Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman,’ from Giant Mechanical Spiders to the Joker

These Days, Neil Gaiman’s most frequent collaborator is his own twentysomething self. As an executive producer on the decades-in-the-making Netflix adaptation of The Sandman and the showrunner of Amazon Prime’s Good Omens (based on his 1990 novel with the late Terry Pratchett), the wildly successful and prolific fantasy author keeps confronting a younger Neil’s artistic decisions. Usually, he has to admit those choices were correct. “He was pretty smart,” Gaiman says.

In an extended interview with Rolling Stone, which you can also watch in full above, Gaiman looks back at the creation of the Sandman and other milestones of his younger years, addresses the status of future seasons of the Netflix series (which just dropped a surprise bonus episode), and much, much more.

So in how many countries is The Sandman Number One on Netflix right now?
Many. It’s been really amazing. I’m so used to Sandman being a thing that the people who love it, love it, but they’re normally fairly small. I mean, when it came out as a DC comic, we were never in the top 50. We were somewhere in the bottom 50. And eventually Sandman #75 was the bestselling comic of its month, outselling Batman and Superman. But we mostly did that because everybody else’s sales dropped slowly and ours just stayed up.

Right. You were assisted by the implosion of the comic-book industry at that time.
The implosion of the comic-book industry got us to Number One. So we didn’t do it by being this huge thing that went to the top. But what I forget is that we’ve had 35 years of selling millions of collections of graphic novels. So now you bring out something new and it’s Sandman, and the world turns out for it.

In this case, you didn’t have to destroy the TV industry to get to Number One. You actually are truly Number One by beating the other shows.
Yeah, exactly. As opposed to just destroying televisions and ways of watching television all over the land.

But despite being Number One, it is not yet certain, last I checked, that the show is being renewed. Can you talk about how that works?
Basically, the way that it works is making something like Sandman is incredibly expensive. This is not a cheap show. This is the opposite of a cheap show. This is dead expensive. And that means that in order to be renewed, we have to perform as well as everybody could possibly, possibly hope. So everybody is very hopeful. It’s all looking great. We’re certainly on track for it. But it’s all about how we do over the month after release.

“On track” sounds positive! Do they throw you any breadcrumbs as far as its status?
Yeah. Well, you get breadcrumbs, and much more importantly, most of the breadcrumbs that they give you are things that you can check publicly. I think last week, human beings on the face of this planet spent 127 million hours watching Sandman. That is an awful lot of Sandman. And the next-most-watched thing was watched for 65 million hours or whatever. So we’re doing well. We’re really doing great.

And you made it clear that if Netflix is foolish enough to not renew this show, there is a potential pathway to take this to another streamer or another network.
Back when we put the deal together, we made sure that there were ways to continue with Sandman. But we also all hoped that none of them would possibly be necessary, because we love our Netflix people and they love us. And they’ve been amazing. I mean, they even made a secret 11th episode of Sandman.

Yes. Which was a nice surprise this weekend, with the beloved “Calliope” and “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” stories.
And we managed to keep that secret despite the fact that I came very close to blowing it twice.

Yeah. You actually dropped the name of one of the actors in an interview.
Also I tweeted, back before we were thinking about how secret we were going to need to keep this, the cover to the book Here Comes the Candle [which appears in the Calliope half of the episode, and the comic-book version as well]. And I tweeted the fact that we’d cast some of the cats. So that was 18 months ago. Fortunately, enough people had forgotten that or thought maybe we’d canceled it or maybe it was just something else that we got away with it.

As far as the show goes, one could see it as a curse worthy of a plot within Sandman if you got to see one season of this thing being brought to life so beautifully, and then were robbed of the chance of seeing the rest. Would you see it that way, though?
I wouldn’t see it that way. I love the 11 episodes that we’ve done. I think they’re fabulous. They’re magical. I think we’ve got to see Tom Sturridge. You’ve got to see Gwendoline Christie. You’ve got to see Jenna Coleman. You’ve got to see Mason Alexander Park. You’ve got to see all of these people bring Sandman characters to life, and to do it really well and to do it in a way that is consistent with and feels like part of the comics. Most people don’t get there. I spent 30-something years battling bad versions of Sandman. If what I get is nine hours of amazing television, with the budget of a big-budget movie, we did great. I definitely wouldn’t feel like a failure. I would feel incredibly proud of what we’d made.

I’m trying to think. Would I be rationalizing there? I don’t think so. I think I just look at this, and I’m so proud. I said this to [CEO] Ted Sarandos at Netflix. He came over and he said, “Well, we’re all very excited about Sandman.” I said, “Me, too.” I said, “I’ve got to say I’m so proud of what we made. I don’t really care if anybody watches this or not. I’m just really proud of it.” He’s like [pauses], “Yeah, we want people to watch it.” I’m like, “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” Possibly the wrong person to say that to.

But honestly, that was always how I felt about Sandman. At the end of the day, I was making it for me. My idea with Sandman was there aren’t really many comics that would make me, at that time, a 28-year-old person, go down to the comic store once a month and buy a comic. I want to make a comic that would make me go and buy a comic. I want to write a comic that I would love. That was my agenda. Here, I feel like me and [showrunner] Allan Heinberg, with the connivance and assistance and support of [executive producer] David Goyer, that’s what we’ve made. We’ve made the show that we’d like to watch. We’ve made the Sandman that we’d like to see.

Obviously, this is a commercial thing. I very much want it to be commercial. But at the end of the day, I think we made it for us because I don’t know how to make it for anybody else.

If it does continue, would you want to write some episodes yourself and dive in the way that you’re doing with Good Omens?
I like the way that we’ve done it so far. I co-wrote episode one with Allan and David. The three of us had to find the tone and figure out what this thing was. I would very happily write or co-write an intro episode or a closing episode as we move forward. But mostly, I’m there in ghost form anyway. Every time Allan Heinberg hits a bump, he’s on the phone to me. We talk it out. We’re like, “How do we give Calliope agency? We need her to have agency, but we can’t change. We have a plot structure that we need. OK. What is she doing? How is this working? What if this happens?”

I feel like I’m in there every step of the way, every beat of the thing, just talking it through with Allan, being there, helping, advising, occasionally just going in and rewriting some dialogue and sending it over. Because often it’s quicker for me to just write the thing and send it than it is for me to say, “Why don’t you do something like this,” and then for it to come back and go, “Not quite like this.”

You did “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” via animation. And one of the first plans for Sandman adaptation involved partial animation. So that idea has been around there for quite a while.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, back in 1996, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, in their first or second Sandman script, and I think Roger Avary was on board as a director, they had “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” as part of that. Roger Avary suggested to the top brass at Warner back then that whenever we were in The Dreaming, he wanted it to be done in stop-motion animation, like Jan Švankmajer’s Alice. And they didn’t know what he was talking about. So he put on a screening of Švankmajer’s Alice for the Warner Movies top brass. And by the time he left the screening, he was fired from the project and his parking space name had been painted over. They were like, “This is madness. Get rid of him. This is not mainstream.”

Of course, there were many attempts to adapt this over the years. Under the producer Jon Peters, there was one infamous script that seemed to make it into a very silly action movie.
I haven’t read that whole script, [but] I’ve read as much of the script as I could take. And I’m not sure if it would’ve been an action movie or quite what it would’ve been. It was a mess. It never got better than a mess. It had giant mechanical spiders in it. The way that it worked …

Wait, did it really have giant mechanical spiders?
It did!

Do you know about Jon Peters’ obsession with giant mechanical spiders?
I heard about that later. And people were like, “Oh, you are kidding.” And I’m like, “No, it had a giant mechanical spider.” But much more important than that, Lucifer, Morpheus, and the Corinthian were identical triplets. They were a family of identical brothers, and it was all a race to see who could get the ruby, the helm, and the bag of sand before midnight on 1999, before the new millennium started, because whoever got it would be the winner. That was the plot. I remember them phoning me up. And I’m normally, I’m polite and nice if you’re on the phone. I try and find positive things to say to people who phone you up. And a guy in Jon Peters’ office phoned me up and he said, “So Neil, have you had a chance to read the script we sent you?”

And I said, “Well, yes. Yes, I did. I haven’t read all of it, but I’ve read enough.” He says, “So, pretty good. Huh?” And I said, “Well, no. It really isn’t.” He said, “Oh, come on. There must have been stuff in there you loved.” I said, “There was nothing in there I loved. There was nothing in there I liked. It was the worst script that I’ve ever read by anybody. It’s not just the worst Sandman script. That was the worst script I’ve ever been sent.” And then there was a pause. He says, “Oh, come on. That thing where we made the Corinthian the Sandman’s brother, that was good. Huh?” And I said, “No, that was really stupid.” And he said, “Oh, well, OK. You can’t win them all.” And I said, “No, you really can’t.” And I put down the phone and I thought, what do I do now?

So I sent the script to Ain’t It Cool News, which back then was read by people. And I thought, I wonder what Ain’t It Cool News will think of the script that they’re going to receive anonymously. And they wrote a fabulous article about how it was the worst script they’d ever been sent. And suddenly the prospect of that film happening went away. And instead Jon Peters turned his attention to Wild Wild West.

Which, I have to point out, has a giant mechanical spider in it — and according to Kevin Smith, Jon Peters tried to put a giant mechanical spider into his never-made Superman Lives screenplay as well.
He had one idea. It transmuted. And he had three properties… They said to him, you can have any three properties you want. And he chose Superman, Wild Wild West, and Sandman. And when I asked, why has he chosen Sandman? They said, because he saw a statue of Morpheus and he thought it looked cool.

The Sandman, in the beginning at least, is very much a project influenced by the possibilities that Alan Moore opened up in comic books. He was a mentor of yours, to an extent —  you even were something of a research assistant, unofficially, for Watchmen, right?
Yeah, that was my entire contribution to Watchmen, although one I was incredibly proud of having done. Initially he phoned me up and said, “You are an educated man. There’s a quote, ‘Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?’ I can’t remember where it’s from, but I want to quote this.”  And I went and checked and I said, “OK, it’s from the Book of Job.” Then after that, he’d phone me up saying, “I need a quote for…” I think I found him the quotes for [issue seven]: “brother to dragons, companion to owls.” And I got him some material on owls that he then used in the back. It was fun, just being Alan’s researcher. I was owl researcher and finder of things. And then I found him the Halloween poem [Eleanor Farjeon’s “Hallowe’en,” quoted in issue eight]. It was fun. And then my name is in the front of Watchmen, which is lovely.

And then Alan showed you how to write a comic book script at a comic-book convention?
It wasn’t a comic-book convention. It was a British fantasy convention. Alan came up to Birmingham. I remember at some point we’d been hanging around and I said, “Look, I don’t know what a comic script looks like. I know what a movie script looks like, but I don’t know – how do you write comics? How do you get what you want out of your head into an artist’s head?” And he grabbed a notebook and he sat there and he wrote, “OK, page one, panel one. Then you describe what you can see.” And he wrote a sample description. He showed me how, if you have somebody speaking, you write their name and you write what they say. And if you have a sound effect, you have “FX: SPLAT,” whatever. And if they think something it’s, THINKS… It was like, OK. And I wrote a John Constantine script for him, a six- or eight-pager called “The Day My Pad Went Mad” — named after the John Cooper Clarke poem. He said, “Yeah, it’s all right. It gets a bit wobbly at the end.” Then I wrote another one, called “Jack in the Green,” a story about a 16th-century Swamp Thing [which wasn’t published until 1999], and sent that to him. He said, “You got it.” I thought, “Good. OK. Now I can write comics.” 

Alan then enlisted you to take over on a series called Miracleman after he left it. You were writing for a publisher called Eclipse, and they went bankrupt in 1994, before you could finish the story. Now, supposedly, you’re going to be finishing that for Marvel Comics, who have ended up with the rights. Is that really happening?
It’s looking very like it. I mean, given that this has taken almost three decades, I think we’re 29 years since the last time I was trying to write Miracleman, I’m waiting to see what happens. But yes. Alan has described it as a bit of a poison chalice. The legal complications involved in Miracleman were so much more complicated and tangled and weird than anybody imagined. Then there were additional complications thrown in over the years. Eclipse went bankrupt. They were bought out of bankruptcy by Todd McFarlane…. Then we looked at what he owned. Well, but you don’t own anything. It turns out Eclipse didn’t actually have anything. We had to get deeper into who actually owned Miracleman. It turned out the original creator, Mick Anglo, had kept rights that people had claimed had been bought. There’s an entire book that you can buy on the mysteries of Miracleman. But it certainly looks … I get beautiful, beautiful emails from Mark Buckingham, who is drawing away.

So you’ve written the scripts. But this was supposed to happen six years ago or something, wasn’t it?
The legal tangles. Six years ago, we were all ready to come out with stuff. Then it turned out that things that we thought had been sorted out had not been sorted out. So Marvel and people had to go off and sort them out while Mark and I sat on the side, twiddling our thumbs and checking our watches.

Between Miracleman, the Good Omens TV show on Amazon Prime, and now Sandman, you’ve done a lot of collaboration with your 20-something self, which is a very interesting thing to do. You rarely seem to come at it from a place of, “You know what, I’m so much older now and so much more experienced, I want to tear up what that kid did and do it better.” That doesn’t seem to be your approach.
On the occasions that I’ve gone, “I am so much wiser, so much smarter, and I’m going to show you how you should have done it, 26-year-old,” I often find myself a year later going, “What if we just cut all that stuff that we did and make it like I did in the original book? Oh, that works. Yeah.” I can feel 26-year-old me smugly smirking at me. He was incredibly smart. It’s not that I haven’t tried reshaping stuff. I enjoy reshaping stuff. But mostly, he was smart. He knew what he was doing, even if he couldn’t have articulated it.

Do you think it was a beginner’s mind kind of thing?
I think that in the case of Sandman, there was a weird phenomenon going on whereby he had to get very good, very fast. It’s weird to talk about yourself in the third person. I had to get very good very fast. I’d been given a monthly comic. I honestly figured the best I was going to get would be something that would be a minor critical success, which back then, was also synonymous with major commercial failure. It’s weird because I tell people now, “Oh, I figured we’d get to issue eight, and I’d get the phone call that says, ‘We’re not selling any, but you’ve got four issues to wrap it up in.’ Then we’d get to do issue 12.”

That was how DC used to do it. They would give something a year. That was why I plotted the first storyline to take me to the end of issue eight. Then I was going to have four issues of short stories, and then we’d be done. Except that by the time issue eight came out, Sandman was selling more than anything like it had ever sold, or at least within the last decade or whatever. I wasn’t getting canceled. I got to do all of my mad plans for what I would do if I had this thing, and I got to tell the story that I want to tell. Those mad plans, they’re now real. I can put them into effect. That was really exciting.

In classic comic-book fashion, you signed away the rights to The Sandman to DC.
Oh, yeah.

Did you quite realize what you were doing?
Oh, I was very aware. I was very aware that I am a 26-year-old being taken advantage of by a large corporation. I’m like, “OK.” But on the other side of it, I remember reading a line from Johnny Rotten, John Lydon, talking about his Johnny Rotten days, saying, “As the Sex Pistols, we knew that we had to sign up with a big label. We couldn’t be pin-pricking our way in from a little independent on the outside. If this was going to work and if it was going to reach people, it had to be from a big label.” I felt this thing that I had in my head needed to be a DC comic, needed to actually be published and look like this, because I wanted to reach my audience. I knew that was the only chance I was going to get of doing it with that size thing.

What I did that was different, I guess, to what Alan [Moore] and other people had done, was after a year of Sandman, I wrote a letter to DC Comics. I wrote to Paul Levitz, who was at that time the publisher. I said, “I’ve done a year. Let’s talk. You guys own all this. I’ve just done it as a standard work-for-hire deal. I think you should improve my deal. I think I should get a better deal. I think I should get part of this thing that I’ve created, because if I don’t, it feels unfair. I’m doing something special.” They wrote back and said, “Yeah, you really are. You’re doing something special. We didn’t realize how special it was going to be when you started. Here is a brand-new contract for you. It is a better contract. No, you don’t own any of this stuff, but you have a lot more say and a bigger share and we are treating you with a lot more respect.” I think if they’d said no, I probably would’ve stopped then. Sandman might’ve stopped at issue 20 and I would’ve taken whatever clout I had and gone off and done something else somewhere else. But instead my relationship with DC, it’s still healthy three decades on. The idea is I do Sandman stuff every now and again, I look after and shepherd the Sandman stuff, and they have 3000 pages of Sandman material, which sells and sells and sells. And we’re all very happy.

Is that contract the reason why we don’t have After Sandman and Sandman Babies and other things without your involvement, or is it just the respect and relationship?
That’s more respect. That wasn’t written into anything. And it’s one of those things where I do not take it for granted. It is absolutely possible in this weird corporate world that tomorrow Warner Discovery would sell DC to some other organization and the other organization would go, “Well, Sandman’s huge. You did that Netflix series. And we’ve only got this stuff. We want five monthly Sandman comics out there just like we did with Watchmen,” or whatever. And I could see that happening, but right now nobody’s planning to do it. I like living in a world in which nobody plans to do it, because it’s one in which I continue working with DC.

One of the fascinating artifacts of Sandman being a DC comic is that, yes, it’s this modern fantasy masterpiece, but it also obviously intersects, especially early on, with the DC universe and DC characters. There’s a whole issue about Lady Metamorpho — what is her actual name? 
Element Girl.

Yes! Somehow it’s even more nerdy to call her Lady Metamorpho. But you have an entire issue with Element Girl. You have Martian Manhunter is in it. John Constantine, who became, brilliantly, Johanna Constantine in the show. Do you regret at all including all of those elements, which could be seen as sort vestigial organs in that vast epic?
No, I don’t. I don’t regret it. The truth is if working with the DC universe hadn’t have been a continuous pain in the ass, Sandman probably would’ve kept much more tied into the DC universe. The reason why after a while the only DC universe characters I would touch would be people like Element Girl, who was so forgotten she didn’t even have a page or an entry in the Who’s Who of the DC Universe, and Prez, first teen president of the United States, widely considered a joke, was because I kept trying to do things and they would be planned and they would be set up and then suddenly they’d be changed. And I just got really irritated with DC continuity.

An example would be at the beginning of Sandman [issue] five, John Dee, Dr. Destiny, is escaping from Arkham [Asylum], and he’s meant to encounter the Joker. And I’d written this whole Joker sequence and it went in and suddenly got a phone call saying, “Oh no, the Joker has just disappeared beneath the waters of the Gotham river. He’s believed dead.” And I’m like, “Well, he’s not dead. He’s the Joker. He’ll be back.” And they’re like, “Yeah. But technically right now he’s dead. So you have to make it somebody else.” I’m like, “But it was the Joker. It was a good … OK.” Roll up me sleeves, it’s now the Scarecrow. But it was that kind of thing. I just went, “I can’t be bothered.” I really can’t be bothered to have to change things and rewrite them because somebody else has just dropped the Joker into a river.

That was really why it went. With Sandman, the TV show, people are like, “Why have you unplugged so much from DC comics continuity?” And I’m like, “Because no human being watching this should actually be obligated to understand 1989 DC Comics continuity in order to make sense of this.” They’re like, “But you don’t have the Justice League in there.” And I’m like, “That Justice League lineup has not been the Justice League lineup since 1996.” People would just get confused. They’d be going, “Well, why isn’t Batman there? And who is Mr. Miracle, anyway?” And we didn’t want the hassle.

When I was a kid, before the Crisis On Infinite Earths [series, which destroyed the DC multiverse], we used to have Earth One and Earth Two. Earth Two was the one with Batman and the Superman from the 1940s. Earth One was the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. So this is Earth-Sandman. It’s not in the DC universe. It’s another Earth, off to one side, but it knows that the DC universe exists. It will borrow from it. It will tip its hat to it. Look, here is Jed [in the show] as a 12-year-old Sandman, and he’s going to be dressed like the [Joe] Simon and [Jack] Kirby Sandman from the early Seventies.

There were even images of real DC villains on the screen there in that episode of the show.
Well, a lot of them were Flash villains. I like the Flash. Flash always had the best rogue’s gallery.

But it seems like you had fun with the extrication from the DC universe, and yet at the same time you have the House of Mystery and House of Secrets in the show, which were DC comics — these wonderful nods to obscure DC lore here in this prestige Netflix series.
Absolutely. It wasn’t that we were embarrassed by any of this. Some of it was just more like, “OK, let’s take the bits that make it easier on people, but let’s leave in all the bits we love.” I love that the House of Secrets and the House of Mystery are on screen. I love that Asim Chaudhry and Sanjeev Bhaskar are respectively Abel and Cain. I love the fact we’ve got Goldie and Gregory the Gargoyle. I look at Gregory and I’m just sad that [artist] Bernie Wrightson is no longer with us, because I wish he’d lived to see Gregory the Gargoyle flying around on the screen, this thing that he made. I love all that. I think that’s so much fun. And I love the fact that if you want to do weird deep dives into DC chronology, you have Lyta Hall, who in some versions of DC Comics existence — not really the one that we were in even by the time we got to the comic — but there is a level in which she’s Wonder Woman’s daughter. And perhaps she is, we’ll never know.

Towards the end of the Sandman comic-book run, there’s a moment when Morpheus is talking to William Shakespeare and we’ve learned that Morpheus helped manifest Shakespeare’s creativity. Specifically, what he says is, “It was all there. I just opened the door.” For you, what opened that door to your creativity?
Lovely question. A few things opened, different doors opened. But I think the thing that really opened the door for me was getting to meet, interact, and work with people who were brilliant and realizing that the biggest difference between them and me was they were working really hard and they’d set their own personal goals high. People like Alan Moore, people like Terry Pratchett, people like Clive Barker, where I’d look at what they were doing and I’d be going, “Oh, my idea of me as a good writer is so far down from what you are doing. Why don’t I raise my sights? Why don’t I just open that door and walk through it to become a really good writer, rather than a commercial writer who is writing to survive?” I wrote a biography of Duran Duran. I would not personally have read it. And yet I wrote it.

And a pretty good book about Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, actually.
That one I’m still fond of. I would’ve read that one, but I wouldn’t have read my Duran book. And I learned a lot from that. It was great. I got the money to buy an electric typewriter and to pay my rent and to feed myself with my Duran Duran book. Now let’s go forward to a point of always wanting to improve as a writer, always wanting, if I can, to go places I haven’t gone before. And if I get very, very lucky every now and then I’ll get to go places nobody’s come before.

Your novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane is now is a stage play in England. Any talk of bringing it to Broadway?
There’s definitely been talk of bringing it to Broadway, but I only know one thing about it coming to Broadway, which is when I called them up and said, “That amazing neon sign that you’ve got outside the Duke of York’s Theater in London, when you’re done, is there any possibility of me being able to buy the sign?” And they said, “We are going to need it for Broadway.” So I thought, “OK, well they’re obviously planning to go to Broadway!” But more than that, I do not know. I hope they do. It’s an astonishing play. The Joel Horwood script, Katy Rudd’s direction, so powerful. I’ve never had the experience of sitting in a theater filled with people crying, and crying at different points, but not crying because they’re sad, crying because there are things that are going on on the stage that are too big to fit into their hearts.

That sounds really wonky, for which I apologize, but it’s a thing I’ve seen and I’ve seen it over and over again. And it’s happened to me. The first time it happened to me, I was incredibly embarrassed because I’m like, “I wrote the novel. I shouldn’t be sitting here in a rehearsal room and everybody can see me and I’m discreetly flicking tears away.” Then the next time it happened, I was at the National Theater on opening night and I’m sitting between my wife [Amanda Palmer], who is sobbing, which is not in itself unusual because she cries at emotional things. And on the other side of me is a journalist from one of the leading English newspapers. And I’m watching his tears plopping onto his notepad as he’s taking notes and I’m going, “OK, if you are crying then something’s happening here.” Ocean does big magic things in your heart.

You’ve spoken about having less creative energy than when you were 28 years old. Back then, you were doing Sandman and Good Omens at the same time.
And [the graphic novel] Books of Magic! I was writing, because I remember I would write Sandman until midnight, Books of Magic from midnight until 2:30 in the morning, and then Good Omens from 2:30 in the morning until 5 — and then go to bed. I look at that now and I go, “How? How did you do that? How did you have a brain that would do that?” These days, I have to work myself up to writing a shopping list.

How do you grapple with that slightly diminished energy?
I mean, let’s put it this way, right now, I am showrunning and actively editing two television series. I’m seeing another one through the promotional stages. I’m just about to start writing a new six-episode thing all on my own. I’ve got a novel that needs to be finished and I’m looking after a six-year-old boy. So I’m doing OK. There is diminished energy, but I am somehow managing to juggle all this stuff and I’m still enjoying it. I’m so proud of Good Omens, season two. I think it’s wonderful. I’m so excited about Anansi Boys [coming on Amazon Prime], because it feels like something that nobody else has made. I’m so proud of Sandman. And I’m enjoying being a dad to a six-year-old too. That’s fun.

With Good Omens, season two, you’re breaking free of the book at this point. How is that working?
Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s so much fun. Partly because I learned so much. The first time you do something, you just learn how to do it and then you can start to play. So when I wrote and made Good Omens I was learning, how do you do a Good Omens? I think there’s this thing in my head, but how does it work? I feel like Good Omens season one was “Chopsticks.” This is much more me getting to the whole orchestra.

The Sandman comic book and TV show share the same opening plot, where a magician tries to trap Death, and instead they trap this other entity, Dream. And then the whole rest of it is dealing with the consequences of these many years of him being imprisoned. Where did that story idea originally come from?
A lot of it came out of me in October 1987, dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. A literal hurricane. We had the first hurricane in England that we’d had for 500, 600 years and there was no power. The little village I was in was in the middle of the woods, so we were cut off and I had nothing to do but think. And I just remember an awful lot of walking around and thinking, and going, “OK, I’ve got this character, but how would this work and how does that work and how do I get from here to there?” I just remember building the first eight episodes and then writing the outline.

As soon as the power came on — it had been about a week — writing an outline and sending it off to DC Comics, to my editor, Karen Berger, and saying, “OK, I think this is it.” A lot of it came from the idea that I didn’t know if I was ever going to get to do this again. I’d never written a monthly comic. I’d written a handful of small things, a handful of short stories that had sold, a handful of comics. This may be my only chance, I thought, ever to actually get a mainstream comic published, so I was going to get everything in there.

I started out going, “Well, it’s a horror comic, so I’m going to do every different kind of horror. I’ll start out with issue one, and that’ll be British respectable horror. And then issue two, I’ll do EC Comics and DC Comics horror. And issue three, I’ll do Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker contemporary splatter-punk horror. And issue four, I’ll go to Hell and I’ll do that 1940s Unknown Worlds magical thing. And issue five, six, I’ll just go hog wild and see how far and weird I can go. And issue eight, I’ll try and kiss everything better and we’ll meet Death and we’ll go for a walk. And after that, I have no idea what’s going to happen, but that’s my story.”

You are not a magician. You don’t do rituals. There are other comic-book writers of your era from England who do all of that.
There are.

Do you not believe in a spiritual dimension at all? Do you think we are just our bodies?
I just don’t ever want to be limited to one thing. What I love is having infinite possibilities. I can believe so many things. Many of them utterly contradictory. And I feel like if I had to pick one, then now I’m locked into what I can write and what I can choose… I need my werewolf to be whatever I need my werewolf to be for my story. I need my angels to be whatever my angels could be for my stories. And so for me, I look at the British magicians who also write comics and I go, these are my friends and I think they’re wonderful, but it certainly wouldn’t be my choice of thing to do.

I like the fact that I get to practice magic as a writer. That’s what I get to do. I get to make magic. I get to create things that are not and never have been and never will be, but I got to make them. And I got to take people to places that don’t exist. I got them to cry real tears over people who have never been in the world and who never died. For me, that’s the real magic. 

From Rolling Stone US.