The Sandman series on Netflix has pulled off that rare trick of ensnaring a new audience in its complex and shifting narrative without diluting what made the comic book source material so compelling. Devotees of Neil Gaiman’s original DC Comics series will already have a fair idea of what future seasons have in store, but – avoiding spoilers – here’s an impressionistic taste of the delights to come…
Ill met by moonlight. Grim fairytales. Popcorn and sweat. Visions of Johanna. The Canterbury Tales meets The Vault Of Horror. Location, Location, Damnation. A rodent in a raincoat. Lucienne. Freud.
An eye for an eye. A guide to picking the right mushrooms. Curious furries and furious Furies. The Spirit Of Whitby. Nazi Narnia. The tallest, thinnest man you’ve ever seen. A river of semen. The gender-neutral person from Porlock. Eden fruit. Anthropomorphic vegetables.
The karmic wheel of death and rebirth. Lies, damned lyres and statistics. Near neighbours. Distant nebulae. Emperors’ states of mind. A chop off the old block. Diamonds. Years of wandering. Rubies. Days of wonders. Emeralds. The dark mirror of humanity. Sapphires. The palace of pleasure. Amethysts. An exaggerated death. Pearls before swine.
Filming for the second series begins this summer. The release date is currently more up in the air than a messenger raven, with rumours of it arriving not as a complete series but in batches – in similar fashion to the two-part episode that dropped as a pleasant surprise soon after the first season. But The Sandman is all about seasons being wrapped in mists of mystery, so it’s sure to be worth the wait.
