Content Warning
This post mentions allegations of emotional and psychological abuse. If this topic is triggering or distressing, please proceed with care or skip this post.
When Netflix’s Sandman was released two years ago, it was all I could ever talk about. I loved everything about it — the ‘controversial’ casting (Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Death? Gwendoline Christie’s Lucifer?!), the production design, the sharper writing. It was everything I hoped a Sandman adaptation should be. Honestly, it was even better than the audio version that Audible produced a few years back.
It was faithful, but somehow the storytelling felt elevated. It made Morpheus more watchable. Yes, I couldn’t shut up about it.
But that was two years ago.
Now, watching The Sandman feels deeply uncomfortable. Weird, and somehow wrong. I haven’t even written about it online (until now). And it’s not because the show got worse — if anything, it’s still good, maybe even better than the source material. And there’s the rub.
(Before I continue, know that this is not a review of the Netflix series. There are plenty of critics and film buffs who can comment on the technical aspects of the show. This is the perspective of a former fan, and my reflections on how one of my all-time most favorite stories became so hard to sit with.)
There’s a reason why The Sandman hits so hard for so many people. When it came out in 1989, it wasn’t just another comic. It was the comic that proved comics could be literature. It was a graphic novel. It smashed myth, horror, poetry, and pop culture together in a way that felt unapologetic and raw. (It even won awards that comics weren’t even supposed to be eligible for. The World Fantasy Award had to change its rules after The Sandman won one.)
But more than accolades, The Sandman gave a whole generation of readers — especially queer and outsider kids — something they didn’t see anywhere else. It was a whole new way of making sense of the world. I remember reading it for the first time and feeling like something clicked, like finally, someone got it.
I know more than a few people who had Death’s ankh as their first tattoo. One of my earliest blogs was named flicker flash fade — something mortals do, according to Destruction in Brief Lives. And when I was a teenager, the author was larger than life to me. Back in 2005, I even spent 10 hours under the sun just to meet him and have him sign a book. No pictures – you’re going to have to trust me on this, because I swear I had a photo taken with him. It was on all of my socials. But it was on Blogdrive, Multiply, and Friendster…
(Update: My good friend Arlene found the photo! That’s her standing behind me.)
The Sandman shaped how I thought about death, dreams, power, love, and even storytelling itself. It taught me that the stories we tell are just as powerful as the gods we worship, because they are the gods we worship.
But for all the beauty The Sandman gave us, I can’t ignore how much of its core is rooted in the perspective of a man now accused of sustained emotional and psychological abuse — and who has repeatedly used his position of wealth and power to abuse women under his employ, and then to silence them.
Here’s the thing: stories don’t exist in a vacuum. Yes, they take a life of their own once they’re published and released to the world – but they’re still very much shaped by the hands that made them. The author’s treatment of women in his work has always been more than a little troubling. In retrospect, it’s hard not to see how those patterns reflect the author’s same perversions we’ve now learned about.
Let’s talk about Nada, the queen of the first people, who was Dream’s muse and lover, and one of the first tragic characters we meet in the Sandman universe.
In the graphic novel, Nada is a sixteen-year-old queen. Dream becomes infatuated with her and pursues her relentlessly. At one point, she even transforms into a gazelle to escape from his reach. And still, he persists.
When they finally sleep together, he does so knowing that it was forbidden for mortals to consort with the Endless. As punishment, her city was razed to the ground by a meteor, as depicted in the Netflix adaptation. But in the original version, Nada commits suicide, and even after that, Dream still follows her to Death’s realm to ask her to be his queen regardless. When she refuses, he condemns her soul to Hell.
The Netflix adaptation cleans this all up. The dynamic between Nada and Dream has been rewritten as a story of two star-crossed lovers, equals – ancient, powerful souls caught in the wrong time, the wrong form. While there is still a power imbalance, it’s much less pronounced. Dream doesn’t stalk or coerce her. He speaks softly. He falls to one knee. It’s sickening.
The show rewrites Dream’s behavior just enough to make him sympathetic. He’s not a god punishing a teenager for refusing him; instead, he’s a gaslighting prick who intentionally misunderstands Nada’s rejection of him as a decision to condemn herself (?!) to Hell.
Somehow it feels like the adaptation is all a ploy to make Dream more likable, and by extension, Gaiman. The Netflix version, as well as the graphic novel, turns the predator into a prince. It flattens a girl’s suffering into a brooding, misunderstood god’s redemption arc. And that feels icky to watch.
Art Is Not Just Form
To defend The Sandman purely on the grounds of craft — its cinematography, its writing, its pacing — is a formalist dead end. It’s missing the forest for the trees. The show might be impeccable, sure. But art is not just about form, or the technical features of the piece. It’s also about who made it, why it was made, and what it does in the world.
Anti-formalist thinking reminds us that aesthetics alone are not enough to make a work meaningful. Context matters. The cultural, political, and ethical dimensions matter. When we ignore them and fail to take them into consideration when we engage with a piece of work, we make it easy for rotten ideas to hide behind beauty. We let ourselves be moved by something that might also be complicit in something harmful or damaging.
For instance, if we watch The Sandman legally, are we just enjoying a good story, or are we lining the pockets of Gaiman, helping him fund his ongoing legal battles against his accusers?
I don’t even know why I bothered to write this. Maybe it’s an invitation — to other fans, former or otherwise — to reevaluate Gaiman’s legacy. Maybe we should be putting his work under a microscope to expose the rot underneath. I don’t know.
What I do know is this: I’m never spending another centavo on his work. What I do know is that The Sandman may have shaped many of my beliefs and feelings around love, life, and stuff that matters — but Neil Gaiman and monsters like him should be held accountable. He has enjoyed pretending to be a feminist for so long. Time for his comeuppance.
