One week to go before Sandman on Netflix

Let me geek out a little more by looking at a few things that I consider to be a challenge to the series:

- the first two volumes (= season 1) is more horror driven than the rest, which is driven more by a mixture mythology and fantasy. So the trick is to calibrate the horror elements knowing that by season 2 the series will start moving in another direction.

- There are long story arcs in the comic series, but there are also one off issues with complete stories end to end, like episodic TV used to be. It would be a crime for the series to ignore them (they are not ignoring the pivotal episode 6, so that's a good sign). I wonder how that mixture of long arcs and one off episodes will come across.

- The 75 issue series covers a great variety of settings. Parts of it take place in Hell, parts of it on Earth, a good deal of it is in what is called the Dreaming where dreams and nightmares live. Some of the stories take place in history. We meet Shakespeare, twice. We meet Augustus, Marco Polo.... and there are mythological elements Calliope makes an appearance, we get the fairies, and on and on. I worry how those sudden shifts will translate to a TV series format.

- Gaiman was making a very conscious decision to pull a lot of smaller DC properties into the series: Dr Dream is a forgotten Justice League villain from the silver age, I believe. Lucien the librarian, Abel and Cain were characters that hosted various horror anthology series (House of Mystery and House of Secrets), Matthew the raven, various nightmares that we see, etc etc. It will be fascinating to see how they navigate that landscape for audiences who don't know the books. For readers we see a weird character and we instantly recognize who that is. For audiences, all that could come across as some random things thrown together. I am curious how they connect those characters or even if they actually need to be connected in the first place.

- One of the great things about the book that came out of necessity when the lead artist quit a few issues in is that Gaiman actually kept changing artists for each issue, each story arc. That gave it a unique angle where the look and feel of the books changed completely, and Gaiman played that up... sometimes he would have issues where people gather around and trade stories (he always said that the series was about stores) and a different artist was brought in to illustrate each story in concert with the nature of the tale being told: sweet and innocent stories got one artist where darker stories got other illustrators. Now ... at some level, you do not want to lose that, but at another .... how do you pull that off? (these would be in later seasons if the series continues).

- There are story lines ... not in the first two season where the central character, Dream, does not even show up or shows up in the last two pages. That is not going to go well with the expectations of TV viewers who watch the show because they are invested in the characters, or modern business demands that if they are paying an actor craploads of money they need to see their face a lot (which is why Spider man always loses his mask in big fights and Iron Man takes his helmet of in the middle of a battle).

- This is a meticulously constructed complex story where at the end you start thinking how we got there and you see how the precious throw away points actually connected to one another, which is easier to do with comics because you can turn to that page and look at that detail again. Can't do that on a tv show.

So I also have things to be nervous about but if they pull it off, there should be enough to grab everyone's attention.