It’s important to remember that comic books did not always have the cultural cachet they do now.
“But it also makes you rethink all storytelling.
How necessary are stories for our survival?”
The cover of ‘The Sandman Book Two’ collected edition.DC
They’d break up, and the girl would take theSandmans and infect the next guy.
It grew on a vector").
Many of those female readers were attracted by the well-drawn female characters like Death.
Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) finds a new raven companion, Matthew (Patton Oswalt), in Netflix’s ‘The Sandman.'.Netflix
And so I was already wearing the Death outfit without knowing what it was.
But Gaiman always had the same answer when these filmmakers came calling.
“I had refused to get involved,” Gaiman says.
Dream (Tom Sturridge) gets some big-sister advice from Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) in ‘The Sandman.'.Netflix
“I’d refused to write them; I refused to be the executive producer.
Gaiman continues, “Fortunately,Sandmanwas just too expensive for anybody to justify making.
And if you’re trying to make aSandmanmovie, the first question is, what do you throw out?
Dream (Tom Sturridge) is not happy with the state of his castle in ‘The Sadnman’.Netflix
BecauseSandman, by the time it was finished, is 3,000 pages of comic.
So what is your movie then?”
By the time he left, his parking space had already been painted over.
Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) on Netflix’s ‘The Sandman.'.Netflix
Then Jon Peters got hold of it and put in giant mechanical spiders.
As if your puny weapons could hurt me, the mighty Lord of Dreams, the Sandman!’
And it got worse from there.”
For one thing, instead of indifferent producers, thisSandmanwas developed by passionate fans like Heinberg.
“It expanded what I thought was possible with storytelling in any form,” Heinberg says.
“I first read it when I was in college, as a professional actor and aspiring playwright.
From the earliest days, I really wanted to be the one to adapt it.
And she said, ‘Oh.’
And then she said, ‘Do you knowDavid Goyer?
I said, ‘Yeah I know David really well; we’re friends.’
I was like, ‘Huh.’
She looked at me and said, ‘We’ll call you.’
“In the old days, the fact thatSandmanwas 3,000 pages of plot was a bug.
Now it’s a feature,” Gaiman says.
The other problem was thatSandmanis never just one thing.
It can be scary or funny, it can be historical or weird.
With a long-running television series, that becomes an advantage.”
The Sandmanhas also aged well.
Now all that remains to be seen is how viewers react to experiencingThe Sandmanin three dimensions.
The ones who come after us will know what these characters look like."
The Sandmanpremieres Aug. 5 on Netflix.
Stay tuned for more coverage on EW.
