The Sandman: Season of Mists

"Yes. In some ways, Sandman needs no introduction; it’s become a massive cultural phenomenon, recently dramatised on Netflix. I was reading it in issue form when it first came out; it was Neil Gaiman’s spectacular entry into the mainstream comic scene in 1989. There was previously a superhero character in the DC universe called the Sandman, a man named Wesley Dodds who fought crime, and had a little gun that fired gas and put his enemies to sleep. Karen Berger, who was the editor Gaiman worked with mostly at DC, encouraged him to create a new character of his own rather than try to reinvent this 1970s character. So we got the character of Morpheus, Dream of the Endless. The Endless are a family of siblings, who are at one point called ideas clothed in flesh. They are aspects of human experience: Dream, Delirium (who used to be Delight),Desire, Despair, Death, Destiny – and then there is the seventh brother, ‘The Prodigal’, who makes a late entry to the scene – he’s missing at the start of the story. The Endless stand outside any human pantheon, and to a large extent they stand above the gods. They are incarnations of certain human universals. And in creating the book, Gaiman created a mythology that brought together all existing human mythologies. So along the way in The Sandman you get Japanese storm gods, you get the Norse pantheon, you get Bas from the Egyptian pantheon, you get Judeo-Christian angels and demons… and it all makes sense! It all comes together in a way that is wonderful and strange and utterly unique. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The other thing I love about Sandman is that it created a new template for comic storytelling. Up to that point American mainstream comics, the DC and Marvel world, were episodic. They were like soap operas with people in tights, in that nothing ever changed – the stories went on and on, but the status quo never advanced. Neil brought a novelistic approach to mainstream comics . Sandman is finite: it plays out over 75 issues – there were some miniseries attached, and he’s revisited it since in a free-standing graphic novel called The Dream Hunters , and in a prequel series – but it reaches a finite end point. It has this wondrously interwoven structure. It consists of alternating long stories, story arcs, and single issues, short stories that are twenty pages long. But they feed back into the main continuity unexpectedly from different angles. I chose Season of Mist because it’s my favourite of the books. It’s the book in which Morpheus decides he has to go to hell and have a fight with Lucifer. A long time ago, Morpheus had a human romantic partner, a woman he loved named Nada; and he condemned her to hell when she refused to stay with him. He’s realised – belatedly – that this was an awful thing to do, so he’s going back to hell to free her, but obviously, Lucifer is not going to stand for that. The thing is, Morpheus can’t win this fight. Lucifer is much, much more powerful than him. So Morpheus is going, he assumes, to his death… And that’s not how the story plays out. The story is incredibly complex and unexpected, wrong-footing you with every turn. It introduces a lot of the characters who became long-running favourites in the series… It’s the first time in the series that you meet the Norse god Loki, and the first time you meet the Dead Boy Detectives, who have now got their own series . It’s just an amazing horror fantasy, with some stunning surprises, and characters who are wonderful to spend time with. Yeah! So, small spoiler: in the course of this story Lucifer quits. He decides he doesn’t want to be ruler of hell anymore, because he realises that his rebellion against God has ended up with him doing God’s dirty work. He’s still part of the scheme. So he walks away from it. My series chronicles what happened after that: his quest for self-determination, his quest to escape from divine providence and be his own his own boss, which in some ways is impossible. Every child wants to break away from parental influence, but when your dad is God, it’s particularly problematic. I love Sandman , and being able to write those characters and add stories to that continuity was amazing. I’d already read it and reread it endlessly, and the wonderful thing is that I always find new things when I come back to it. It’s that kind of story, it’s fractally complex, in a way that I think is incredibly rewarding as a reader. But also, I got to talk to Neil about it a lot, because he was creative consultant on all of those early Sandman spin off books. He was really generous with his time. I’d come up with an idea and I’d pitch it to him, and then we’d talk it through. He only ever said no to me twice, in the whole course of my role on this. One was a line of dialogue for Death, when Lucifer seems to be on the brink of death, and Death visits. He says to her, “You have no hold on me”, and she says, “I wouldn’t know where to put you anyway.” And Neil said, “She can’t say that, because she doesn’t have a realm.” All the other brothers and sisters of the Endless have a realm or domain that is theirs. Death doesn’t: she takes you from here to there, she takes you from this world to whatever your next stop is. She doesn’t have a place that’s uniquely hers. The other ‘no’ was about a character named Rose Walker in Sandman , who becomes pregnant. It’s very, very strongly suggested that the child is of the lineage of Endless; that something is happening which involves one of the Endless. I was going to have a Rose Walker story, and Neil said, “If I come back to Sandman , that’s the story that I will tell, so I’d rather you left her alone.” But apart from that, he let me run free, and was happy to bounce ideas around and be a sounding board. The Highest House is the story of a young boy named Moth. He lives in a fantasy world, Ossaniul, which is roughly mediaeval in terms of technology and infrastructure. It’s a world that has slavery as a tradition which is seldom questioned, and it’s quite easy to own another person. Parents own their children, and if they want to sell their children, that’s fine. A husband will own his wife, and can sell her on if he wants. If you take church charity, you become the property of the church, and the church can use your labour or sell it elsewhere. Ossaniul also used to have a polytheistic religion, and many of the ruling families had made deals with supernatural beings – you could call them gods or you could call them demons, it’s debatable, but they were much more powerful than humans. These families have achieved their eminence in society with the help of these beings. And then Ossaniul is invaded by the Koviki, who are monotheists. They worship the Goddess, the Lady – she doesn’t have a name, she’s just the Goddess. And all of those old religions are now proscribed. Moth’s mother sells him to a family that live in Highest House, a Koviki family who have taken over the family seat of an old Ossani family. Lord Demini Aldercrest is the head of the household. In the first few issues Moth doesn’t even meet any of the family, he just meets the steward, and he’s given a job as a roofer – when the new slaves come into the family, they take on a specialty. So he’s learning his trade, going around repairing thatch and shingles under the guidance of an older woman named Fless. But then he meets the demon-or-god, the creature that the former owners of the house made a contract with. It’s still alive, and it lives in one of the many basements of the house. It’s called Obsidian, and it’s trapped in a black stone. And it says to Moth, if you set me free, I will give you three wishes. Moth says, “I’d like to learn to read, because knowledge is power. I’d like my sister’s eyes to be to be healed so that she can see again” – he has a younger sister called Jet who is going blind. “And I would like you to free the slaves. I’d like you to end the institution of slavery.” And Obsidian says, “I don’t get into politics. The other two wishes are fine.” But Moth says, “In that case the deal’s off. It’s that or nothing.” So Obsidian reluctantly says, “Okay, this is going to take some time. It’s going to be really complicated. But yeah, the two of us, we’re going to end slavery.” That’s the story. When we started Lucifer , we had a penciller and an inker: the penciller was Chris Weston , the inker was James Hodgkins . Both were riding high in their careers at the time, Chris Weston in particular was at the height of his game, and we were very lucky to have him. But then it turned out the two of them didn’t get on, they couldn’t find a modus vivendi. Chris was so unhappy with James’s inking that he took some pages back and inked them himself. So they both walked off the book after three issues, which ought to have been the end of the affair – losing your whole art team that early in the run, losing your visual identity, it’s catastrophic. So I sank into a deep depression. And then I got a call from the editor, Shelley Roeberg as she was then – Shelley Bond now. And she said, “I’m going to approach Peter Gross. He’s just finished drawing The Books of Magic , s o he’s free, and this feels like it might be in his wheelhouse.” So she called him up, and he said, “No, absolutely not. I’ve just spent the last six years, seven years, doing a fantasy comic; I want to do something different.” But she sent him a script, and he liked it. So he came on board cautiously – “I’ll see how this goes.” He came on with issue five. And since then, we have collaborated on something like 160, 170 issues of comics, over 2000 pages, and it is one of the most pleasurable and rewarding collaborations I’ve had. Peter is amazing. The thing is, he’s not just a great artist, he’s a great visual storyteller: his art is always in the service of the story. There are some comic artists out there who do these gorgeous, flashy pages, but you have no idea what’s going on – there’s nothing to lead the eye. Peter’s pages are always kinetic, and they’re structured; they take you through the story in the right direction. He has amazing instincts as a storyteller. There’s a sequence in Lucifer , where we meet a guy who is ‘a good man in hell’ – he committed one unforgivable sin which he’s gone to hell for, and he accepts that it’s right. He killed a child in a fit of rage. And there’s a bit where we see that backstory, and I wrote it as three pages of normal art with about five or six panels per page. Peter said, “But he’s going to be thinking about this every single moment of every day. So I think we should tell it a million times; instead of just having five or six panels, we should have hundreds of panels just repeating and repeating and repeating, to give the sense of that obsession.” So that’s what he did – and it was beautiful, and much better than my original idea. We ended up working together on the whole run of Lucifer , and on another long running series called The Unwritten ; the DC Vertigo ; a miniseries called The Dollhouse Family ; and The Highest House … we just keep on keeping going, keep coming back and finding each other again. It works very differently according to who you’re doing it with, and depending on how the editor does their job. Shelley was one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with, in that she would pick intelligent fights with the story: she would get what you were aiming for, and if she didn’t think you were getting there, she would throw it back to you to try again. But also, she was really good at keeping the rest of the team communicating, and making sure that we were all talking to each other, which is crucial in collaborative works. When I’m writing for an artist I don’t know, I’ll write a very, very full script. Very specific, with instructions for page turns, instructions for art direction, instructions for the key panel on the page, and so on. And then I’ll relax gradually, as I get to know them. But there are only two artists with whom I’ve ever got to the point where the script becomes an invitation to negotiate, for a free back and forth – and Peter is one of them. When I send a script, he comes back to me with questions and suggestions. He would ask me where the story was going so that he could anticipate plot points. More than once, I would come up with an idea for a character and then he would draw the character, and the character’s voice would come from the drawing. I’d look at the character that he created and think, ‘Ok! Now I know who that is!’ There’s a horrible little imp named Gaudium who’s a fallen angel; and while most of the angels who fought with Lucifer were seraphs, big glorious six-winged beings with swords and armour and so on, Gaudium was a cherub. He’s a little fat dude. In his fallen version, he looks like a gargoyle who got a job as a New York cabbie, with a cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and a little iron ring in his navel. The voice came very much from that sketch. Also, Gaudium was originally meant to be just a plot function, used to come in and tell a character something important, but he looks so great, we just kept on going back to him. He got three issues to himself over the course of the series."