Given carte blanche to reimagine Sandman, a character who had gone through various iterations under the auspices of creators like Gardner Fox and Jack Kirby, Gaiman envisioned a richly-realized urban fantasy populated by characters like Destiny, Lucifer, and of course, Death. It was in this period that Gaiman was establishing himself as a writer, having gravitated toward comics after finding himself mesmerized by Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. The original Sandman was released in 1989, an era defined by works like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One. In short, after such a rich and varied career, The Sandman is bringing Gaiman back to the beginning. It’s a show that connects the Gaiman of 2022 – who has found such success in comics, novels, film, and stage – with the young Gaiman of the late 1980s, who was handed the task of revitalizing a little-known DC Comics character and subsequently turned it into one of the greatest comic books of all time. It took, as Gaiman refers to it, the “weird and wonderful” streaming age to bring the series to something resembling what Gaiman had in mind: a genre-spanning adventure that in some ways resembles 10 distinct movies spread across a single season. It was the Rose Walker show or something,” Gaiman says. “The damage that you had to do to Sandman to put it on network TV 15 years ago and in the kind of budgets and the way that you could do it just meant it wasn't Sandman. He remembers how Eric Kripke, a creator that Gaiman “loves and respects” who has lately been enjoying great success with The Boys, pitched a Sandman series for network TV circa 2010, and how Gaiman rejected it because “it really didn’t work.” The version who was told that “nobody’s ever come into this office and asked us not to make a movie before.” Wearing his familiar black t-shirt and jacket, he talks about how “incredibly envious” he is of his younger self – the version of Neil Gaiman who fought back against a Sandman movie he didn’t think would work. But when he speaks with IGN on the occasion of the show's release, he comes across as deeply introspective, his comments occasionally peppered with interjections from showrunner Allan Heinberg, with whom he has an easy back-and-forth rapport.
Gaiman, once so reticent to see this happen, has been tirelessly stumping for the show on his 2.9 million follower Twitter account and elsewhere. Launching on Netflix earlier today, reviews of the 10-episode series have been positive, with IGN’s Amelia Emberwing calling it a "dream of an adaptation." It wound up taking more than 30 years, but The Sandman is finally getting the screen version Gaiman previously thought impossible. I would so much rather that it never got made than a bad version would get made,” Neil Gaiman tells IGN. “I didn't care about it just getting made.
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