adaptations of his work include Coraline and Stardust. Lucifer, Good Omens and American Gods have all been successfully adapted for television. Gaiman even wrote the English translation of the Studio Ghibli anime classic Princess Mononoke. Subscribe to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights. Gaiman’s output may be prolific and diverse, but it’s also instantly recognizable. It is characterized by a magical realist view of the universe, where mythical creatures exist in everyday life. There is also a gentleness that permeates his stories. Gaiman is a writer who likes his characters. This generosity may be one of the reasons he enjoys such devotion from his fans. This essential optimism is also evident in his social media interactions. He is unselfconsciously familiar with his nearly 3 million Twitter followers and readers of his online magazine. Fans were regularly invited to hear Gaiman and his wife, musician Amanda Palmer, sing lullabies to their son, Ash. Gaiman may be enjoying phenomenal success now, but he got his start in comics, then considered the literary gutter. The mid-’80s were an exciting time to be in the medium, and Gaiman – working as a freelance journalist – knew it well. “In 1986 I put together a story about what was happening in comics,” he says. “At that point all the Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were coming out. One newspaper responded: “We’ve written about Desperate Dan’s 50th anniversary this year – we can’t do another comic strip.” Comics were a place where you could do things that no one had done before. But I also wanted to do movies, TV, novels Gaiman was eventually commissioned by a Sunday newspaper supplement to make a comic book film. “It would be a big cover story. I did all the interviews and collected art, including unpublished material.” But it was not to be. “They didn’t call back,” Gaiman continues. “After a few days, I called the editor to ask if he had gotten the article, and he said, ‘Yes, I read it. There’s just one problem – we think it’s unbalanced. These comics – you seem to think they’re a good thing…” What I was saying was that there was this whole boom in the medium, and what he wanted me to do was interview people who felt that comics were the end of education. ” Gaiman was of course right. Maus by Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize. The Dark Knight Returns was a bestseller that reached readers far beyond the comic book audience. Alan Moore’s Watchmen has been named one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels since the magazine’s inception. The late 80s saw a sort of “British Invasion,” an immigration of talent to the US that was to change the face of comics. This was largely due to Karen Berger, visionary editor at DC Comics, home to Batman and Superman. Initially, Berger assigned writer Alan Moore to work on the horror title Swamp Thing. Moore’s run raised the bar for what was possible in a monthly comic. The door was open. Scottish author Grant Morrison followed. Facing off against the unlikely superhero team Doom Patrol, he twisted it into his own surreal, psychedelic image. Now everything seemed possible. You want it darker… Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer Morningstar in The Sandman. Photo: Laurence Cendrowicz/Netflix This was the context for the largely inept Gaiman to enter the picture. The way DC comics worked was to give these young British upstarts a trivial existing character to play off of as a way of minimizing the risk. Gaiman was offered Sandman, a minor character who had appeared in two incarnations over the years, neither of which were very successful. Gaiman was encouraged to make the character completely his own and was given the freedom to make any changes he saw fit. Even with this tabula rasa, Gaiman was nervous. “Mind you, at this point I’ve written and sold maybe four short stories and [comic miniseries] Black orchid. And now I’ll have to do a monthly comic,” he says. “And I have no idea if I can do it or not. I don’t think I have the engine to write a superhero comic. I’ve watched what Alan Moore is doing, what Grant Morrison is doing. These guys have superhero engines, they can do them. I don’t have that.” Gaiman needed another way, and it came through a US science fiction writer. “Roger Zelazny did a book called Lord of Light where he made sci-fi gods who feel like superheroes,” says Gaiman. “It is set in a world in the future where many space explorers have given themselves the powers of the Hindu pantheon. I thought: I can’t do superheroes, but I could do god comics. I bet I could have that feeling and it might feel like a superhero comic enough to fool people.” I was told you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels. I felt like a douche who had been called the lady of the evening Gaiman’s version of the Sandman is Morpheus, a handsome goth as comfortable in a flowing cape of velvet shades as he is in jeans and a T-shirt (all in black, of course). He is one of the Endless, seven immortal brothers who are the embodiment of the natural forces: Death, Desire, Destiny, Despair, Delusion, Destruction and – in the case of Morpheus – Dream. Like all mythological deities, Morpheus’ almost limitless powers do not protect him from sorrow and danger. In fact, Gaiman delighted in exploring the flaw and essential humanity of these characters. Morpheus’ immortality also allowed Gaiman to set his stories in every era, from deep prehistory to the far future, as well as provide a snapshot of modern civilization. It was a bold idea for a superhero series. With this magical equation in place, Gaiman’s “comic book god” took off. Rich in literary allusions and foregrounding strong female characters, The Sandman found an audience outside the usual legion of fanboys. It became required reading on college campuses – for both male and female students. “Back then, DC always did a year before canceling a title,” says Gaiman, “so I thought that in the eighth issue they’d call me and say, ‘Well, minor critical success, major commercial failure. You have four subjects to complete it!’ Then I would be done. That would be Sandman. Instead, we got to version eight and were selling more than anything comparable had ever sold in the last 15 years.” Buoyed by the sales, Gaiman was determined to do exactly what he wanted with the comic, backed by his ally Berger. “I knew this was the only chance I’d ever get to put all the things I loved into a comic,” he says, “so if I wanted to do a remake of [Roman historian] The Life of Augustus by Suetonius as a tribute to the poet Robert Graves, I was only going to do it once. The luckiest thing I had was an editor who trusted me.” Grave new world… Tom Sturridge as Dream and Kyo Ra as Rose Walker in The Sandman. Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix Sales picked up – particularly when the comics were collected in paperback book form and made available outside of comic shops – but critical acclaim was slow to follow. “In 1989, I was at a Christmas party for some magazine that was at the Groucho Club,” Gaiman says. “I spoke to someone who, if he remembers, was a literary editor at the Telegraph. They asked me what I did and I said I wrote comics. The gentleman looked like I’d slapped him with a herring, but he couldn’t just stop talking to me and walk away, so he asked, “Oh, well, what kind of comic?” I said I had written a thing called Violent Affairs and I was writing a thing called The Sandman. He said, “Wait, are you Neil Gaiman?!” I said yes.’ He said, “Oh, my dear friend, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels!” I felt like a bag who had just been called “lady of the evening”. A successful writer can enjoy an entire career without creating a classic. Gaiman created it right out of the gate. For those who read it, The Sandman was as much a part of the 90s as Twin Peaks and Nirvana. It may not have initially had an audience on the same scale, but it created an icon of its author. “In 1997, I went to a meeting at Warner Bros. I don’t even remember what it was about,” Gaiman says. “I’m with my new agent. The meeting goes nowhere, and when we go downstairs, there are some of what would then be called secretaries at their desks. As we pass one of them says, “Excuse me Mr. Gaiman – would you sign my Sandman?”, which I do. My agent jokingly tells me, “Ha! Ha! You’re like Tom Cruise to these women.” She turns to him angrily and says:…