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Anyone watch it yet? I've only seen the first episode, I thought it was okay. For some reason I don't really like the actor playing Dream. I thought he was good until he started speaking LOL. Seems to be getting good reviews and I've heard episode 5 is especially good so we'll see.

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I can’t find my copy of Hy Bender’s Sandman Companion (which, if memory serves, is a lengthy issue-by-issue overview of the series via an extended interview with Neil Gaiman; can’t remember if the artists, colourists, Todd Klein — wait, did anyone other than Todd Klein ever do the letters? not going to bother to check, sorry, you’re on your own — get interviewed too, I assume they did but maybe not to the same extent, I don’t know, could look it up, of course) but if I could then I’d be able to flesh out what I’m about to say, sorry, I can’t make the following two points with the necessary detail but just wanted to say :

 

1) The series doesn’t really seem like the sort of thing that’d reward my interest? It’d have to meet with near-unanimous critical acclaim from certain ultra-specific sources in order to make me give it a shot. I tried w/Good Omens (‘19-’22???? What? they’re making more of it?????1?) and that kind of felt like a big waste of time so none of the points in its favour — great casting, creative involvement from Gaiman himself — really hold much water w/me. But the one thing they COULD do that’d make me check it out is if they adapted parts of The Sandman (‘88-’96, ‘03, ‘13-’15) which never actually got made. There was a whole arc planned out later in the series that he mapped out in detail which he actually ditched. He talks about in in the book, the Hy Bender book! From memory it involved a return of one of the victims of the sleeping sickness, I think he was black, Daniel Bustamonte (?) and also some friendly Satanists? It involved a lot of things. Gaiman lists them in a single paragraph. Wish I had the book in front of me. He was also going to do an arc riffing on themes of the myth of Orpheus. It was going to be a sequence of interconnected one-offs. But then he did some signings in America and every time a fan would ask him “Wow! Neil, what’s next? What’s going to happen next in your comic, Neil?” and he’d tell them they would just respond with “What? Do you mean Morpheus?” and he figured that the American educational system had failed an entire generation and everyone was so unfamiliar with the basic story of Orpheus & Eurydice that he may as well scrap the whole thing because it’d all go over their heads so he just did the Special w/Bryan Talbot instead to set up the final parts of the series. My point is this : I’m not really interested in seeing stuff I’ve already seen on the page show up on the screen. But I am really curious about seeing stuff on screen that’s never even been on the page. That could get me on board! So if they do that for Season 3 or 4 or whatever, wait, will Netflix give them that much time? entirely possible it doesn’t! Oh, there’s a good bit in the Hy Bender book where Gaiman is asked what he’d have done if the series had been cancelled in its earlier issues before it really became a success. He said he wouldn’t have tried to wrap up the whole plot then and there but instead would’ve just filled up the remaining space with a few short stories in the hope eventually somewhere down the line some friendly editor would ask him to pick up where he left off. That’s what they should do if they know they’re not going to get to do the whole show! If this first year is kind of a flop and they get one more year out of it, seems like that’s kind of the model the algorithm spits out, then next year should just be all new original stuff! Like, I’m pretty sure there’s, for example, there’s a big love story between Dream and another character, one of his many exes that he wronged, her name escapes me, it’s like Princess Zamunda or something like that, evocative, Google thinks I might be thinking of Alianora, maybe, I think we actually get a lot of the details there but I think there’s someone who’s only named and we get nothing else. Whatever. Okay, so for me, there’s like three different ways the series could intrigue me enough to give it a try. Okay, okay.

 

2) Making Death a black woman is a really neat idea. There’s a recurring motif in the series of a young black woman being introduced and then immediately dying in horrific fashion, it keeps happening and happening, until eventually Hob Gadling goes to that ren fair with the black lady and the pattern is broken. They talk about this in the book! Not sure if this aspect of it has come up in any of the show’s publicity; I remember when some of the casting was announced and there was more of a generic flavour to talking about this and, for example, whatshername, Clara Oswald, Jenna Coleman as a gender-switched John Constantine. That also makes a lot of sense, y’know, because of the multiple existing Constantine adaptations as well as the fact that Gaiman already introduced a girl version of Constantine (ancestrally) in the series itself, y’know? I mean, this sort of thing always makes sense but in these particular two instances it makes sense again, even more so, on an additional level.

 

Addendum : okay, I found my copy! I was somewhat mistaken and/or unclear on a few points here and there.

 

a) There wasn’t going to be an entire arc of Orpheus-ish stories. Just the plan for the Special was going to be less a straightforward retelling of that particular myth and more riffs on that theme.

 

and

 

b) The thing w/the black women is v. specif. them burning alive. Nada’s city is consumed by a fireball, Ruby dies in a hotel fire after she smokes in bed, Carla is incinerated by Loki. It’s explicitly referenced within the text itself when The Corinthian eats Ruby’s dead eyes.

 

and

 

c) It wasn’t a complete planned arc I was thinking of. It would’ve been maybe four additional issues of the Season of Mists storyline dealing chiefly with the subplot of the dead returning to Earth because Lucifer has shuttered Hell. He wrote the first seven pages of it and then threw it away because he didn’t think the audience would have the patience for him to stretch things out that long at that time in the series. I’ll quote : “It was good material, involving creepy magical types on the run; a young lady named Isolde Bane and her baby Anthony, a group calling themselves the Fashion Satanists; and the return of Daniel Bustamonte from issue 1.”

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I watched a couple more. Maybe I didn't want a live action Sandman as much as  I thought. It's been okay but nothing that makes me salivate for the next episode. It's just like, I'll watch the next ep whenever. I recommended it to people I know when it first came out but so far they either haven't watched it or only watched the first one or two and stopped. I don't hate it, so that's something?

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I've watched up to ep 6. Still don't like Dream and now even worse, I didn't like Death, either. I thought she was just eh, not very memorable. And she was my favorite in that series! So bummed about that. Now that I think about it, I also didn't like Lucifer. Not sure what I didn't like, just wasn't feeling it. It's just hit or miss for me, I did like John Dee, Hob, Matthew, Lucien and Cain and Abel, so I feel like they got some of them right.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Finally finished! Last episode was the best, it was two stories from the comic, Dream of a Thousand Cats (yes!) and Calliope. I had to hit up IMDb after because I recognized the actress playing Calliope's voice. Turns out she voiced the main character Kassandra in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, so that was neat. DoaTC was animated and looked great, highly recommended. Good thing is even if you haven't watched the whole series yet you can skip ahead to ep 11 because it doesn't directly tie into the other ones.

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