I didn’t want to make things that were less than they could have been, which didn’t mean that I didn’t want to take chances. And I couldn’t see the point in making bad films. Why?įrom the age of 24 to 27, I was a film critic, and I saw a lot of bad films. Despite the many television adaptations of your work that you’ve been a part of in recent years, including Good Omens on Amazon and American Gods on Hulu, you have a reputation for trying to steer Hollywood away from-not toward-your work. When it’s my turn to go, there’d just be somebody lovely there, saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you should have looked both ways before crossing that street.” That was the Death that I wanted. When I came to create Death, I thought, well, on the one hand, I could do a standard that people are expecting, but where would be the fun in that? I loved the idea of a Death that was warm, a Death that was nice, a Death that you’d like to meet.

There’s no shortage of horrors in The Sandman, but the character of Death offers some of the warmest moments in the show. My eventual theory was that whoever was giving me them was so disappointed by my reaction to them that they just couldn’t be bothered anymore. But whenever I’d get a nightmare, I would wake up thrilled and immediately jot it down and go, “Whoa, I can use that.” Fairly quickly, the nightmares just went away.

And when I was writing Sandman, they continued. When I was a kid, I had terrible nightmares. I’ve learned to trust my dreams and nightmares. What did you learn from your dreams–or your nightmares? In one of the season’s later episodes, Morpheus tells a recently recaptured nightmare that a nightmare’s purpose is to reveal a dreamer’s fears so that they may face them. The feeling that you have to see every one of the films because otherwise you might miss out on something that’s important to the film that you do want to see. And I think it’s also made people very aware that Marvel movies have become incredibly successful by doing what Marvel comics were doing for years-interconnected stories. I think it’s made people very aware of comics as a source of intellectual property. I don’t think that it’s particularly changed the world of comics.

How has that changed the world of comics? Superhero narratives are now among the most popular stories in the world. We actually had gone and made something that felt pretty much of its time. It feels like we kind of in a weird way did all the work. And now we’re doing a TV series of the comic.

Back when nobody commented on the fact that it was filled with gay characters, trans characters and Black characters and so on. Mostly going through the old comics reminded us all the extent to which Sandman had kind of been rather ahead of its time. Was there anything that, upon rereading, you were excited to update?

The sandman comic