Eventually, Neil Gaiman's The Sandman will make its way to Netflix as the TV series announced last year. Meanwhile though, we can listen to a new audio adaptation of the classic comic. Released this week on Audible, the audio drama features the voices of Gaiman as narrator, James McAvoy as Morpheus, and Kat Dennings as Death. Listen to a clip above. From an interview with Gaiman in Entertainment Weekly:
You've previously done audio adaptations of your novels Neverwhere and Good Omens. What was the difference translating a comic book into that format?
NEIL GAIMAN: The biggest difference is they are made up of words, while comics have pictures. Having said that, comics are weirdly close to audio drama. They sort of work in very similar ways. One of the first adaptations of my stuff I ever did was taking the graphic novel Signal to Noise, which I did with Dave McKean, and doing it for BBC in the mid-'90s. We're proud of what we've done. One of the things I was able to do was give Dirk Maggs, who did all of the heavy lifting on this, the original scripts for Sandman. I had to go into long-forgotten parts of my computer and wander down dusty corridors with cyber cobwebs to find files in Word Perfect 4.1 format, and translate them out of Word Perfect and send them over to Dirk. What was great about that was Dirk got to take instructions I had written 30 years ago for artists to tell them what to draw, and take lines from that to me as the narrator. We would take lines that had been written so only the artist would ever see, and those lines would then become part of the description, part of the background. What was really fun for me was how little we changed. For years and years, people who have vision issues have told me how much they wish they could read Sandman. Audio drama is incredibly inclusive. I do love that we're bringing the books to people who otherwise would not be able to read them.
