On the whole, The Sandman on Netflix got a great reception from fans, meriting a second season on the streamer. For a comic that spent decades in development hell as screenwriters tried to crack it, the final product remained remarkably faithful. Even changes like race- and gender-flipped casting occurred within the existing parameters of the story. But in an interview with Inverse, creator Neil Gaiman and executive producer Allan Heinberg each reveal their biggest individual regret as far as what they weren’t able to do.
For Heinberg, it was the legal limitation that it couldn’t be part of the DCEU. “As a longtime DC Comics geek, part of me would have loved to have done the 1989 DC Comics continuity,” he says. “I was a huge Infinity, Inc. fan, and I don’t mind telling you that. But we got as many sideways nods into the DC Universe as we possibly could. And we stuck in little tributes like the care home where Unity is living is the Karen Berger Care Home, for example. So we got to play with the DCEU in that way but understood why we had to leave it behind. But it would have been fun to do more of that.”
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Gaiman’s answer is one many fans might agree with — when you translate a comic into live-action, the style of a particular artist can get lost. “I would have loved to have been able to just bring a little more of Kelly Jones’ art style into ‘Calliope,'” he says, “a little more of Mike Dringenberg’s into ‘The Doll’s House.’ We barely managed to get Kelly Jones’ art style into ‘Dream of a Thousand Cats,’ and that’s animated. That’s the one thing that I look at, and just go, ‘I wish we could bring some of that kind of look.’ But, you can’t because these are real people, and this is really being shot on film. And it’s also kind of necessary that one episode looks at least more or less like another episode.”
Adds Heinberg, “It makes the books even more of an essential component of the whole Sandman experience. So if you do watch the show and you haven’t read the books, I love that the books are there for you to see this world in this glorious way that we can’t provide for you.”
Recommended Reading: The Sandman Book One by Neil Gaiman
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