The Sandman

The Sandman gets a big audiovisual adaptation after decades of trying, Neil Gaiman and his band having waited to make a close one. This means some great moments come through clearly, and some of the uneven tone of the early stories in particular does too.

The first episode, The Sleep Of The Just, covers most of the first issue with some slight embroidering here and there to make the series a bit more serialised.

It also makes Dream a bit more sympathetic from the beginning. And his captors as well, to make that stick.

And me being me, this got me thinking about a series set entirely around people stuck guarding a supernatural being and the effect this has on them.

It serialises the first run quite a bit through subplots, while still keeping the episodes largely standalone as they were.

This does mean that episode 5, 24/7, the one that puts the Horror tag on the show, would be skippable but it carries on into resolving a plot. It’s not as purposely brutal than the “go as far as I could go” original issue 6, but still pulls the series from maybe a 15 due to swearing to an easy 18.

Following it with The Sound Of Her Wings establishes just how much mood whiplash the series, in all its forms, can have, before carrying on to volume two, The Doll’s House. It’s less of a bumpy ride in general, perhaps due to Gaiman having mellowed, but some of the bumps are still in place.