Fellowship & Fairydust

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With Netflix’s Sandman Season 1 wrapped and Season 2 reportedly starting production today, June 20, 2023, it’s a good time to look back at the show that had many comic book and fantasy fans worried, and surprised everyone. 

Note: quotations from Sandman Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes are from a digital edition without page numbers listed. For simplicity, quotes are listed by the issues they appear in.

Enter Sandman: The Beginning

“I’ve just lost a day’s work because of you,” Alan Moore says.

“Oh, good,” Neil Gaiman replies.

It is the mid 1980s. Neil Gaiman is a journalist who discovered Moore’s writing when he picked up a copy of the comic book Swamp Thing at Victoria Station. He then sent Moore a copy of Ghastly Beyond Belief,  a book he’d co-written with Kim Newman. The book (a collection of the worst written, most ludicrous quotations from sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fiction) was apparently entertaining enough that Moore stopped his usual work to read it for a day.

The two men keep talking, and Gaiman offers to show Moore around an upcoming Birmingham writer’s convention. In the convention hotel’s bar, Gaiman asks Moore to show him how to write a comic.

Cut to the late 1980s. Moore has written the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen, which will cement his reputation as the greatest writer in comic book history. Gaiman gets a thank-you inside the book for fact-checking quotations that Moore includes in the book. Gaiman is working on something equally groundbreaking. The Sandman is a sprawling epic story about Morpheus, the personification of dreams. Published by DC Comics, Morpheus’ story—imprisoned by mortals for decades, escaping and rebuilding his kingdom, interacting with six siblings who personify Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destiny, and Destruction—becomes one of the most acclaimed graphic novels ever written.

The Long Development Road to The Sandman

Given that The Sandman’s is widely considered one of the greatest graphic novels ever written, it’s not surprising that it was optioned for movie adaptation not long after it was finished in 1996. It proved a difficult task. It was a story with multiple story arcs, eventually published in 10 volumes spanning hundreds of pages. A single story arc could go from Morpheus visiting Hell to Morpheus feeding pigeons in New York City.

Movie plans went in and out of “development hell,” with big names like Pulp Fiction screenwriter Roger Avary and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playwright Jack Thorne involved at various stages. During this period, the Wachowskis created a character of the same name for their action film The Matrix. They reportedly told Laurence Fishburne to play him like Gaiman’s character. Since Warner Bros owns DC Comics and produced The Matrix, any influence the Wachowskis took from Gaiman’s comic was presumably kosher.

Things took a different direction in the 2010s. Lucifer, a spinoff comic book taken from a Sandman story where Lucifer decides to retire and let Hell take care of itself, became a TV show that ran from 2016 to 2021. In 2020 and 2021, Gaiman narrated The Sandman: Act I and Act II for Audible. The Sandman: Act I became Audible’s bestselling original content show ever. In 2021, after David S. Goyer’s plans for a Sandman film fell apart, Gaiman and Goyer began developing a TV series version with Allan Heinberg. 

On August 5, 2022, Netflix released The Sandman, an 11-episode season of 11 episodes with Gaiman as executive producer and co-writer of the first episode, “Sleep of the Just.” 

So. After over 20 years of development plans, raised and crashed hopes for a Sandman movie or TV show, how is it?ary and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child writer Jack Thorne involved at various stages. During this period, the Wachowskis created a character of the same name for their action film The Matrix. They reportedly told Laurence Fishburne to play him like Gaiman’s character. Since Warner Bros owns DC Comics and produced The Matrix, any influence the Wachowskis took from Gaiman’s comic was presumably kosher.

Things took a different direction in the 2010s. Lucifer, a spinoff comic book taken from a Sandman story where Lucifer decides hell needn’t exist so he’ll retire, became a TV show that ran from 2016 to 2021. In 2020 and 2021, Gaiman narrated The Sandman: Act I and The Sandman: Act II for Audible. The Sandman: Act I became Audible’s bestselling original content show ever. In 2021, after David S. Goyer’s plans for a Sandman film fell apart, Gaiman and Goyer began developing a TV series version with Allan Heinberg. 

On August 5, 2022, Netflix released The Sandman, a season of 10 episodes. Gaiman not only served as executive producer (giving lots of input on casting and other matters) but also co-wrote the first episode, “Sleep of the Just.” 

So. After over 20 years of development plans, raised and crashed hopes for a Sandman movie or TV show, how is it?

The Sandman Season 1: The Plot

In 1916, English warlock Roderick Burgess acquires a grimoire from the Royal Museum so he can summon and capture Death. The ceremony fails. Instead, Burgess captures Death’s younger brother, Dream. Dream’s full title is Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming.

Morpheus spends the next century inside the magic circle that Burgess cast, with a glass enclosure around it and guards who are warned never to sleep. He says nothing during his capture. He just watches Burgess (and later Burgess’ son Alex) try to barter with him for power (or at least a guarantee he won’t kill them if he’s freed).

When Morpheus finally gets out, he determines three objects that held his power—his helm, a bag of magic sand, and a ruby—were stolen decades ago by Burgess’ runaway mistress. He can’t rebuild his kingdom, the Dreaming, without these objects. But even if he gets them back, a sentient nightmare he created years ago has been wandering the world, sowing carnage in terrible ways. A showdown is imminent…

This narrative fairly faithfully follows the comic’s first two story arcs (Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll’s House). The final episode, “Calliope/Dream of a Thousand Cats,” adapts two standalone stories collected in the third volume (Dream Country), a volume of scattered stories from different times within Morpheus’ career.

Almost immediately, it becomes clear the show is making some major changes. Morpheus escapes in the present, 2022, instead of 1988 (the year that “Sandman #1: Sleep of the Just” appeared in stores). A few standalone scenes foreshadowing later story arcs get omitted. One or two scenes in The Doll’s House get rearranged. At least one scene includes cameos from important characters in later story arcs, hinting where the show will go next.

Then there are the major changes, which primarily solve rough edges that make Preludes and Nocturnes hard to adapt. Gaiman admitted in a 2015 interview with Junot Díaz that the last Preludes and Nocturnes story, “Sandman #8: The Sound of Wings,” is “the first one of them in which I don’t sound like anybody else.” The earlier stories are interesting, but each sounds like an homage to another writer—ones that Gaiman freely admits he was emulating, including Dennis Wheatley, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Alan Moore, and Robert Heinlein. Preludes and Nocturnes is important and quite good, but not Gaiman at his best.

On top of that, The Sandman was a DC comic, but DC’s pantheon of superheroes proved an odd fit for the world Gaiman was creating. In “Sandman #5: Passengers,” Morpheus locates his ruby with help from the Justice League’s Mister Miracle and Martian Manhunter. It makes narrative sense but feels off-putting.

As Gaiman explained in a 2009 interview with Chip Kidd, other times, he tried to include DC characters, but extenuating circumstances interfered. The Sandman issue with the Justice League also shows Arkham Asylum resident John Dee escaping to get Morpheus’ ruby… but not before he sees the Scarecrow has hanged himself as an April Fool joke. The story was written with the Joker making an April Fool joke, but then DC informed Gaiman that the Joker had just disappeared into Gotham River in a Batman story and couldn’t be seen in any DC comic for five months. So, the Scarecrow had to step in.

Eventually, Gaiman decided to treat The Sandman as a story unfolding in a secluded corner of the DC Universe, only using occasional minor characters that barely anyone used. In Preludes and Nocturnes, he was still figuring out this balancing act while finding his voice. Thus, Morpheus’ first story arc is like an early Michelangelo sculpture. It’s different and better than the rest of its field, but has awkward traits that show the artist is still maturing.

The Sandman Season 1: The Changes

The TV show’s major changes solve the adaptation problem in three ways.

First, the early episodes show several characters central to the second story arc, appearing for brief moments. These characters don’t interact much with Morpheus, but they meet the other characters, hinting at their plans. One such character is clearly an antagonist, and his recurring appearances give the TV show a villain who will exist throughout the entire season. Like the brief intercuts of Saruman talking to Sauron in Peter Jackson’s first two Lord of the Rings movies, these appearances create a narrative throughline, reminding readers who the antagonists are in this sprawling tale.

Second, the TV show cuts some minor characters, fleshing out the remaining ones. In the comic, Burgess loses Morpheus’ magic objects when his mistress, Ethel Cripps, runs off with his second-in-command, Ruthven Sykes. Later, Cripps’ son John Dee gets Morpheus’ ruby and uses it in terrible ways. The TV show omits the second-in-command, so Cripps does the theft herself. She goes from being simply Burgess’ scarlet woman to a smart, overlooked woman. The TV show’s scenes of Cripps talking with John Dee in his asylum make him an equally interesting character. Dee soon proves to the psychopath readers know from the comic, but his talk with his mother shows a tortured past that makes him seem human.

Even Roderick Burgess gets more dimension. In the comic, he looks like the lovechild of Lex Luther and Aleister Crowley. And he more or less behaves like one. Burgess wants to capture Death purely to show up rivals—he tells his son Alex, “after tonight I’d like to see Aleister and his friends make fun of me! They will make no more jokes, Alex, when Death is at my command…” (“Sandman #1: Sleep of the Just”). In the TV show, Burgess wants to capture Death to resurrect his oldest son, a soldier who died at Gallipoli. He’s still a self-centered and abusive man, but the script gives him a hint of understandable tragedy. His unwanted son Alex is even more sympathetic—an abused child who fears his father and the god his father has imprisoned.

Third, the TV show omits many of the notable DC universe references. Instead of getting help from the Justice League, Morpheus uses his helm to locate the ruby. John Dee is contained not in Arkham Asylum, but an anonymous institution in Buffalo, New York. The show also avoids (possibly for legal reasons) bringing back the actors who played Lucifer and blue-collar warlock John Constantine in previous TV shows. Instead, Gwendolin Christie plays Lucifer, and Jenna Coleman plays a female member of the Constantine family, Johanna Constantine. These unconventional choices raised the ire of fans, a point that will be considered below. In terms of its effect on the plot, it makes the TV show feel like its own animal. It doesn’t overreach to connect the story to the DC comic book universe. There are no attempts to connect The Sandman to the CW’s shows about DC characters (Constantine, The Flash, Arrow). It’s The Sandman, an eclectic dark fantasy show that doesn’t trade on its DC connections, capturing the comic’s unique tone. 

Sandman Season 1: The Cast

So much for the plot. What about the cast?

Fortunately, there’s not a bad performance to be seen.

Tom Sturridge plays Morpheus very well, which is no easy task. Morpheus is a proud, distant figure who struggles to understand humanity—Alan Rickman’s Severus Snape without the accidental humor. Furthermore, the first Sandman story, “The Sleep of the Just,” consists of Morpheus doing nothing but getting captured, sitting in a glass cage for a century, and then briefly wreaking vengeance when he escapes. This is not an easy part to play.

Laurence Fishburne had it easier in The Matrix playing a character with the same name and some of the poise, but still a human character with human wants and weaknesses. Sturridge has to work on the principle that his character is not human. As his sister Death puts it when he’s pouting, Morpheus is the “most self centred anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane” (“The Sandman #8: The Sound of Her Wings”). Sturridge captures Morpheus’ emotional distance yet provides little moments of sympathy and humor. These moments are often subtle—a slight change in the face or tone—but communicate that Morpheus is more than just a stern (or pouting) gothic figure. As the show’s narrative leads Morpheus to recognize how much he relies on others, Sturridge portrays newfound warmth without overdoing it.

Structurally, the comic helped handle Morpheus’ emotional distance by keeping side characters interesting. The actors playing Morpheus’ staff in the Dreaming—Patton Oswalt as wisecracking raven Matthew who accompanies Morpheus, Vivienne Acheampong as Lucienne who supervises the Dreaming’s magic library, Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain and Asim Chaudhry as Abel, Mark Hamill as Merv Pumpkinhead who tends the Dreaming’s palace—are all clever characters played excellently by the respective actors. The same holds for Kyo Ra as Rose Walker, a woman who becomes the secondary protagonist in the season’s last act. Stephen Fry gives a brilliant Chestertonian performance as Walker’s friend Gilbert, one of Morpheus’ subjects who takes a human form modeled on G.K. Chesterton.

The actors playing the various antagonists and supporting characters are equally excellent. In particular, Charles Dance does a great job making Roderick Burgess intimidating in a Christopher Lee kind of way, yet also charismatic. Laurie Kynaston convincingly plays Alex Burgess as a frightened young man trying to escape his father’s influence. The actresses playing Ethel Cripps at different ages (Niamh Walsh and Joely Richardson) bring dimension to a character who must be crafty yet vulnerable. David Thewlis plays John Dee as a figure who initially seems pitiful, his evil side slowly emerging across several episodes. Boyd Holbrook is deliciously menacing as sentient nightmare the Corinthian. The actors playing Morpheus’ siblings—Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Death, Mason Alexander Park as Desire, Donna Preston as Despair—are each memorable.

When Netflix announced the casting choices for The Sandman, some fans objected to several characters being different genders (Christie as Lucifer, Coleman as Constantine) or races (Howell-Baptiste as Death) than in the comic. Gaiman’s explanation of the TV show’s casting choices are available in a Vanity Fair interview. Without giving a view on the matter, it is worth noting the following.

First, some of these changes fit the story world. Yes, during Preludes and Nocturnes, Morpheus gets help from John Constantine, the chain-smoking occult detective who looks like Sting’s acerbic twin. However, in “Sandman #29: Thermidor,” Morpheus enlists one of Constantine’s ancestors, Lady Johanna Constantine, to retrieve a precious item in Revolutionary France. So, the idea of a Constantine family line, with male and female Constantines, is canon.

Second, these changes fit the comic’s overall philosophy. From the first issue in 1988, which implied Alex Burgess had a male lover, The Sandman featured a higher-than-average number of female characters, people of color, and LGBTQ+ characters. This became especially clear with Desire, who could seem alternately male or female. The TV show continues that philosophy, along with Gaiman’s practice of making LGBTQ+ characters integral to the plot. Viewers will have to decide how much they agree with this philosophy, but it is inherent to the source material.

The Verdict

Hardcore fans of The Sandman will debate the merits of the comic, the TV show, and the Audible adaptation. Audible adapted the final Sandman stories with The Sandman: Act III, released in December 2022, making it possible to listen to the entire Sandman saga. The TV show showed enough success (Deadline reported it reached number one globally in three days) for Netflix to order a season season, which will reportedly be released in spring or summer 2024. Whether or not the show lasts long enough to tell the entire saga remains to be seen.

Regardless, The Sandman is a faithful yet clever adaptation of Gaiman’s comic that marks a new hallmark for adapting fantasy stories.

Sources Cited

Andreeva, Natalie. “‘The Sandman’ Dethrones ‘Virgin River’ On Top Of Netflix’s Weekly Ratings, ‘Extraordinary Attorney Woo’ Sets New High.” Deadline, August 9, 2022. deadline.com/2022/08/the-sandman-netflix-weekly-rankings-virgin-river-uncoupled-keep-breathing-extraordinary-attorney-woo-1235088745/.

Craig, David. “The Sandman season 2 release date speculation, cast and latest news.” Radio Times, January 18, 2023. radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/sandman-season-2-release-date/.

Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. DC Comics, 2011. Ebook via Hoopla Digital. hoopladigital.com/title/11356782.

–. The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll’s House. DC Comics, 2011. Ebook via Hoopla Digital. hoopladigital.com/title/11374684.

–. Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections. DC Comics, 2019. Ebook via Hoopla Digital. hoopladigital.com/title/12342030.

–. “You Must be This Tall to Ride this Website…” Journal.NeilGaiman.com, June 10, 2003. journal.neilgaiman.com/2003/06/you-must-be-this-tall-to-ride-this.asp.

“Neil Gaiman Breaks Down Netflix’s ‘The Sandman’ Official Trailer.” Vanity Fair, July 23, 2022. youtube.com/watch?v=3e54llvV_tc.

“Neil Gaiman and Chip Kidd: 20th Anniversary of Sandman.” 92 NY, June 25, 2009. youtube.com/watch?v=0ei9OQkQ2BU.

“Neil Gaiman in Conversation with Junot Díaz.” DC, November 9, 2015. youtube.com/watch?v=s1kzdP3OlBg.

“The Sandman with Neil Gaiman at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.” Edinburgh International Book Fest, October 8, 2013. youtube.com/watch?v=y4lPPN_Qcc4.

Spangler, Todd. “The Sandman: Act II’ on Audible Premiere Date Set, James McAvoy Returns to Lead Star-Studded Cast.” Variety, July 22, 2021. variety.com/2021/digital/news/sandman-act-ii-audible-premiere-date-james-mcavoy-returns-cast-1235024922/.

Photo Credit: Netflix