‘Please don’t do it’: Everything Neil Gaiman has said about adapting Sandman through the years

polygon.com:

If you’ve ever thought, Would Patton Oswalt be a good voice for a talking raven? Netflix’s The Sandman is here to answer your question. Whether it answers in the affirmative or the negative is, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder. But Sandman creator Neil Gaiman has said in a blog post that Oswalt was the first person they cast for the comic book adaptation, and he was very intentional with his pick.

“The question was, could we find an actor who could make you care about a dead person who was now a bird in the Dreaming – one who isn’t certain what’s going on, or whether any of this is a good idea? And could we find a voice performer who was also the kind of Sandman fan who used to stand in line to get his Sandman comics signed?” Gaiman wrote. “The answer was, we could if we asked Patton Oswalt (he/him). And Patton was the first person we asked, and the first person we cast, the day before we pitched The Sandman to Netflix.”

If this seems like he’s overthinking it, just know (if you don’t already): This development is a helluva long time coming. In a similar way to how Dream of the Endless is tasked with spending years trying to rebuild his realm, Gaiman has found himself some 30 years into a journey to translate The Sandman comics to the screen. Over those decades, that screen has been big and silver and small and serialized, but it’s always been just a bit elusive.

As we know now, Netflix would finally win out, providing the story a properly serialized home along with a hefty budget and a cast just as endless as its hero. And now, along with the chapters of the original comic, we can now look back at the chapters of Sandman’s attempted development, and the alternate realities we might’ve seen had Sandman been