Neil Gaiman on 'The Sandman': 'You'd be amazed how non-CGI it is'

The impact 'The Sandman' has had on the world of comics could be portrayed in its own Netflix show - much like a film and television history often tasked with adapting comics to motion pictures . The bumpy, detour-prone road that Neil Gaiman's pioneering phantasmagoria has traveled in its 30+ year journey from page to screen would require at least two parts.

For Netflix's adaptation of the Dream Lord's (Tom Sturridge) adventures through time, space, and at times Washington Square Park, one of the key creative decisions was determining how well this "man of sand" would or could even reflect the style of the comic book. What could it create instead of the abstract, iconic impressions that only comics' particular format of sequential words and images can provide? Just like a dream, a drawing is tangible, but accurate.

The show's response is darker and slightly more polished than the real thing, but certainly comes closer to HBO's overly realistic take on "Watchmen" than the self-consciously unreal pictorial world of the "Sin City" films. In a recent interview with IndieWire, production designer Jon Gary Steele joked that he would be fired if he made sets that looked like sketches from the "Sandman" comic book. But it's still the touchpoint that the creative team took inspiration from when designing the show. "You had sets like Desire's threshold, you know, it's some squiggles in the graphic novel," Steele said. "And I remember talking to [co-creator Alan Heinberg], I had just printed a bunch of amoeba-like buildings from the 60s, and I said, 'I want to do it like the 'inside a heart'. And he goes, 'do it.'”

"The Sandman"

Courtesy of Netflix

Desire's Lair (Mason Alexander Park) is all about sumptuous reds and curvaceous, hard-to-pin-down shapes; it's really an externalization of the character's Machiavellian personality, which is one of the joys comic book creator and show co-creator Neil Gaiman has found in having a new way to explore the story. "[When writing a comic,] I comfortably have 24 pages," Gaiman told IndieWire. "I have six panels per page, but I'm also going to have to have pages with larger panels. I can fit a maximum of 35 words in a panel, before it gets cluttered.

While "The Sandman" strives to be a fuller and more realized version of the original story, it is a version very aware of the contrast between the Infinite, embodiments of the forces that largely govern the human life, and the real world around them; like Gaiman's adaptation "American Gods," the mythical and the mundane don't clash so much as they coexist in a real world, but...