Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, DC Comics | Tagged: dc comics, dc vertigo, endless nights, joker, neil gaiman, netflix, rolling stone, sandman

When The Joker Would Have Been In Sandman

In an extended interview with Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone magazine, Neil Gaiman has talked about the early days writing Sandman and the journey from then to here. He also talked about his increasing frustration with ties to the DC Universe as the series continued, and how he would have liked more if it were possible.

Gaiman tells Hiatt, "The truth is if working with the DC universe hadn't been a continuous pain in the ass, Sandman probably would've kept much more tied into the DC universe. The reason why after a while the only DC universe characters I would touch would be people like Element Girl, who was so forgotten she didn't even have a page or an entry in the Who's Who of the DC Universe, and Prez, first teen president of the United States, widely considered a joke, was because I kept trying to do things and they would be planned, and they would be set up and then suddenly they'd be changed. And I just got really irritated with DC continuity."

"An example would be at the beginning of Sandman [issue] five, John Dee, Dr. Destiny, is escaping from Arkham [Asylum], and he's meant to encounter the Joker. And I'd written this whole Joker sequence, and it went in and suddenly got a phone call saying, "Oh no, the Joker has just disappeared beneath the waters of the Gotham river. He's believed dead." And I'm like, "Well, he's not dead. He's the Joker. He'll be back." And they're like, "Yeah. But technically right now he's dead. So you have to make it somebody else." I'm like, "But it was the Joker. It was a good … OK." Roll up my sleeves, it's now the Scarecrow. But it was that kind of thing. I just went, "I can't be bothered." I really can't be bothered to have to change things and rewrite them because somebody else has just dropped the Joker into a river."

This is how that scene played out in Sandman #5. The Joker does not appear, but his absence is noted by The Scarecrow. Neil Gaiman told Bleeding Cool that if it wasn't for the editorial demands, "It would just have been the Joker rather than the scarecrow covering for the Joker."

I have to say my favourite DC appearance in Sandman come much later, when Neil Gaiman could get away with a little more, and with a story immune from being affected by continuity, by being set in the far, far past. From the prequel story The Heart Of A Star by Gaiman and drawn by Miguelanxo Prado from the Endless Nights graphic anthology, the first time an American comic book entered the New York Times book bestseller list. When we got to see the embodiments of stars hanging around and talking at a cosmic party. Such as Despair inspiring Rao, the sun of Krypton, inspiring events that would lead to the destruction of that planet and the survival of Superman. Or an inhabitant of Oa, meeting her own sun.

As well as discovering why the inhabitants of Earth look like the Guardians of Oa.

Maybe one day, in years to come, it too may become a chapter of the Netflix Sandman as well…@

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