The author’s dark fantasy about the adventures of Morpheus has long resisted movie and TV adaptations. So it’s materializing as an Audible series.While much of Neil Gaiman’s writing has been brought to other media, his influential fantasy comic-book series The Sandman remained an outlier, much to the author’s relief.Credit...Rozette Rago for The New York Times
While much of Neil Gaiman’s writing has been brought to other media, his influential fantasy comic-book series The Sandman remained an outlier, much to the author’s relief.
When Neil Gaiman devised his influential fantasy comic-book series The Sandman for DC Comics in the late 1980s, he was a 26-year-old literary neophyte with a few short stories and graphic novels on his résumé and untested ambition.“In retrospect, I think I got DC to do it because they really didn’t know what it was they were signing onto,” he said recently.Three decades later, Gaiman, now 59, is a best-selling author and a brand unto himself, whose fiction has provided the source material for films like “Stardust” and “Coraline” and television series like “Good Omens” and “American Gods.”
The Sandman, an episodic and ever-changing story which varied in tone and topic from light comedy to dark thriller, was originally published from 1989 to 1996. Yet while so much of Gaiman’s writing has been brought to other media, this formative work has historically resisted efforts to present it in any form other than the printed page.It hasn’t been for lack of trying, as various film and TV studios have taken interest in The Sandman over the years. But the fact that some previous screen translations have failed to materialize, Gaiman said, has “always been a source of incredible relief to me — you only have to miss by a tiny amount for Sandman to go very wrong.”
Instead an authorized multimedia adaptation of The Sandman will arrive on July 15 as an audio drama on Audible, which has been building its library of audio narratives and other original content. (The company, which is owned by Amazon, is also preparing new projects from authors like Jesse Eisenberg, James Patterson and David Koepp and featuring actors like Christian Slater, Carrie Coon, Aaron Paul and Alicia Silverstone.)
The Sandman will arrive on July 15 on Audible, part of the company’s strategy of developing audio narratives.Credit...N/A The Sandman will arrive on July 15 on Audible, part of the company’s strategy of developing audio narratives.The first installment of its series, which consists of 20 episodes, is based on the first three volumes of the Sandman graphic novel. It features a cast that includes James McAvoy as the ethereal title character; Kat Dennings as his spectral sister Death; Michael Sheen as the fallen angel Lucifer; and Riz Ahmed as the stylish nightmare being the Corinthian.For Gaiman, who is the creative director and an executive producer of the audio project, the endeavor is a validation of his patience and his strategic stubbornness. As he sees it, the Audible adaptation hasn’t required him to compromise the audacity, the ambiguity or the endearing strangeness of the comics.
“I didn’t want to see the changes that would have to be made to Sandman to make it palatable to everyone,” he said. “We haven’t filed off the rough edges. We’ve gotten to make a version of Sandman that is everything we wanted to do.”Speaking by phone from Scotland’s Isle of Skye, where he was sheltering in place, Gaiman recounted how DC had initially offered him his own monthly comic book to help raise his profile as the publisher prepared to release Black Orchid, a costly project he was writing for the company.“They said, you have 12 issues — we’ll let it go for a year before we cancel it,” he recalled.Gaiman said he envisioned The Sandman as “a machine for telling stories — something that I could go anywhere with.”
By centering the series on a supernatural protagonist named Morpheus, an ashen immortal being also known as Dream, Gaiman gave himself an offramp to pursue narratives well outside the realm of superhero adventuring.“I can do horror,” he said. “I can do fantasy. I can do historical fiction. I can do science fiction. I can go all the way back to the beginning of the universe.”Early issues, which told the story of Morpheus’s escape from a long imprisonment and the rebuilding of his metaphysical powers, also featured appearances from established DC heroes like Batman, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.But within months, Gaiman was off chasing his own imaginative and sometimes very dark muses, using The Sandman to spin tales of a serial killers’ convention and a cat who hopes to reshape reality to make humans subservient to felines. The series became a hit and sold especially well in graphic-novel collections stocked at traditional bookstores.
Not long into its run, The Sandman was eyed for a film adaptation by Warner Bros., where Batman had just taken wing as a movie franchise. Gaiman described a conversation he had in 1990 with a Warner Bros. executive whom he asked not to pursue the project, arguing that it would distract from his work on the comic.“She said, ‘Nobody has ever walked into my office and asked me not to make a movie before,’” Gaiman recalled. “And I said, well, I am.” The project did not move forward.A few years later, Gaiman was approached by Dirk Maggs, then a BBC producer, who was interested in turning The Sandman into an episodic radio drama.
Describing the approach he has sought to apply to his work, Maggs said, “The idea was to avoid it sounding like a polite BBC production of rattling teacups and the occasional door opening while somebody talks to the vicar about their dead dog.” But while Gaiman was intrigued, Maggs could not get his BBC superiors to approve the proposal.Other attempts to bring The Sandman to movie and TV screens went nowhere. A film adaptation that would have been directed by Roger Avary (“The Rules of Attraction”) collapsed, as did another that would have starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Morpheus.
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