Netflix’s The Sandman is different from the comic — it’s what Neil Gaiman wanted
Whenever an adaptation is released there is naturally a lot of talk about what the changes mean. Did the snipping that comes with altering a book or comic to a show or movie make it better, worse, different in a way that’s unrecognizable? What does it mean when these changes came from the creator themself?
That question will likely be on fans’ minds as they watch Netflix’s The Sandman, based, of course, on the beloved comic of the same name by Neil Gaiman, and developed for Netflix by Gaiman (alongside David S. Goyer and showrunner Allan Heinberg), who also serves as executive producer. It might provide some comfort, in a way, knowing that a creator has this much of a hand in a show that went through true development hell to get here. But that’s not to say Sandman is without changes.
“There were things that we’d go, OK, what is important in each scene? And I would talk with Allan about why a scene had been written, about what I was trying to do, about what I meant, about what mattered to me,” Gaiman tells Polygon. “You take a character like Death; what mattered to me was that we cast an actress who can actually convey the niceness, who could convey the emotion, and the idea that you’d fall in love with her just a little bit.”
In Gaiman’s mind, Kirby Howell-Baptiste captured that perfectly; she was the kind of person who, as Death, could generously say, “You know you should look both ways before you cross the street,” and you’d “kind of like her for having said it.” It mattered less that Howell-Baptiste, a Black woman, perfectly matched the character drawn so many decades ago — though Gaiman said that wasn’t always the case.
“I mean, that was one reason why Gwendoline Christie was so perfect as Lucifer. She looks and
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