British writer Neil Gaiman’s award-winning comic book ''The Sandman'' has been adapted into a live-action series for Netflix. Speaking to Reuters, Gaiman, who is one of the writers and executive producers on the fantasy drama, recalled a feeling of "terror" at being given his own comic book 34 years ago.
STORY: ("The Sandman" writer and executive producer, Neil Gaiman) "Mostly what I remember was the absolute terror of being given my own comic book because Karen Berger, a wonderful editor at DC Comics, had basically said to me, 'We just want to raise your profile. What would you like to do?' And I suggested a whole bunch of characters to her, and she said no to all of them and then said, 'What about that Sandman thing you were talking about?' I'm like, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. All right, I'll do that.'"

Neil Gaiman wrote the award-winning comic book, 'The Sandman,' 34 years ago

Now it's been adapted into a live-action series for Netflix

Gaiman is one of the writers and executive producers on the fantasy drama

"There are definitely places where I get to look at things and go, 'OK well, that was how we did it then. It's 30 years later. What are we doing now?' One thing I loved was getting to open up the choices more. So I would do a thing where when we were casting, when we were looking at characters, we would ask the question, 'Is there any particular reason why this character has to be male? Is there any reason why this character has to be white?' And sometimes, quite often, the answer will be yes and they do and you keep things. But whenever they weren't, it would be like, 'OK well then we have a larger pool of people to actually draw on, a larger bunch of people we can go out to for an audition, a larger bunch of people that we can look at.' And very often, not always, we would wind up with a woman in a role that had been a man's."

Gaiman says he was moved watching his comic jump from the page to the small screen

"I'm watching people walking around saying lines that I wrote 34 years ago, and those lines are reducing me, now, here, to tears. I'm watching Death and I'm watching a scene I wrote when I was 27 and now I'm 61 and it's really powerful. It's really beautiful. And it's just as good a scene as I'd ever hoped, and in a lot of ways it's a lot more powerful. I'd read it on paper over the years, and I read it in script form and I'd written it originally. But this is the first time I felt my eyes prickling and realizing that I was absolutely emotionally there." the sandman interview

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