The one who wrote Coraline, and co-wrote the book of Good Omens and made the TV show, also the Sandman comics writer and co-creator who made the Sandman TV show. Quite nice really.
Good morning Mr. Gaiman! I was wondering this morning about how the presence of a fandom affects (or doesn’t affect) the business decisions that are made in the media and publishing world. I’d be so interested to hear your thoughts on it as someone who has a foot so strongly planted in both worlds—I at least can’t think of very many other creators who work on IPs as big as you do who are as engaged with and aware of the surrounding fandom culture as you are.
In your experience, are the studios and executive Powers That Be generally aware of the fandom cultures that surround their media properties? And is it considered a good thing, or more of a liability to an IP’s potential commercial success? When a show like Good Omens, or Our Flag Means Death, or Lucifer comes up for another season, are the studio execs aware or thinking about the active fandoms when they decide what gets greenlit? I would imagine that the scads of fan content and online chatter those fandoms have generated would be a good indicator for the success of those shows, but only if the decision makers knew about it and thought of it as a good thing, which of course not all creators do. You’ve shared with us a few very good reasons why some creative distance with fandom is strictly necessary at times. Is an active fandom something that a creator like you would consider part of the pitch when you’re trying to get more content greenlit? Or do the studios not get it or not care?
I think the truth is that for Networks the numbers of people in a fandom are so small, proportionally, to the numbers of viewers, that the fandom doesn’t really even show up on anyone’s radar. It was very important to me that the Good Omens fandom was treated well when we launched Season 1, but I doubt that Amazon or the BBC will be thinking much about the fandom when they plan the roll out for Season 2, as they already have an existing worldwide audience now in the hundreds of millions, and they will be aiming their promotion at those people and the people who have yet to try it, and not the fans. I’ll remind them that Good Omens fandom exists as we get closer, and there are fans out there now in the promotional world (like whoever runs Prime Video’s Twitter feed) but pretty much everything will be aimed at the viewers rather than the fans.
Studios and networks like knowing that there’s an existing fandom, it reassures them, but it’s never big enough to make a difference beyond the possibility of helping get something greenlit in the first place – and that’s not fandom, that’s potential audience. The existence or non-existence of a Sandman fandom didn’t help sell Netflix on greenlighting Sandman; the fact we’ve sold over a hundred million Sandman comics and graphic novels around the world definitely did.
As a writer, I realized in early 1989 that I had two choices: I could do things I knew would make fandom (back then, the early early Sandman fandom) happy, and risk making myself bored and dissatisfied, or make myself as the writer/creator happy and hope that enough of the fandom would come on the journey with me. I chose the latter route and it worked, and so it’s the route I’ve always chosen since then.
I was thinking of the story of Adam's three wives in Sandman. I was curious where you found the nameless virgin, the second wife, or if that's an original invention? If you do have a source I'd love to take a look at it, she's been in my imagination for a long time.
She’s in the Midrash. I had heard about her orally. Since writing that story I discovered her in Robert Graves’s Jewish Mythology book. But there isn’t much on her at all. (I think I answered this once here and found a bunch of links to the Midrashic commentary, about Adam’s reaction rather than how she felt about her brief life. But you’ll have to rely on nice people in the notes pointing you to that one.)
Every afternoon I get an email telling me that there are “dailies” from The Sandman ready to be watched. It’s the best bit of the day. Once every few weeks I get an email letting me know that there’s a finished episode waiting for me to watch it. It’s the best bit of the month.
The Sandman is being made, and it’s… well, it’s The Sandman. Which is the best thing of all.
You may know that The Sandman is based on my comic book series of the same name. A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend are interwoven, The Sandman follows the people and places affected by Morpheus, the Dream King, as he mends the cosmic — and human — mistakes he’s made during his vast existence.
You might already know that Tom Sturridge (he/him) is Dream of the Endless, Gwendolyn Christie (she/her)is Lucifer, Sanjeev Bhaskar (he/him) and Asim Chaudhry (he/him) are Cain and Abel, Charles Dance (he/him) is Roderick Burgess, Vivienne Acheampong (she/her)is Lucienne, and Boyd Holbrook (he/him) is The Corinthian.
But there are more parts to be announced. And I thought it would be fun to tell you about some of them, and the thinking behind them.
DEATH – Dream’s wiser, nicer, and much more sensible sister. Significantly harder to cast than you might imagine (well, than I imagined, anyway). Hundreds of talented women from all around the planet auditioned, and they were brilliant, and none of them were right. Someone who could speak the truth to Dream, on the one hand, but also be the person you’d want to meet when your life was done on the other. And then we saw Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s (she/her) audition and we knew we had our Death.
DESIRE – Dream’s sibling and everything you want, whatever you want and whoever you are. Desire is also trouble for Dream. Families are complicated. We had barely started looking when MasonAlexander Park (they/them) reached out on Twitter, and threw their hat into the ring. We were thrilled when they got the part.
DESPAIR – Desire’s twin, Dream’s sister. She is the moment when all hope is gone, the bleakest of the Endless. Donna Preston (she/her) will be playing her, and her performance is chilling and sad. You feel her pain.
JOHANNA CONSTANTINE – Eighteenth Century occult adventuress, John Constantine’s great-great-great grandmother. This Sandman character became so popular that she even had her own spin-off series. I created her to fill the role that John Constantine does in the past. When we broke down the first season, given that we knew that we would be encountering Johanna in the past, we wondered what would happen if we met a version of her in the present as well. We tried it and the script was sparkier, feistier, and in some ways even more fun. So having written her, we just had to cast her. Jenna Coleman (she/her) gave us the Johanna of our dreams – tough, brilliant, tricky, haunted and probably doomed.
ETHEL CRIPPS – Roderick Burgess’s love, John Dee’s mother, is a small but vital role in the comics, but she became more important as we told our story. In the 1920s and 30s, she is played by Niamh Walsh (she/her): a betrayed and determined young woman seeking to survive. In the present day, now a woman of a hundred identities and a thousand lies, she’s played by the brilliant Joely Richardson (she/her).
JOHN DEE – Ethel’s son is dangerous. He was driven mad, long ago. Now he’s out and on a quest for Truth that may destroy the world. We needed an actor who could break your heart and keep your sympathy while taking you into the darkest places. We were lucky that David Thewlis (he/him)took the part.
Now we’re shooting The Doll’s House, the second big Sandman storyline. It’s the story of:
ROSE WALKER – a young woman on a desperate search for her missing brother, who finds a family she didn’t know that she had, and a connection to Dream that neither of them can escape. We needed someone young who could make you care as she ventures into some very dangerous places. Boyd Holbrook’s Corinthian is waiting for her, after all. Kyo Ra (she/her) achieves that as Rose.
LYTA HALL – Rose’s friend, a young widow mourning her husband Hector. Rose doesn’t know that Hector has started showing up in Lyta’s dreams, though. Or that strange things are happening. Razane Jammal (she/her)is Lyta, and she’s terrific.
UNITY KINKAID - Heiress, Rose’s mysterious benefactor. She has spent a century asleep. Now she’s awake, having missed out on her life. She’s played by Sandra James Young (she/her).
GILBERT – Rose Walker’s debonair protector. A dab hand with a paradox and a sword cane. Stephen Fry (he/him) is a National Treasure, and we forget sometimes that he’s also a remarkable actor. Seeing him in costume and make up on the dailies made me blink: it was as if the comic had come to life.
MATTHEW – Dream’s trusted emissary. A raven. I expected our animals to be CGI, and was both taken aback and thrilled when the dailies started coming in, and there was Dream talking to… well, a raven. But ravens don’t really talk. The question was, could we find an actor who could make you care about a dead person who was now a bird in the Dreaming – one who isn’t certain what’s going on, or whether any of this is a good idea? And could we find a voice performer who was also the kind of Sandman fan who used to stand in line to get his Sandman comics signed? The answer was, we could if we asked Patton Oswalt (he/him). And Patton was the first person we asked, and the first person we cast, the day before we pitched The Sandman to Netflix.
Of course, there are more delights and nightmares cast than I’ve listed here, and we have a few more secrets up our sleeves. I can’t wait until you can start watching.
Did you intentionally make Dream look an awful lot like you?
Not really. I suspect we’ve grown to look more like each other over the years, like people and their dogs. I mean, at the time that that issue came out I looked like this (I’m the one on the right):
I’m afraid not. It seems to be from a clickbait article from an Indian website where they’ve just taken an article about Coraline and replaced the name with Coraline 2 all the way through, and changed 2009 to 2022.
Quality journalism.
You should see some of the Netflix Sandman articles I’ve come across. “The Sandy Man is from humor comedian tome and will be TV movie maybe. With big star James McAvoy. Click for good trailer.” (Not mocking anyone’s accent here. That’s how some of them are written.)
that’s been run through a thesaurus via word definition
‘comic book’ = ‘comedian tome’
which honestly sounds like a collection of olde timey fart jokes
Yeah, I believe that’s what Neil Gaiman suspected when I mentioned that particular one to him several months ago, that a bot was using some sort of thesaurus on a stolen article.
In any event these sort of articles should NOT be turning up in Google’s News tab and yet it keeps happening.
The most recent clickbait article to involve Sandman, ironically, was from some “Reporter” who didn’t even seem to realize he was standing right on the filming location of Sandman. The headline was something like “Are they filming a Batman mini-series in Poole England?!” No. No, they’re not. I found this article by accident, by the way.
His whole article was trying to suggest that this “Secret project” from DC and Netflix was a Batman mini-series because he found out it was from DC and Netflix and then concluded: The Batman is still filming, right? (No.)
He was fixated on this idea that it was a Batman mini-series. The kicker? Someone about thirty feet away from where this reporter was snapping photos, got a rather blurry phone video recording of Tom Sturridge (Morpheus) in costume, and posted it online. I’m not sharing the link because I’m pretty certain we were not supposed to see that. And Boyd Holbrook was also right there and Boyd made a small recording of wandering around the masked crew and posted it to his Instagram (There were no spoilers in that one, just some people in masks and a woman moving a garbage bin). But this “journalist” on location and about ten feet from him, is like “Can a new Batman mini-series be in the works?!”
He went on to suggest that if it’s not Batman then it could be Wonder Woman, Aquaman, or Flash related. I think that “journalist” was just listing off the only DC characters he knew. Or he was peppering the article with names that he thought would get him clicks because it would then turn up in Google searches for those names. It felt underhanded to me, more than naïve.
There was a live raven croaking about thirty feet from him and Tom Sturridge IN costume and Boyd Holbrook wandering around with his own phone, clearly bored because they didn’t film him that day, but sure… Yeah, it’s Batman being filmed, right. I’m in Upstate New York and I’m more aware of what was really being filmed on that beach!
This is what passes for “quality” journalism today.
End of rant.
I googled, clicked on the article, saw the trucks and the equipment and suddenly remembered that making TV is an enormous thing, and there are lorries and tents and all…
What I’m seeing of Sandman is what’s on the screen on the dailies. I forget that there’s an army making what I see.
They really were that size: paintings and assemblages that Dave would take to get photographed, and send the transparency to DC Comics to use as a cover.
Just to remind people of how things were done in the longago.
Part of me wonders how much these would be worth today, and what Dave (aged 24) and I (aged 27) would have thought about that if we’d known.
Morpheus AKA Dream of The Endless has his own language. It’s a simple enough language once you learn the basics. Here are a few translations of Morpheus to English…
_______________
“Perhaps.” - Yes. Definitely yes. Yes, but I don’t want to actually say the word “Yes” to this for various reasons, usually out of pride, sometimes something else, but usually pride.
“You dare…” - The Morpheus equivalent of “I can’t even…” or various swear words.
“I did not need rescuing.” - Thank you for rescuing me.
“I was doing perfectly well on my own.” - I was NOT doing perfectly well on my own. I was in deep shit.
“I believe I was quite capable, given enough time, of rescuing myself.” - I have no idea how I was going to get out of that…
“Petty hedge-magick.” - (Actual meaning: Novice or amateur spellcasting.) Morpheus meaning: Something I woefully under-estimate.
“…help me… …please…” - I am weak, defenseless, and completely at your mercy and if you nurse me back to health we shall never speak of this again and no one else will ever hear those words uttered from me. I am going to lose consciousness now. Bye.
“After a fashion, I can.” - It’ll happen. Might take me a few decades but it’ll happen. I can do it. I will do it. But I’ll be lazy about it. Don’t rush me.
“I mislike (insert random thing here)” - I hate this thing!
“I feel cold.” or “It is cold.” - I am traumatized by what is currently happening.
“What could possibly go wrong?” - Equitable to Sarah saying “It’s a piece of cake.” in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. He might as well say “Everything is about to go very, very, very, wrong.”
“I am perfectly self-sufficient.” - Oh, God, I am so lonely! Please, hold me.
_______________________________
Bonus:
Daniel:
“I walked.” - You REALLY want me to sit here and explain the mechanics of interdimensional travel to you right here and now? No. This is easier. And technically true.
“Time to go for a walk.” - I have a mission. (or) I have to set right one of Morpheus’ many f–k ups. Keep supper heated for me until I get back. Also I’m being cryptic because of wibbly wobbly Timey Wimey… stuff.
I just sent this to the Sandman lead showrunner, Allan Heinberg, suspecting he was deep enough into the Morpheus World that he would find it funny and accurate. He did.
