As we go off to never, ever, ever land with the upcoming The Sandman series from Netflix, I’m sure that fans coming into it and new people who didn’t read the series will wonder how much from the comics is covered in these eleven episodes. Well, here is the breakdown.
Spoilers for The Sandman
Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series has many spin-offs, but the core series comprises ten volumes of seventy-five issues. While the Netflix series pulls small details from other comics, the first season is an adaptation of the first two volumes: Preludes and Nocturnes and The Doll’s House.
Episodes 1-5 cover Prelude, while 6-10 deal with Doll’s House.
Prelude and Nocturne is the John Dee arc that focuses on Dream working to regain his three tools of power that make it possible for him to control the Dreaming fully. It is largely faithful to the source material and serves as an introduction to the world. We meet Dream, his favorite sibling, Death, and see both Dream’s capacity for vengeance and his stubbornness about learning to love and trust others.
The Doll’s House is about Rose Walker, a teenage girl looking for her brother, who is revealed to be a dream vortex. The vortex comes about every generation and has the power to destroy the world if not stopped. It also has the conflict between Dream and four of his rogue creations that have caused problems in the human world during his capture.
However, episode eleven is a bit of a twist on the adaptation. It is an adaptation of Dream Country, four independent stories that add color to the world of The Sandman. The most popular of this story is “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” which features an adorable white cat and plays on the idea of the power of dreams. Four of these stories are put into one episode which serves as a lighthearted break between the intensity of The Doll’s House and the future chaos of Season of Mists, that sees Dream return to Hell.
When Tessa Netting and myself interviewed Neil Gaiman for the Netflix Geeked podcast, Tessa noted that she was coming into the series as a non-comic reader. The series is built to satisfy fans of the books, but also is an inviting start to the Sandman journey for anyone who is looking to enter the Dreaming.
(image: DC/Vertigo)
