Neil Gaiman is relieved to be home. Dressed all in unruly black hair and silver, he sits comfortably on a couch in his home in Woodstock, New York. “I left here in August 2019, thinking I’d be back at the end of March,” he says. “I didn’t actually come back until April 2022. Just in time to go on tour in America.” No one was completely unaffected by the pandemic, but not even Covid could derail Netflix’s big-budget adaptation of Gaiman’s 90s comic book series The Sandman, which comes out next month.
Gaiman, of British origin, is one of the most recognized living authors. Her restless imagination refuses to be limited by gender or demographics; he has written horror fantasy for adults (American Gods), children’s literature (Coraline) and accounts of ancient myths (Norse Mythology). He has won the Hugo, Nebula and Bram Stoker awards, and the Newbery and Carnegie medals. And those are just the books. Gaiman’s Midas touch extends beyond literature: his play The Ocean at the End of the Lane was recently staged 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 Studio Ghibli’s classic anime Princess Mononoke.
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Gaiman’s output may be prolific and diverse, but it’s also instantly recognizable. It is characterized by a magical realist vision of the universe, where mythical creatures exist within the everyday. There is also a kindness that permeates his stories; Gaiman is a writer who likes his characters. This generosity may be one of the reasons why he enjoys such devotion from his followers. This essential optimism is also evident in their social media interactions. He subconsciously knows his nearly 3 million Twitter followers and readers of his online journal; 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 started out in comics, then considered himself the conduit for literature. The mid-’80s was an exciting time to be involved with the medium, and Gaiman, who worked as a freelance journalist, was well aware of that. “In 1986 I pitched a story about what was happening in comics,” he says. “At the time, Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were all coming out. One newspaper responded: “We wrote about the 50th anniversary of Desperate Dan this year; we can’t do another piece of comics.”
Comics were a place where you could do things that no one had done before. But I also wanted to make films, television, novels
Gaiman was eventually commissioned by a Sunday newspaper supplement to report on comics. “It would have made a great cover story. I did all the interviews and gathered art, including unpublished material.” But it was not so. “They didn’t call back,” Gaiman continues. “A few days later, I called the editor to ask if he had the article, and he said, ‘Yes, I’ve read it. There’s just one problem: We feel it’s unbalanced. These comics , you seem to think they’re a good thing…’ What he was saying was that there was this whole flowering of the medium, and what he wanted me to do was interview people who felt that comics were the end of literacy.” Gaiman, of course, he was right. Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize. The Dark Knight Returns was a bestseller that reached readers far beyond the comic book audience. Alan Moore’s Watchmen was nominated one of Time magazine’s 100 best novels since the magazine’s inception.
At the end of the 80s there was a kind of “British Invasion”, a migration of talent to the USA that was to change the face of comics. This was largely due to Karen Berger, visionary editor at DC Comics, home of Batman and Superman. First, Berger commissioned 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. He was followed by the Scottish writer Grant Morrison. Facing the defunct superhero team Doom Patrol, he twisted it into his own surreal, psychedelic image. Everything seemed possible now.
You want it darker… Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer Morningstar in The Sandman. Photo: Laurence Cendrowicz/Netflix
This was the context for the largely untested Gaiman to enter the scene. The way DC comics worked was to give these young British rookies an unimportant existing character to play off of, as a way of minimizing the risk. Gaiman was offered The Sandman, a supporting character who had appeared in two incarnations over the years, neither of them very successful. Gaiman was encouraged to make the character completely his own and was given free rein to make any changes he saw fit. Even with this tabula rasa, Gaiman was nervous.
“Keep in mind that 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 seen what Alan Moore does, what Grant Morrison does. These guys have superhero engines, the they can do; I don’t have that.”
Gaiman needed another way in, and it came through a science fiction author from the United States. “Roger Zelazny did a book called Lord of Light, where he made sci-fi gods who feel like superheroes,” Gaiman says. “It’s set in a future world where a group of space explorers have been given powers from the Hindu pantheon. I thought, I can’t do superheroes, but I could do god comics. I bet I could have that kind of feeling happen , and it might look enough like a superhero comic to fool people.”
I was told you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels. I felt like a prostitute 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 cloak of velvety shades as he is in skinny jeans and a T-shirt (all in black, of course). He is one of the Endless, seven immortal brothers who are the embodiment of natural forces: death, desire, fate, despair, delirium, destruction, and, in Morpheus’ case, sleep. Like all mythological deities, Morpheus’ nearly limitless powers do not protect him from heartbreak and danger. Indeed, Gaiman delighted in exploring the fallibility and essential humanity of these figures. Morpheus’ immortality also allowed Gaiman to set his stories in all eras, from deepest prehistory to the far future, as well as providing a snapshot of modern culture. It was a bold concept for a superhero series.
With that magical equation in place, Gaiman’s “God comic” took off. Rich with literary allusions and strong female characters in the foreground, The Sandman found audiences outside the usual legion of fanboys. It became essential reading on college campuses, for men and women alike. “So DC would always do it a year before they canceled a title,” says Gaiman, “so I thought by issue eight they’d call me and say, ‘Well, minor critical success, major commercial failure. . You have four questions to close it!’ It would have been over by then. That would be The Sandman. Instead, we got to issue eight, and we were selling more than anything comparable that had ever sold in the last 15 years.” His confidence buoyed by sales, Gaiman was determined to do what he wanted with the comic, with the support of his ally Berger. “I knew this was the only chance I’d get to put all the things I liked into a comic book,” he says, “so if I wanted to do a count of [Roman historian] Suetonius’ Life of Augustus as a tribute to the poet Robert Graves, would only do it once. The luckiest thing I had was a publisher who trusted me.”
Serious New World… Tom Sturridge as Dream and Kyo Ra as Rose Walker in The Sandman. Photo: Liam Daniel/Netflix
Sales increased, especially when the comics were collected in paperback form and made available outside of comic shops, but critical acclaim was slower. “In 1989, I was at a Christmas party for a magazine that was at the Groucho Club,” says Gaiman. “I spoke to someone who, if I recall, was a literary editor at the Telegraph. They asked me what I did, and I said I wrote comics. The gentleman looked like he’d been slapped with a herring, but he couldn’t stop talking with me and turn around, so he asked, “Oh, well, what kind of comics?” I said that I had written something called Violent Cases and I was writing something called The Sandman. He said, “Wait, are you Neil Gaiman?!” I said yes.’ He said, ‘Oh dear mate, you don’t write comics, you write graphic novels!’ I felt like a prostitute who had just been called “a lady of the night”.
A successful writer can enjoy an entire career without creating a classic. Gaiman created his 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 audiences on the same scale, but it created an icon of its writer. “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 isn’t going anywhere, and when we get downstairs there are a couple of what would then be called secretaries at their desks. As we walk past, one of them says, “Excuse me, Mr. Gaiman, would you sign my Sandman?” which I do. My agent jokingly says, ‘Ha! Ha! You’re like Tom Cruise to these women. She turns to him furiously and says, . . . .