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.
Only as shows that Crowley would find rather fanciful, and as comics that Aziraphale would never read.
For those who want to know where Good Omens falls in The Sandman, apparently it’s a book so well loved by Paul and Alexander Burgess that it’s kept beside his bed. And likely was read to Alex while he was under his curse of Eternal Waking before it was lifted. Perhaps it soothed him a little.
(Note: I would never have been able to see that if I couldn’t enlarge.)
Though personally I still love this fan art where the feather from an angel’s wing was actually Aziraphale’s.
I think Good Omens was published in the Sandman universe when it was published in ours, which would have been May 1990, by which time Alex would already have been asleep. Probably Paul wanted books by the bed Alex would have liked, for when he one day woke up, and it was a book he had enjoyed…
By challenging a canonical writer like Shakespeare and subverting in his artistic genius in your Sandman series, through co-opting a well-known like A Midsummer Night's Dream, you kinda ran the risk of alienating readers who admire Shakespeare. So, how did you work around this?
It has never occurred to me that I was running the risk of alienating people who loved Shakespeare. Only that I was running a much bigger risk of alienating readers who didn’t like Shakespeare, because I had to hope that the readers would enjoy Shakespeare and “ A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and not be intimidated by it, or by the Shakespeare they would meet in the final issue of Sandman, “The Tempest”.
If the reader took no pleasure in the words, or in the stories, or in the biography, in Sandman 13, or 19, or 75, then I have failed as a writer.
Sandman #54 by Neil Gaiman and Michael Allred (pages 3-24)
DC/Vertigo
Wildcat was in it, because I asked Mike Allred if there was anything he wanted to draw, and he said yes, Wildcat. So that was why Wildcat was in the Prez issue.
It’s amazing how many thirty-year-old pop culture references in Sandman are not only still relevant today but thanks to new adaptions are INCREDIBLY relevant today.
1. During Morpheus’ captivity one of his guards was reading Stephen King’s It, which was only recently re-adapted for a theatrical release. Part two of the theatrical adaptation of Stephen King’s It came out just a few months ago.
2. Lucifer does not like the musical Cats. The new film adaptation of Cats hits theatres this weekend and is already getting terrible reviews…
3. Alexander Burgess and Paul (His lover / possibly husband by modern standards) keeps a copy of Good Omens next to his bed. Good Omens has become a very popular book and mini-series for the LGBTQ+ community and is currently one of the most popular tags on Tumblr. The mini-series was released to DVD and Blu Ray last month. I know I’m cheating with this one since Sandman was written by Neil Gaiman and Good Omens was co-written by Neil Gaiman (with Terry Pratchett). But it still fits.
4. In the story “A Game of you” part five is called “Over The sea to Sky” which is a lyric from The Skye Boat Song. Though an oldie this song is currently being used as the theme song to the TV show Outlander.
Bonus: A meme before memes…. (Possibly the origin of the menacing eyes behind glass “Soon”. meme). “Soon” from during Morpheus’ captivity in a glass cage surrounded in a magical binding circle. This is from the very same page of issue 1 where one of his guards was reading Stephen King’s It.
Even with the timeline changed for the Netflix series, so much of Sandman doesn’t need to be changed at all. This comic truly is timeless.
Bonus 2: Sandman was created shortly after the Crisis of Infinite Earths event at DC comics. That event just happened / is happening right now on the CW, connecting all established DC media incarnations, including Netflix’s Lucifer. Netflix is adapting Sandman.
I used to suspect that Sandman was ahead of its time. But apparently time is circular, and we have returned to the late 80s…
There’s not a lot of pages I wrote over 20 years ago I’d look at proudly now. There’s normally something that feels false or forced or incompletely imagined.
I only got into Sandman last June. I wish I had read it sooner but no one really described it well to me so I went in almost completely unawares.
The main character in Sandman is Morpheus AKA Dream of The Endless. He is the living embodiment of dreams. His usual appearance (as his form changes depending on who is looking upon him) has peculiar, bone-white, skin and completely-black eyes with tiny star-like pupils that flare when he’s using his powers. He has wild black hair and is extremely thin.
His minion are entities of Dreams and Nightmares. He seems to have a fondness for Halloween aesthetics from Jack-o-lanterns and Gothic castles to spooky old houses (like The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery), and ravens.
Morpheus AKA Dream of The Endless is of a family of beings known as… well… The Endless.
The Endless are a family of anthropomorphic personifications. That means they are living embodiments of certain concepts. For example Morpheus / Dream’s older sister is Death. She’s essentially the Grim Reaper.
The family consists of Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and little Delirium (She used to be Delight but she went mad).
Most of Sandman is the story of Morpheus and what happens to him. The place to begin is Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes.
In this story Morpheus gets summoned and captured by early twentieth century occultists who had been trying to capture Death but got him by mistake. He is kept locked in a windowless cellar in a glass cage for nearly a century.
When he finally escapes he gets his revenge on the son of his original captor and then seeks out his tools that were taken from him when he was captured. These tools include his pouch of dream sand (he is the Sandman after all), his helm (a battle helmet, though he rarely if ever goes into battle, made from a skull and spine of Old Gods and resembles a gas mask), and his rubly dreamstone amulet, a conduit for his power (like a wizard’s wand).
The first storyline is Morpheus reclaiming these lost artifacts. At one point this leads him to Hell where he faces a demon who has gotten a hold of his helm. The demon challenges him to a game of wits, creativity, and imagination as opposed to physical combat.
Morpheus used to be something of an asshole but he undergoes considerable character growth through the course of the series and becomes more and more compassionate.
Often he finds himself simply trying to set right the wrongs of his own past. For example Sandman: Season of Mists starts with Morpheus reluctantly (he’s very afraid) going back to Hell to rescue a soul he wrongfully left there centuries before only to find that Lucifer is quitting (basis for the plot of the Fox / Netflix TV series).
Lucifer leaves Morpheus the key to Hell and and now Morpheus must figure out what to do with it while The Dreaming (his realm) is bombarded with deities and beings of folklore who all want the key to Hell for themselves since it’s “Prime psychic real estate.”
The Sandman is strange. It’s surreal and it’s beautiful. Each volume of Sandman is drawn in a different art style. There’s very little combat-style action or explosions though there is occasional horror and gore. It’s more like a work of pure literature than any traditional idea of a comic book.
The order Sandman should be read in is as follows:
1. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes 2. The Sandman: The Doll’s House 3. The Sandman: Dream Country 4. The Sandman: Season of Mists 5. The Sandman: A Game of You 6. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections 7. The Sandman: Brief Lives 8. The Sandman: The Worlds’ End 9. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones 10. The Sandman: The Wake
The Sandman: Dream Hunters The Sandman Endless Nights The Sandman Overture (a very beautiful prequel)
The Sandman can also be read in the Omnibus form (three volumes) or in the “Absolute editions” (There are six in all). The Absolute editions are better than the omnibuses and physically easier to read (larger print) but they are more expensive.
I’m reading the Sandman right now, and a character talking to Julius Caesar praised him for giving the people cheap corn.
The Columbian exchange didn’t occur for a millennium and a half. Literally unreadable. Sorry Neil, I can’t continue reading this.
The word Caesar used in latin, in his book on the Gallic Wars is Frumentum, which is commonly translated into English as Corn. “How odd,” you might think. “I didn’t think the Romans would even have known that corn exists.”
The word corn is old. It means the main grain of the region. It also predates the old world discovering the maize growing in the new world. The use of the word to mean exclusively Sweetcorn or Maize is a fairly modern North American usage.
Panel 6: Corn: What Americans call "corn" is one specific grain,
originally native to the Americas. In Pre-Columbian English, though, "corn"
meant any grain, particularly the most important local grain, usually wheat,
and retains some portion of that meaning in British English today. It is used
in that sense here.
One of those pages I loved and am still proud of, and I sometimes wonder what the world thought of it, but mostly I just remember the pleasure in the writing of it.
(How can I have started writing the first issue of Sandman 30 years ago? That can’t be right…)
I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.
I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.
It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.
It was overwhelming. Unattainable.
I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.
I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.
My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.
Wait, back up, what was that character again? Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.
Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.
I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.
We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.
It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.
I can’t see Sandman, really. All I can see is the patches and the solutions and the hacks, the places where the art wasn’t what I hoped for or expected, or where the writing fell short of the thing in my head. It’s long enough ago that I still wonder why I was so insistent that DC simply dump “Three Septembers and a January” because it was bad enough that simply publishing it would ruin Sandman. (Sensibly, Tom Peyer, who was editing while Karen Berger was off having a sudden baby, ignored me, or made pacifying noises that perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I believed. These days it’s one of my favourite episodes.)
But yes. It’s all work, and it’s all about the work. I used to write four pages of SANDMAN a day on a good day, which was about eight pages of script, although I’d usually write the last six pages in one swoop being grumpy that I didn’t have enough pages and throwing things away so we’d end on page 24. (Although once, in Game of You, I simply miscounted and wrote a 25 page comic accidentally, so we only did 23 pages the next month to make up for it.) By the end of Sandman I was writing two pages a day on a good day…
