Before
appearing for at the Sandman panel at Comic-Con, writer Neil Gaiman and artist J.H.
Williamson III talked to the press about returning to one of the best comic
books series ever, the wider audience this time around and the visual style of
the book.
“Gaiman
was first asked what it was like for him returning to the Sandman universe after all these years:
It’s really fun actually. It’s nerve
wracking. It’s definitely a peculiar sense of terror. When I
started doing sandman I didn’t know if anybody would be interested. I was
basically writing it for me…and very quickly I found that I was writing for
about 40,000 people and then I was writing 50,000 people and then 100,000
people. And that was still nice, that was still Okay. But there was
a level at which you go, “the world population is huge and there’s 120,000
people who know about my comic” and that’s a tiny, tiny part of the population,
but it made me happy. And even toward the end when we were outselling
Batman and Superman, I was saying, “It’s only a little thing, and it’s nice.”
And then a few years had gone by and the graphic novel collections have sold
more and more with every year that’s gone by… I’ve asked DC how many
copies we’ve actually sold, because we’ve got this figure of 7 Million that
I’ve seen a few times, but I was saying, “Guys, those 7 Million graphic novel
figure is the one that you rolled out in 2003.” And we’ve sold a fuck of a lot
of books since 2003. No one’s every actually sat down and counted all
this and we don’t actually know how we’d count, because are you counting
comics? Are you counting books? Are you counting collections?
And none of us really know, but the upshot of all that is that 25 years after I
started writing a comic that I didn’t know if anybody was going to read and
that I thought would probably be cancelled at issue eight…that’s all changed.
Now I’m doing it for millions of people and in my head they’re all looking over
my shoulder as I write. And they’re all going, “this better be worth
waiting for. This better be good.” And there’s millions of them.
Is
it hard for Gaiman not to let that kind of audience pressure sway the way he
tells the story?
It’s a little bit difficult. There was a point
writing Sandman. It was about issue 8 that I had to make
a big decision because the most popular thing I had done at that point was Sandman #4. People had loved going to hell they
loved facing off against Lucifer…Fan mail on that was happy and thrilled, and I
had a storyline that was going to be called Season of Mists and I knew that
that was going to be Morpheus going to hell, facing off against Lucifer.
It was going to be cool, fans were going to love it, and I thought “Okay I have
a choice. I can do that story that everybody is going to love or I can do
this thing in my head called The
Dolls House and I don’t know if anybody is going to
like that at all. It’s nothing like anything that’s been before…it’s
different. And I went “Okay I’m going to do the thing that I don’t know
if the fans are going to like and we’ll find out.” That’s what I did, and in
some ways that became in some ways a kind of wonderful model for me for the
rest of Sandman because it meant that I was actually allowed to do things that
fans didn’t like.
…
Williams
is also feeling the pressure of expectation as he attempts the balancing act of
honoring the Sandman universe that came before and bringing
his own style to it:
That’s a very challenging thing for me and I am
feeling the pressure, probably more so on myself than anyone else is putting on
me because I want to do the series justice, I want to do Neil’s writing
justice. It’s a weird thing because it’s a prequel, but at the same time
in some ways it still needs to feel like now. So how do we walk the line
of being a prequel, but still feeling relevant and fresh today on a visual
level? That’s been very challenging, but I think so far we’re doing
okay. As a creator and artist that’s definitely on my mind.
…
When
asked about his visual approach the Sandman world
Williams said:
For lack of a better term it’s a bit sporadic
because I’m trying to bring different qualities to each scene to make them
distinct and with Sandman, since he’s the lord of dreams and it’s about stories
and how stories can make you feel I want to make sure that each scene has this
emotional beauty to it.
Was
it difficult for Gaiman to reconnect with the story and maintain the same tone?
The characters are still there and the characters
sound like themselves. They’re as much fun as they ever were…That’s the
joy and that’s the challenge. Did you feel that the 42 Neil who wrote Endless Nights was writing the same characters as the
26 year old Neil who started writing them in Sandman
#1? If you did then I think we have a good chance.
When
asked what’s different about Morpheus as we see him in the past, Gaiman Joked:
Short hair.
…”
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