After many many years of false hopes and crushed plans, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is being made into film. Better yet, it’s coming to Netflix, and first glimpses look marvelous.
Sandman made use of a stable of characters from the DC universe, including the classic Sandman comic figures, and added a lot more. Gaiman drew from mythology, classic literature, and his own prodigious imagination to flesh out an epic that (oh, one hopes!) will be almost as good on screen as it is on the page. For more than ten years, Sandman was the quintessential graphic novel. It’s a classic, one that looks backward to literature and forward to a living mythology. There’s nothing else like it.
This is cause for celebration, and there was indeed celebration when the trailer dropped this week:
I’m sure I’ll have something coherent to say about the adaptation, once we’ve seen more than 60 seconds of video. But those 60 seconds look impressive, indeed.
There’s still some time before the series debuts, so if you haven’t read Sandman and want the experience of the graphic novel before the film version starts, you have a little time to get going on it. The first volume, Preludes and Nocturnes has broken unwary readers, so you have to plan to get through 24 Hours, Gaiman’s foray into horror, and out the other side.
It’s worth it.
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