After remaining a beloved fixture of comics for decades, The Sandman has finally found its way into live-action, with a Netflix series debuting to great acclaim earlier this month. The show, which has consisted (thus far) of a ten-episode first season and one bonus episode, has adapted the original Vertigo Comics series in a pretty stellar detail, while still leaving a lot of storylines left to explore in potential future seasons. While speaking to ComicBook.com about the recently-released bonus episode, series creator Neil Gaiman addressed whether or not he would consider writing new content for The Sandman‘s TV version — and revealed that he would much rather adapt the wide swath of story that’s still left in the main comic, as well as in its various offshoots and miniseries.
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“Yes, but I’m also incredibly aware that we have an awful lot of we’ve got,” Gaiman revealed in our interview, which you can check out above. “We’ve just covered in the first season, essentially, the first 400 pages or 450 pages. Now we’ve dropped eleven [episodes] of Sandman and we have 2600 pages to go. So I don’t look at this going ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to add something else in?’ I tend to look at this and go, ‘We have a long road to travel, with a lot of places that we have to stop on the way.’ How can we get as much of The 75 issues of Sandman, of Dream Hunters, of Endless Nights, and then of Sandman: Overture? Everything that we’ve done, we’ve done knowing that, in many ways, the odds are against us getting to finish the story, but also knowing that if we do not plan to get to the end of the story, then we will have things missing when we need to get there. Which is an incredibly familiar feeling for me, because when I was writing Sandman, I never knew I was going to be able to get to the end of the story, if DC were going to cancel it, if something would happen. So it does feel kind of familiar.”
The Sandman is based on the iconic comic from Gaiman and artists Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Jill Thompson, Shawn McManus, Marc Hempel, Bryan Talbot, and Michael Zulli. A rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend are seamlessly 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.
The series stars Tom Sturridge as Dream, Kirby Howell-Baptise as Death, Gwendoline Christie as Lucifer, Charles Dance as Roderick Burgess, Asim Chaudhry as Abel, Sanjeev Bhaskar as Cain, Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, Joely Richardson as Ethel Cripps, David Thewlis as John Dee, Boyd Holbrook as The Corinthian, Stephen Fry as Gilbert, Patton Oswalt as the voice of Dream’s raven Matthew, and Mason Alexander Park as Desire.
Do you hope that The Sandman gets a second season? What stories do you want to see the show adapt next? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
The first season of The Sandman is now available to stream exclusively on Netflix.
