Enter Sandman

Neil Gaiman's breakthrough comic series finally arrives on screen, leading a wave of fantasy epics headed to television.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

It could be said that, after a long nightmare, Neil Gaiman is having a dream run with screen adaptations. The streaming era has been good to the veteran fantasy author. It has allowed his past works, often too mythologically and theologically dense and historically sprawling for easy screen translation, to become bigbudget, star-studded television shows.

He has had some movies of his lighter work, like fairy-tale comedy Stardust (2007) and the stop-motion animated children's horror Coraline (2009). More recently, though, his novels American Gods and Good Omens (co-written with Terry Pratchett) have become multi-season series on Amazon Prime, the TV arm of a company that has been selling his books since it began.

Considering the size of the writer's catalogue, there has not been a lot of Gaiman on screen, despite all the meetings he has been in.

"I'd definitely gone through the Hollywood blender," he told the Auckland Writers Festival last year, where he attracted the longest lines of autograph seekers. He remembered when, in the early 2000s, the Hollywood Reporter published a cover story on why he was getting so lost in translation.

"It was a whole thing about how Neil Gaiman has had more things optioned and not made than any other human being on the planet. What's nice is, actually looking back on it, most of those things hadn't happened because the time was wrong for them."

Now it seems the time is right for The Sandman, his breakthrough DC Comics series, published between 1989 and 1996, which arrives as a Netflix series with Gaiman as co-creator, co-writer and executive producer.

At the time, the 75 issues were described as "the greatest epic in the history of comic books" by the Los Angeles Times. It sold in near Superman and Batman numbers to a readership that didn't otherwise read comics. Norman Mailer declared it "a comic strip for intellectuals".