There are a hundred variants on this...
I want to make a concept album/stage play/short film/set of tee shirts/something to sell based on Sandman. Please give me permission.
And the answer is simply, I can't. I don't own Sandman. DC Comics does. If you want to make something using the material I did for Sandman, you have to ask them.
Feel free to ask me or my agent about things I control. But I'm not going to be any use for Sandman.
What is the order of the Sandman volumes?
Sure. Preludes & Nocturnes. The Doll's House. Dream Country. Season of Mists. A Game of You. Fables and Reflections. Brief Lives. Worlds' End. The Kindly Ones. The Wake.
Sandman: The Dream Hunters is off to one side, as are the two Death books: the High Cost of Living and the Time of your Life.
The current edition of the books have numbers on the covers, to help you figure it out, and a list of titles on the back.
Was the King of Pain real?
The King of Pain was indeed a real person. I learned about him in a book called The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld by Herbert Asbury, which, rather to my surprise, is still in print.
What happened to Malcolm Jones III?
Malcolm (who was the best inker Sandman had, from 1988 to 1990) killed himself (around 1995, if memory serves).
Is there Sandman merchandise available?
Yes. Google is your friend.
Where did the text on the Sandman shirt come from?
There is a Sandman shirt that was made which seems to have a story printed on the background. Unfortunately, the images are obscuring so many words that I can't quite make it out. Any idea where to find the text in full?
It's a Dave McKean shirt. The text is the description of Morpheus from the script to Sandman 17 (reprinted in Dream Country.)
Who can't spell Dalmatians in Brief Lives?
Something I wonder when I reread "Brief Lives": is it you or Todd Klein who can't spell dalmatian?
Oh, that was me. Although Todd usually caught my most egregious misspellings (or English Spellings). It was meant to have been fixed when the book was collected, but Brief Lives was cursed, and to date, and over five or six printings, only a tiny handful of the text and colour goofs have been fixed.
Is the Death movie really in development?
Yup.
Can I make an animated version of one of your Sandman stories?
It's something you can certainly do for your own amusement -- but beyond that, the to Sandman rights aren't mine. They are controlled by DC Comics and Warner Bros. If you want to do something with Sandman filmically, you need to talk to them.
How would you describe Morpheus's feelings towards Death? I imagine he hides a very strong love for her, an idea people seem to find offensive for some reason ...
I don't think he hides it at all: read Sandman 8, "The Sound of Her Wings", or Sandman 21, the first part of Season of Mists, or part of the Wake. He obviously loves her very much, just as she loves him. I'm not sure why that should be offensive. She's his sister, after all. And family dynamics, while complicated, tend to include love as a major component.
If you're asking me whether he lusts after her, that'd be a no. His love-life is complicated and doomed enough already.
In Hy Bender's book, The Sandman Companion, on page 199, you comment that one of your favorite sequences to write in the Kindly Ones was when Cluracan vomits up his nemesis...I have been over that book countless times, and I must confess that I cannot find this sequence ANYWHERE. On page 6 of part 2 of the Kindly Ones, Cluracan does ask Dream to destroy his nemesis, but nowhere that I can see is the actual drawing that is shown in that book on page 199. This has caused me no small amount of consternation. Maybe that sequence only showed up in the monthly comic, and not in the Kindly Ones volume....? I can't seem to figure out what is going on....
Very odd indeed. Everything in the monthly comics went into the finished book. On the other hand it's not unknown for books with errors to creep out, and it sounds like your book may be missing an 8 or 16 page "signature". Someone once e-mailed me (and showed up at a signing to show me) a copy of DON'T PANIC! which turned into a german porn novel at the end. The sequence with Cluracan and his Nemesis is Chapter 2, pages 7-9 (for some reason The Kindly Ones isn't numbered all the way through). If your copy is missing these pages, take it back to where you got it, and explain that you want one with all the pages in.
Dear Neil: As far as I can remember, Barbie (unlike most of the characters in the series) did not re-appear in The Kindly Ones or The Wake. Was there a reason behind this?
Sort of. She didn't want to come on. I kept expecting her to come back, but she didn't -- she was perfectly happy having walked off-stage at the end of Game of You and didn't see why she should come back. I wasn't going to force it.