This, while shifting tones and genres between family drama, horror, comedy, historical fiction, whimsical fantasy, cosmic science fiction, mythology, crime drama, and surreal tone poems. At other times, it only gives them the briefest of cameos in stories about emperors, madmen, immortals, and plenty of ordinary people. It's a series that shifts between longer story arcs and seemingly disconnected short stories, sometimes focused on the title character and his truly unforgettable siblings. The Sandman, the comic book series, is notable for being extremely literate, layered, creative and surprisingly emotional, but arguably the most groundbreaking thing about it was its deeply strange structure. And if its creators are given a chance to adapt the rest of the 75-issue comic book series (plus spin-offs, perhaps?), it will only become more so with each passing season. What results is something that doesn't exactly tower over everything else around it, but it is almost entirely unique as a piece of television. Some changes have been made, however, to enable its transition from page to screen and to bring it (slightly) up to date. It may not represent the very apex of TV in the way the originals did the comic book medium, but it's really damn good – and I can all but guarantee you've never seen anything quite like it.Īdapted for television by Gaiman himself along with David S Goyer and showrunner Allan Heinberg (all three of whom have extensive comics and screenwriting credits to their name), the first season of The Sandman – which deals with Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll's House, the first two volumes of the trade paperback collection of the series – remains very faithful to the comics. But boy, did it have its work cut out for it.Īstonishingly, while the series, which ultimately landed on Netflix, still isn't a patch on the comics (few things are), it turned out far, far better than anyone could possibly have hoped. It is only now, in the true Golden Age of television, that adapting Sandman could have been seen as anything other than a pipe dream. The idea of doing The Sandman in two or even four hours is so ludicrous in retrospect that it's hard to believe anyone thought it could be done. I can also pretty confidently claim that it's probably, on a purely technical level, the best too.Įarlier attempts to adapt it into a feature film obviously failed miserably, no matter how impressive the talent involved – no matter how much input Neil Gaiman himself had on the adaptation. It's my single favourite comic book series, one that I have read at least three or four times all the way through. Still, I have never come across any long-form piece of comic book storytelling that matches, let alone surpasses, The Sandman. Sandman was released by DC Comics, and nothing that Gaiman has written since, no matter how excellent, has matched its impact.įor my money, there may perhaps be better single issues and graphic novels out there. Yes, Gaiman is British and has written numerous novels that have topped the literary charts worldwide, but the point still stands. A perennial bestseller and one of the most acclaimed comics/graphic novels of all time, The Sandman and Gaiman (who created it along with artists Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg) have enjoyed a certain level of "mainstream" recognition enjoyed by few others to come out of the American comic book industry. Dream’s eventual escape leaves him weakened, but he will need to collect all of his strength if he is to reverse the immense damage done to both the waking world and the Dreaming in his absence.Īside, perhaps, from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, no comic book adaptation has ever arrived with a greater mix of anticipation and dread than Neil Gaiman's (and the many, many artists who worked on it) epic dark-fantasy series, The Sandman. In 1916, when a magician by the name of Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) tries to capture Death (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) to get her to return his dead son to him, he captures Dream instead and imprisons him for well over a century. For Dream, that is the dreaming – the place that all beings go when they sleep. Older than gods and almost as old as the universe itself each of the Endless rule over their respective realms. But most of all, he is Dream of the Endless (Tom Sturridge): one of seven immortal siblings who are the anthropomorphic manifestations of Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium (who was once Delight), respectively.
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