“I just didn’t care if it got made. I’d rather it never got made than a bad version,” Neil Gaiman tells IGN. It’s been more than 30 years in the making, but The Sandman is finally getting the screen version that Gaiman once thought impossible. Launching on Netflix earlier today, reviews of the 10-episode series have been positive, with IGN’s Amelia Emberwing calling it a “dream adaptation.” Gaiman, once so reticent to see this happen, has been tirelessly bashing the show on his 2.9 million-follower Twitter account and elsewhere. But when he speaks to IGN on the occasion of the show’s launch, he comes across as deeply introspective, his comments occasionally peppered with interjections from showrunner Allan Heinberg, with whom he has an easy rapport. Wearing his familiar black T-shirt and jacket, he talks about how “incredibly jealous” he is of his younger self – the version of Neil Gaiman who turned down a Sandman movie he didn’t think would work. The version where they said “no one has ever walked into this office and asked us not to make a movie before.” He recalls how Eric Kripke, a creator Gaiman “loves and respects” who has lately had a lot of success with The Boys, pitched a Sandman series for network TV around 2010, and how Gaiman turned it down because ” it really didn’t work. “ “The damage you had to do to Sandman to put it on network TV 15 years ago and the kind of budgets and the way you could do it just meant it wasn’t Sandman. It was the Rose Walker show or something,” says Gaiman. It took, as Gaiman puts it, the “weird and wonderful” era of streaming to bring the series into something resembling what Gaiman had in mind: a genre-spanning adventure that somehow feels like 10 separate films that spread over a single season. It’s a show that connects the Gaiman of 2022 – who has enjoyed such success in comics, novels, film and stage – with the young Gaiman of the late 1980s, who was tasked with reviving a little-known DC Comics character and then turned it into one of the the greatest comics of all time. In short, after such a rich and varied career, Sandman brings Gaiman back to square one. Netflix Spotlight: August 2022

Just trust the story

The original Sandman was released in 1989, an era defined by the likes of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One. It was during this period that Gaiman was establishing himself as a writer, having been drawn to comics after finding himself fascinated by Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Given carte blanche to reprise Sandman, a character who had gone through various iterations under the auspices of creators such as Gardner Fox and Jack Kirby, Gaiman envisioned a rich urban fantasy reality populated by characters such as Destiny, Lucifer, and Death of course. The series quickly gained a following, lasting 75 issues before Neil Gaiman’s termination in 1996. Today, it is considered one of the pillars of modern comics, standing tall alongside works such as The Watchmen, one of its contemporaries. Gaiman has since moved on to other mediums, gaining popular recognition with American Gods among others, but has retained a soft spot for comics, which he once likened to hacking through a jungle. “When I was working on Sandman, I often felt like I was taking a machete and going into the jungle. I had to write in places and do things that no one had ever done before,” Gaiman said in 2007. Set in modern times, The Sandman follows Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, as he escapes from captivity and returns to his kingdom to find his misery. What follows is a metatextual exploration of dreams, storytelling, death and rebirth. In IGN’s review of The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1, Hilary Goldstein noted that there is “a purpose to every panel”, writing that the Sandman story is neither a “series of disconnected events” nor “an incoherent dream”. “Events in these early stories may seem important only to the present story, but almost all of them turn out to be connected to later themes leading up to the series finale,” Goldstein wrote. “When I wrote Sandman, there was a lot of stuff that had very little feedback. Very little traction. It was mostly awkward, the fact that you had characters in it who were of all races.” “ It’s an ambitious story with an expansive scope – one that Gaiman struggled with at times even in comic form. It’s filled with stories like A Dream of a Thousand Cats, where a secret gathering of domesticated felines learns the true history of their species (Gaiman says it won’t be in Season 1, but doesn’t rule it out for future seasons). Looking back at the comics, Gaiman talks about how ahead of his time they were in terms of representation. It specifically points to Wanda, a transgender character who was first introduced in Sandman #32 (and perhaps due to the era in which the story was written, is the victim of some discredited tropeseven if Wanda herself was widely welcomed by the LGBTQ community). “When I wrote Sandman, there were a lot of things that got very little feedback. Very little traction. It was mostly confusing, the fact that you had characters in it that were of all races. The fact that here we are in issue nine, and it’s in Africa a long time ago, and everyone’s black, and Dream is also black, and that’s just the way it is,” says Gaiman. “The fact that we have trans characters, the fact that we have gay characters. All these things, which were important to me, were not particularly of their time. Wanda was the first transgender character in mainstream comics. It just was.” In that regard, Gaiman doesn’t see much difference whether Sandman is set in the late 1980s or 2022. “When I was telling people, ‘No, no, we’re setting it now.’ And they go, “Oh, right. You modernize it and update it.’ And they’re like, “Yeah, no, not really.” Some of the people have cell phones, and that’s really the biggest part of it. Some of the hairstyles are different.”

“It had to be fixed”

But even if Sandman’s themes are timeless, it’s still incredibly difficult to successfully adapt to other media. Attempts have been made since the 1990s, with one scenario apparently so bad that Gaiman called it “Not only the worst Sandman script I’ve ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read.” In 2001, Gaiman argued that a successful adaptation would require someone with “the same obsession with the source material that Peter Jackson had with Lord of the Rings or Sam Raimi with Spider-Man”. In 2010, the television series with Kripke aired for Warner Bros. Television and also failed to go anywhere. The moment finally came in 2018, when David Goyer approached Gaiman while he was busy with Good Omens – the adaptation of the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett near the beginning of his career. Goyer had written the scripts for several superhero movies, including Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, and was convinced that Sand could work on a streaming service. Goyer then connected Gaiman with Heinberg, who had his own superhero experience working on 2017’s Wonder Woman. The three went to dinner, where Heinberg quickly established his fans by revealing that he had met Gaiman before— at an event where he had asked the author to sign a page of The Sandman: Brief Lives for him. “I knew pretty much from that moment that we had our man,” says Gaiman. After that, Gaiman says he watched Hollywood lawyers “move faster than I’ve ever watched” to negotiate and agree the contracts, which the team quickly reached an agreement with Netflix after taking positions from “every major streamer and gamer in the world.” This is where Heinberg, who has been largely quiet up until this point, starts to get more movement. He and Gaiman will often fall into conversation without asking for it—a consequence, perhaps, of their deep collaboration throughout the show’s production. Much of this comes from lessons Gaiman learned from American Gods, which suffered many setbacks, including the unexpected departure of its showrunner. Gaiman was not heavily involved in the development of this show, which he believes was to his detriment. “I kept watching these people, never making American Gods, and I’m like, ‘Guys, I’ve been down this road. If you go down there, you’ll get the car stuck and you won’t be able to turn around.’ […] And there were a lot of them,” says Gaiman. “With American Gods, I talked to the showrunners for a day or so before they started the new season, conceptualizing it. And then they would normally send me the finished episodes. With that, I was on the phone or on a zoom call with Alan every day.” At this point Heinberg jumps in, “It would be very rare to go three days without checking in.” “I mean, we’d be on email for the other two days,” Gaiman replies. “Yeah, and the phone, but Neil, we’ve never been in the same city,” says Heinberg, now fully engaged. “And there was one day when we were both in London and we didn’t see each other all day and then we managed to meet for dinner, but that was about it. It was something that we had enormous freedom to…