It was the Rose Walker show or something,” Gaiman says. “The damage that you had to do to Sandman to put it on network TV 15 years ago and in the kind of budgets and the way that you could do it just meant it wasn't Sandman. He remembers how Eric Kripke, a creator that Gaiman “loves and respects” who has lately been enjoying great success with The Boys, pitched a Sandman series for network TV circa 2010, and how Gaiman rejected it because “it really didn’t work.” The version who was told that “nobody’s ever come into this office and asked us not to make a movie before.” Wearing his familiar black t-shirt and jacket, he talks about how “incredibly envious” he is of his younger self – the version of Neil Gaiman who fought back against a Sandman movie he didn’t think would work. But when he speaks with IGN on the occasion of the show's release, he comes across as deeply introspective, his comments occasionally peppered with interjections from showrunner Allan Heinberg, with whom he has an easy back-and-forth rapport. Gaiman, once so reticent to see this happen, has been tirelessly stumping for the show on his 2.9 million follower Twitter account and elsewhere. Launching on Netflix earlier today, reviews of the 10-episode series have been positive, with IGN’s Amelia Emberwing calling it a 'dream of an adaptation.' It wound up taking more than 30 years, but The Sandman is finally getting the screen version Gaiman previously thought impossible. I would so much rather that it never got made than a bad version would get made,” Neil Gaiman tells IGN. “The Sandman” is now streaming on Netflix.“I didn't care about it just getting made. And I don’t feel that any of those things are less important or less relevant now.” And those are the things I wanted to say. And back then when I said them, they were important and I felt that they were true and I felt it was right to say them including, you have your story and your story is important, and including, you get a lifetime. There were words of comfort and there were words of warning. There were things about dreams and things about death. “’Sandman’ as a graphic novel series, as comics, was me getting to say things to the world that I believed,” Gaiman said. While the Netflix series made the decision to differentiate itself from the DC Universe, Gaiman believes that it still captured the essence of his original comic books. “Its world joined up more and more with our world and became less and less a world in which costumed crime fighters fly around and so on, which meant that by the time ‘The Sandman’ finished, it had its own aesthetic which really wasn’t the DC Universe anymore.”

“‘The Sandman’ itself started out in the DC Universe, the comic, and then it just sort of wound up wandering off into its own place,” Gaiman said. Why ‘Queen Charlotte’ Says Yes to a Very Specific Wedding Dress

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman