“The Sandman” on Netflix: Neil Gaiman, dreamlike writer

In 2008, The Times said of him it was “the most famous writer you’ve never heard of”. However, in thirty-five years of career, accumulating dozens of novels, short stories, comic strips and screenplays for cinema and television, crowned by the greatest literary prizes in science fiction and fantasy, Neil Gaiman is a cult author for lovers of genre literature. A guest star in an episode of simpsons or the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. An author who delivers one of his most exploratory and most famous works from the start of his career with comics The Sandman, whose television series adaptation is put online by Netflix from August 5th.

From 1989 to 1996, he revisited a character from the DC Comics universe created in 1939, the Sandman (sandman, in English). Throughout the albums (illustrated by various cartoonists), the British writer offers a great saga built around the family of the Eternals: there is the hero Dream, master of dreams with human features, but also Death, Destruction, Desire, Despair, Destiny and Delirium.

British wave in the comics

In 1988, Neil Gaiman and his sidekick, illustrator artist Dave McKean, honed their weapons at DC Comics by tackling a minor character from the Batman universe, Black Orchid. The two artists have known each other for a short time and a compatriot, the author and critic of comics Paul Gravett, put their foot in the stirrup by ordering them some boards for a magazine, will tell Gaiman in 2014 in a long interview with comic planet. The result is the album Violent Cases. The narrator recounts a childhood memory, a consultation with an osteopath who himself had had Al Capone as a patient. This is the first stone of a long friendship: McKean will notably sign the emblematic covers of The Sandman.

“Neil Gaiman was part of that wave of British artists who, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the wake of Alan Moore, were recruited by DC editor Karen Berger, who then founded the Vertigo label »explains François Hercouët, editorial director of Urban Comics which undertook in 2012 to publish in France the integral of The Sandman. For the publisher, this generation of authors is a pioneer. According to him, “She brought a fresh look to the heritage of comics and the myths of superheroes. She breathed new semantic and thematic storytelling into American comics, often tackling more mature subject matter.” citing for example “the import of the word fucking in these comics, explicit sexuality, modernity and a certain shade”.

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