You're probably familiar with Neil Gaiman, even if you're not familiar with comic books. The celebrated author has written a number of acclaimed novels, like American Gods, which is on its way to becoming a television series by Bryan Fuller of Hannibal fame. Or Stardust, the illustrated novella he wrote with artist Charles Vess, which was adapted into a movie starring Daredevil's Charlie Cox and Homeland lead Claire Danes. Once you know what to look for, you'll find his name everywhere—which is what makes Gaiman one of comic books' most potent gateway drugs. Inevitably, if you like his other works, you'll end up at his magnum opus, the seminal comic-book series The Sandman.
The 2013 announcement of The Sandman: Overture was one of the most exciting bits of news for comics lovers in quite some time. A hybrid prequel/sequel to The Sandman—widely considered to be one of the best mainstream comics ever published—Overture marked beloved author Neil Gaiman's return to the story that made him famous, as well as his first collaboration with virtuoso artist J.H. Williams III. Overture promised more of what made Sandman so beloved from the late '80s to mid-'90s: beautiful stories about Morpheus, Dream personified, and his siblings, known as The Endless, that weren't like anything else happening, in comics or elsewhere. Sandman stories eschewed superheroes and fighting and embraced literature and myth. They lingered in your mind, kind of like a dream.
So the prospect of more Sandman was always terribly exciting—and it was made even more so thanks to Williams, an artist whose lush, beautiful work is almost impossible to oversell. Making it, however, is a time-consuming process, and the six-issue series—which was initially meant to be released between late 2013 through 2014—only just concluded this fall. But it was worth it.
With the complete Sandman: Overture miniseries now available in bookstores and comic shops as a deluxe hardcover, author Neil Gaiman took some time to speak with us about working with an artist as ridiculously talented as Williams, the things he learned about characters he dreamed up over twenty years ago, and what it's like to deal with the stage fright of returning to a story beloved by so many.
GQ: Now that Overture is complete, what did you appreciate most about working with J.H. Williams III?
__Gaiman:__
In Sandman, I was always insanely lucky, because I had fantastic artists all the way, and I had appropriate artists for storylines all the way. But I think the thing that I appreciate most is seeing reviews of the work talk about what a fantastic thing Overture is, and talk about the story, and then go and talk about the artwork for two or three paragraphs, about what J.H. brought to it. And I'm loving that.
I'm too used to seeing phrases like "Gaiman and his collaborators." No one's talking about "his collaborators" here. People are saying, "J.H. Williams III does things here in mainstream comics that nobody has ever done before." He brings a beauty, a gravitas, a design sense, and also an ability to summon the ghosts of different kinds of art that nobody else can. I don't think there's anybody else that can do what he did and make it that gorgeous.
The price everybody paid for it was they weren't getting it monthly, because he couldn't draw one of those in a month. And by the end, it basically took him about four months to draw Sandman. And that was okay, because we realized by the end that it really was going to take that long every time. We also knew that we were doing something special, and that people would stay with us.
I love what we did, I love what we pulled off. And I loved that I could ask J.H. for anything—very often things impossible—like, "draw Dream as a flower," and he'd give it to us. And I also knew that there were going to be two characters that we'd never met before who were going to become huge and important, and I wanted to see [what he did]: "You're going to get to draw the parents! What are they going to look like?" And he drew them, and they're amazing.
You've said that Overture takes place both after the ending and before the beginning of Sandman. Did you always want to come full circle?
That was definitely always the plan. I didn't know it was going to work, mind you, but I knew that was the plan. The idea of something that would essentially be a kind of little Möbius-strip link between the end and the beginning that would take you through the whole of Sandman, and when you read Sandman again it would be different.
And I didn't know if I could pull it off, but I loved the idea that if you read Sandman, having read Overture, you're not reading the same book that you read last time. It's going to be something else.
Does that reflect how you see Dream and his story?
It's how I see good stories, in truth. The idea that you should be able to—my friend, the writer Jean Wolff, once defined literature as "that which could be read with pleasure by an educated reader and reread with increased pleasure." The idea that you should be able to reread it with increased pleasure—that's the idea that I loved trying to do in Overture. Yes, you're going to get a story that you didn't know, and once you know it, things that you knew already will make more sense. And things that you knew already will mean different things. They'll echo differently
.
Roughly midway through Overture, you mentioned how you learned things about the Endless. What did you learn about these characters that you first wrote twenty years ago?
I definitely learned more about Morpheus. I love the fact that his voice is always the same, the character is always the same, he—I can't push him into doing things he won't do as a writer. He'll only do the things he will do.
Watching him with his parents was fascinating. Who he is to his father, who he is to his mother. Who they are and how they behave—which suddenly makes so much more sense of the Endless. You go, Oh, okay! now I completely get how with these two as your parents, you're going to get that strange, these seven very very different individuals, and you're also going to get why they don't call. So that was huge for me. I'd been looking forward to meeting them for so long. But it really wasn't until I wrote them talking to Dream in each case that I thought "Okay, I get this. Of course this is who you are. Of course this is how it went."
Is the experience of getting to know Dream different than any of the other characters in your work?
I worry about him more than any of the others. Karen Berger, my editor on the original Sandman used to say that I was him, and that he was me. And I've said, like, "But he hasn't got a sense of humor and I do," and she'd say, "Yeah, but he's still you." And you'd probably have to ask Karen for more explanation why he's definitely me.
I always know as I write him what he's going to do and what he's going to say, and quite often he disappoints me. And quite often I say, Noooo, I wish you'd do something—but he does come through in a pinch.
Looking back, what was it like dealing with all the expectations for Sandman: Overture?
It was hard doing the first issue. There was a level of stage fright that I hadn't known. Because when I had first started writing Sandman, all I cared about was that it wouldn't get cancelled in eight issues. Now here I am, doing Sandman and knowing that [sighs] thirty million people? forty million people? around the world are familiar with this, that everybody is looking over my shoulder, everybody is going to be—whether they want to or not—they're going to be judging. They're going to be saying, "Okay, how does this measure up to what we feel a Sandman story should be?"
And I knew that was going to happen, and it was terrifying. Very rapidly though, that actually kind of faded. And it faded mostly because the most important thing to me became, could I write cool things for J.H. Williams to draw? And what the hell was going to happen next in the storyline? So I was no longer worried about whether or not people were gonna think it was as good as Sandman, or whether I'd lost it or whatever. I was much more worried about what happened in the next panel.
And given that was a condition I was in for the entire eight years I was writing Sandman, it felt perfectly familiar.