How (and Why) Neil Gaiman Finally Adapted ‘The Sandman’ for TV

Could be: I definitely enjoyed the comic immensely back in the day. However watching the adaptation after should be compared to a re-read perhaps.

Adaptations aren't necessarily worse though. The Martian is better than the book. The yesteryear Dune is better than the book (I don't really like the book tho). Altered Carbon is a draw on the first season, but quickly outshines the book sequels later.

From what I bore to watch, it's a quite faithful adaptation - even if somewhat simplified.

As someone who only read a bunch of those 80s/90s "transgressive" comic books in the late 2000s-early 2010s, thanks to the wonders of the Web (and never saw any sign of anyone else having heard of these particular works in my godforsaken corner of the world, though Gaiman is somewhat known for his collabs with Pratchett), I could draw comparison with "Preacher" and "The Boys" (based on the eponymous works by Garth Ennis), which seem to be doing the whole "comic book to TV show because we bought off all the counterculture and are consequently running out of interesting intellectual property" thing a bit better. Taking more liberties with the source material, too; adding stuff that wasn't in the book but bears the original spirit.

Interestingly enough, those are also more grittier and less "politically correct" tales - even though their protagonists also tend to espouse enlightened views of radical acceptance, and the underlying message seems to be that the real antagonist is not just some entrenched establishment of crooked power mongers, but the mass of NPCs who enable them. Guess violence is timeless and magical realism is only relevant in the context of specific historical moments of cultural transition - who would've known?

Of course, there's comparatively less of that particular conflict overtly represented in the Sandman - it's one of those metaphysical things where most of the action happens in the characters' inner worlds. (Maybe that's why they thought it was such a timeless tale that recasting some of the characters as non-Gothic would be sufficient modernization?) Still, I consider Gaiman's work part of the same campaign of guerilla cultural warfare that was conducted around the turn of the century by teaching the kids lateral thinking, imagination, and of course emotional literacy and compassion. And of course the kids took that and went to become salaried creatives building nostalgic simulacra to mask the terminal disenchantment of the world (no enchantment -> no hope -> workers don't breed). So, yeah, guess we lost that one.

Finally got around to reading William Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, and boy oh boy does the man have a good handle on how the media machine acts to transform artworks and the human experiences that art glorifies into a uniform bland "concept soup". Guess they'll start shooting shows from his desiccated corpus next. (Heard it here first, folks!)

All in all a Constantine/Watchmen tier adaptation. Don't waste time watching it, just torrent the original comic books and enjoy.

I really don't think it's Desire anyone is annoyed about, and using that as an example to dismiss the criticism only weakens the dismissal.

Lucifer... sure, he's canonically without genitals anyway and decidedly uninterested in things like gender norms - and I'm actually excited to see Gwendolyn Christie portray the character.

Casting a black woman as Death goes directly against Gaiman's explicitly stated concept of how he imagined the character, and while she wears many guises, it seems wrong to just break the visual similarity (paleness) between the Endless. I really, really hope the actress can transport the character's essence (IMO first and foremost a kind of universial compassion and humor) sufficiently to make it not matter.

And then Lucien as a black woman... was that really necessary? At some point it just feels forced.

The issue with this season is that while the comics are beloved, the first book is quite weak; Gaiman was still finding his voice, still experimenting with what the books were going to be, and constrained by editorial requirements from DC. The first several issues are full of cringey tie-ins to other DC IP, and the horror elements are forced (The Sandman is not a horror comic series).

If you're not a Sandman stan, my advice is to watch episode 1, and then episode 5, skipping 2-4. The first actually-good episode is 6; the Hob Gadling stuff is sort of emblematic of the the comic grows into, so if you like it, you'll like the rest of it.

If you are a Sandman stan, something to note is that they seem to have deliberately severed it from the DC Universe. I'm surprised at how many elements of the first and second book turn out to be been DC tie-ins; for instance, Hector and Lyta Hall in Dolls House were I guess defined by other DC comics? Anyways, they've gone out of their way to cut all that stuff out the series.

I think most of the changes are for the better.

I think the series is fine.

I was way, way into Sandman when I was younger.

This show isn't in my Top N list. I'm curious to see if it gets renewed.

By comparison, the HBO Watchmen series is not only one of the best comic book adaptations of all time, but also one of my favorite TV series of the last 10 years.

The entire story, of the whole comic series, is an emotional coming of age story about a petulant man-child. So this is a weird critique.