For The Sandman, patience is about to be rewarded. Netflix’s upcoming television adaptation sees the embodiment of Dream, aka Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), waiting a century to reclaim the kingdom from him after being captured by occult overreachers. Offscreen, writer Neil Gaiman (Good Omens, American Gods) has waited more than 30 years for his revered epic to hit screens, clinging to his patient faith in an absolute.

“I had no faith that we would always get here,” Gaiman tells Total Film in the new issue, with Thor: Love and Thunder on the cover, “but I had faith that the important thing was to prevent bad versions from being published. done. Once a bad version is done, you never come back from it. It may sound silly, but when I was 14 or 15, my favorite comic was Howard The Duck. Steve Gerber, Gene Colan, Frank Brunner, satire, madness, glory… I was very excited when I heard that George Lucas was making a movie. And then a new breed of hero [the 1986 movie’s alt-title] he left. Howard The Duck became a bad joke. I never wanted that to happen to Sandman and I saw scripts that would have made it happen.”