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5 Things We Learnt About New Sandman Titles From Neil Gaiman

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8 years ago

March 2, 2018

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A New Kind Of Dream State

♦ Yesterday, EW announced that Vertigo would be launching a new line of Sandman universe books overseen by Neil Gaiman. Here’s 5 things we found out from Gaiman from EW’s chat with him…

Gaiman realised that there was still a lot of potential in the Sandman characters that other creators could explore:”it’s a huge sandbox with so many wonderful toys that nobody’s getting to play with right now. I started feeling guilty. I liked the idea of getting the toys played with again, reminding people how much fun this is, and also getting the opportunity to work with some fantastic writers. Down the line, there will be fantastic artists as well.”
There will be areas of the world which will be off limits to creators who aren’t Gaiman, he admits: “It’s always been personal, and there are still areas of it that have velvet ropes set up and “do not disturb” signs hanging on the door. People will ask, “Can we do this?” and I’ll be like, “No.” Some of that is because one day I will want to go there and tell those stories, even if it’s not for another 5 or 10 years.”
The creative team came together with Gaiman sitting with the editors at Vertigo: “I got to assemble them working with the Vertigo editorial team. They suggested some people, I suggested some people, I got to read some samples, and people went, “Yeah, I think this is going to work.” But in each case, it was trying to fit somebody to the character and the book. An example would be Nalo, who writes science-fiction and fantasy and historical stuff and books that blend all of those things, and they’re always informed by Caribbean roots and African roots. And going, “Okay, if we’re gonna do House of Whispers, if we’re going to do Erzulie and have all this voodoo lore stuff, then I want Nalo to do it because there isn’t anybody better.” The joy of this is being able to go out and find the best person.”
He is excited by the prospect of a new Tim Hunter book as part of the Sandman universe too: “Books of Magic was an idea I came up with and did 30 years ago and loved and had an enormous amount of fun with. It was pre-Harry Potter, and the idea of a bespectacled, tousled 12-year-old boy with an owl learning magic was this sort of weird new thing we were trying to figure out as it went along. I love the idea of starting that again now, because now you’re in a universe in which everybody and their brother knows how that kind of story ought to go. Now we’re going to go back and look at ways it can go, both lighter and darker (he said, picking his words with care), than the original.”
He sees the new line as a way of celebrating the history of Vertigo: “For this stuff, it’s really the joy of looking back at the history of Vertigo. There’s always stuff I created in the Vertigo world, that spun off and went out into the world and did really well. But the natural life cycle of these things is it came, it went away. Let’s bring it all back, let’s have fun with it. So for me, the joy is just sitting with smart writers who love the material and saying, ‘Let’s go play.'”

To read the whole chat, visit here