1The name “Dirk Maggs” first graced BBC’s airwaves on June 5th, 1988—and it was spoken by Lex Luthor. At the end of “Superman on Trial”, a special docudrama marking the 50th anniversary of the iconic hero’s creation, his archnemesis sits in a prison cell. Luthor calls his nefarious corporation’s legal department, and then begins to read out a list of all the people he plans to sue “for defamation”, for their roles in thwarting his recent attempt to prosecute the title hero. His aggrieved recitation of names doubles as diegetic closing credits for the entire voice cast and production team, a tirade that he caps off by calling out the program’s creator, BBC Radio 4 producer Dirk Maggs. This was just the beginning of what would become Maggs’ long, celebrated career as an audio storyteller; the first of many instances where he evinced his keen awareness of this medium’s nuances, his ability to harmonize form and content to craft stirring narratives, and in doing so, ever so slightly blur the metatextual borders of the soundscape.
2Since his time at BBC Radio, to becoming an independent producer, David George Dirk Maggs—known professionally by his middle name—has established himself as one of entertainment’s most in-demand audio-dramatists. He began his career adapting well-known comic book heroes like Superman and Batman for radio, and moved on to reimagine other beloved works of science fiction such as Alien and The X-Files into the time-tested yet under-appreciate form of audio-drama. His partnership with famed British fantasy author and comic book writer Neil Gaiman goes back nearly as far, with a string of finely-produced, star-studded audio adaptations of Gaiman’s written stories over the years. But the project the duo had in the works since 1993—adapting Gaiman’s culture-defining comic series from the same era—only came to fruition until far more recently.
3Close to three decades after initially conceiving of the idea together, an audio-drama adaptation of the Sandman comics was eventually greenlit by Audible, Amazon’s increasingly popular audiobook platform. When Audible’s The Sandman released on July 15th, 2020, it soon became their best-selling original title, alerting a wider global audience to the captivating potential of a vivid, vastly-populated, and interconnected fantasy story existing entirely in an aural world. But with the added knowledge of Maggs’ history of audio adaptations, it begins to appear less a breakthrough hit than the natural culmination of his thirty-year journey as a storyteller.
4James McAvoy, who previously starred as Richard Mayhew in Maggs’ 2013 radio adaptation of Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, returns as the title role in The Sandman. Morpheus, or ‘Dream’—one of the seven Endless, who presides over the metaphysical realm of sleep and imagination. This ten-volume comic book epic follows the immortal being’s mission to rebuild his fractured kingdom after spending nearly a century imprisoned on Earth. The audio-drama hews faithfully to its source material, and Gaiman’s creative presence remains felt, in no small part due to the author’s role as the adaptation’s omniscient narrator.
5The Sandman comics lend themselves to an audio adaptation more than most other works of their medium. A glance at one of Gaiman’s original scripts for the comics reveals their fundamentally dramatic qualities: the extensive dialogue and resulting speech bubbles that often encompass entire panels, the author’s elevated prose housed in narratorial captions, and the pivotal role that character interaction plays in many of the stories. Unlike its antecedents in conventional DC superhero comics, the conflicts in Sandman aren’t primarily physical, but instead often interpersonal, emotional, and at times deeply existential—in Maggs’ words, demonstrating “the difference between teenage boy and mature adult” storytelling sensibilities. His scripts for the adapted stories, to that effect, read more like stage-plays. But in audio form, the added benefit of Neil Gaiman’s narration allows thoughtful glimpses behind the curtain to see the creative action backstage as it happens, in much the same way as Maggs’ vexed Lex Luthor in “Superman on Trial” did years prior.
6One small but telling example occurs in The Sandman’s eighth episode, “The Sound of Her Wings”, which adapts Sandman’s landmark Issue #6 of the same name, what Gaiman deems in retrospect as the moment when he “finally realized what he wanted to say” with his nascent Vertigo comic series. As the narrator in the audio-drama, introducing the fan-favourite character Death, Gaiman describes her iconic gothic appearance at length, concluding that, “She could be a waitress in a pancake house”. The observation may lead casual listeners to scratch their heads, but longtime Sandman fans will recognize this as a meta nod to the character’s real-world creation story, when years prior, Gaiman caught a glimpse of a similarly-dressed waitress at a pancake house in Chelsea who inspired the look of Dream’s older sister.
7Audible’s The Sandman contains many special moments like this, where the innately aural, adaptational elements enhance Gaiman’s story, by uncovering the pre-existing depths of the comics, and imbuing new significance into his fictional world within this updated narrative form. Media scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock suggested the various adaptations of Gaiman’s fantasy novel Neverwhere—including Maggs’ 2013 radio drama—all contribute to a transmedia “mega-text”, described as, “a kind of imagined space where past and present incarnations of the same text coexist and collide in productive tension.” In much the same way, Audible’s The Sandman adds to the imagined world that Gaiman first conceived of in the source text. Through moments of telling narration, the audio-drama achieves “metalepsis”—a self-referential breaking of narrative boundaries, which reminds listeners of its fundamentally constructed nature. At its essence, Sandman is a sprawling, multilayered story that celebrates the power of storytelling. Having the original author narrate the story—in effect, bringing his world and characters to life using just his words, as he did in print decades ago—feels like the purest form for this narrative to inhabit. As the audio-drama’s director, Maggs intuitively understood the impact this would have, and the conscious creative choices he made result in an ever more impactful dramatic experience.
8Since 2020, Audible has released three installments (Acts 1, 2, and 3) of The Sandman, spanning eight volumes of the original comics, with a fourth Act on the way. With the release of Netflix’s popular live-action Sandman adaptation in 2022, the transformative comic series has once more found a welcome home in the public’s cultural imagination. Now, two of the world’s largest entertainment brands, Netflix and Amazon, have both offered up their interpretations of Gaiman’s series—although the innovative mind behind the audio-drama makes no bones about which one he prefers.
9This conversation with Dirk Maggs took place in November of 2022, shortly after the release of The Sandman: Act III. This latest installment won AudioFile Magazine’s prestigious Golden Earphones Award, marking the third consecutive time in as many years that Audible’s Sandman series received this honour.
My unfamiliar friend once humorously likened the concept of an “audio comic” to “swimming in the Sahara desert”. What do you make of that assertion, with contradictory media aspects of audio (pure sound) and comics (pure visual) put together in this conceptually incompatible narrative form?
- 1 The original Adventures of Superman radio program, broadcast in America, was one of the first and m (...)
DM: I think it’s only contradictory if you don’t understand the power of audio as a storytelling medium, which in the Western world is mainly due to the cultural gap the Atlantic has created in the past fifty or so years, between the U.K. and North America, for what audio entertainment means. Drama as an audio storytelling tool hasn’t been so prevalent in North America until recently, whereas the British Broadcasting Corporation has always had a tradition of audio drama, with sound effects, casts of voice actors, and music.1 In America, the idea of an ‘audiobook’ has always been a single voice entity—with one skilled narrator providing both narration and the voices of the characters. It’s only in the last ten years or so that’s changed [in America], where now people listen to stories being told, as it were, in an ‘audio-drama’ form. I think the Internet has now blurred the edges of this divide, but a lot of people still aren’t aware of what audio can do.
I was raised in the U.K., listening to radio comedy shows like The Goon Show, with Peter Sellers doing thousands of voices, or radio drama like Under Milk Wood or the BBC radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings. Audio storytelling was just part of the cultural landscape here. I joined the BBC intending to get into television and film, but found I loved audio as a storytelling medium so much, I didn’t see the need to be in the same room as a camera to tell a good story. As a result, I got into the station’s comedy department, and I had to pitch a production as part of the job interview. It just so happened I knew it was Superman’s 50th birthday, in 1988. I suggested we do a Superman docudrama, to dramatize episodes from his ‘life’, with the concept of him going on trial for crimes against humanity.
I didn’t realize, until I began adapting other comic book stories into audio, how compatible the two mediums were. Rather than trying to swim across a desert, it was like swimming across a nice, heated pool with fins on. They didn’t just complement each other, they loved each other. The purely visual medium of comics, and the purely aural medium of radio, worked perfectly together, but they also work independently as well, because you can consume them individually.
- 2 Following the success of “Superman on Trial”, Maggs produced a similar retrospective audio-drama ca (...)
It makes me laugh now when people on Twitter who are fans of The Sandman say, “This is great, but it’s even better if you listen and read the comics at the same time”. Which of course, wasn’t the intention—we intended to create something entirely for the screen of the mind. But if that’s what works for people, that’s wonderful; if we can give a voice to the images on the page, then our job is done. In fact, Sandman is the most faithful version of a comic adaptation I’ve done, because I’m more or less directly translating Neil [Gaiman’s] original scripts with their visual descriptions for the artists into a sort of stream of consciousness. It’s like being inside Neil’s head as he creates the original stories, hearing the characters come to life as he invents them. Our earlier projects in the ‘90s with Superman and Batman were much trickier, because we were still exploring a new narrative medium, figuring out the ‘grammar’ of sound.2 But looking back on that journey, I think it’s worked out very well, indeed.
I was one of the people for whom The Sandman audio-drama was a gateway to reading the original comics. Have you heard of others who had a similar experience?
Yes, it’s been really gratifying. If someone discovers the story through our medium, then goes and reads it in the original form, that’s the greatest possible compliment, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s the same with the live-action Netflix series in 2022. The difference is that while I’m adapting the source material and not reinventing anything, the Netflix show is more of a 2020s revamp. Initially, I considered the idea of following that route, before Netflix announced its plans, but after they did, I decided, “let’s just stick with the mother lode”.
- 3 The original story first appeared as a six-part BBC radio broadcast in 1978. In 2018, Maggs produce (...)
It was much the same way when Douglas Adams asked me to adapt the later books of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and “bring it back home to radio”, as he put it.3 There were people who hadn’t read the books, but after listening to the audio stories, went back and read them. By that point, Douglas had tragically died, so I helped keep that flame alive. With Sandman, I’m doing that also, but because its popularity spans borders—culturally, physically, politically—I’m discovering people who haven’t known about the possibilities of audio storytelling. When they hear The Sandman, it opens their imagination to what is possible in sound alone—and what happens visually when what they hear becomes a picture in their mind.
What did you make of Netflix’s Sandman series?
I haven’t watched it, and I don’t plan to. I know it’s really good—I’ve seen brief clips, I know the cast is amazing, and of course, Neil’s behind it, and he’s the source of the magic. But I don’t want that adaptation to colour my interpretation of the story. If Tom [Sturridge’s] version of Morpheus in any way affects how I direct James [McAvoy] in the next Act, then it’ll be a mistake. I know Tom is a brilliant actor, but James and I spent a long time working up our version of the character—we had about three hour-long Zoom calls during COVID talking about how Morpheus should sound, how he would react, what made him tick. We arrived at a version of the character we could believe in and work with. Before the Netflix series came along, the people who know and love the character were saying that James has absolutely nailed what they thought Morpheus would be. After hearing that, I just thought, “Well, thank goodness for that”.
I’m one of them—you’ve cemented James as my definitive version of the character. You were also a fan of the Sandman comics during their original run in the late ’80s to early ’90s. What aspects most intrigued you about this adaptation, and how did you initially approach the project?
I was already making various shows for the BBC: topical comedies, knock-about comedies, and recreated Marx Brothers scripts from the ‘30s. One of the things I was working on was The Adventures of Superman. I’m not sure if the BBC would commission it now, but that meant I had a good relationship with DC Comics and their International Business Manager Phyllis Hume, a lovely person who’s no longer with us. At that time, she asked me if I knew a writer named Neil Gaiman, to which I replied, “I know Britain’s small, but it’s not that small. I’ve never met the guy”. She asked me if I had read Sandman (no), and next thing you know, she FedExed me over the first twenty comics of the series. So I’m reading this stuff, and I thought “Holy smokes”. This was just a completely different proposition from conventional superhero stories. This was culturally-rich, eclectic, drew on myth and historical figures, but also created a new mythology. I’d read Watchmen, so I was already aware that Alan [Moore] and Dave [Gibbons] were doing some amazing work, and I’d also read Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, so I knew that comics in the ’80s were already being revolutionized. However, Sandman was something like I’d never seen before. There were no characters in tights. No one even called Morpheus ‘The Sandman’.
So here I am at the BBC thinking, “Why am I doing Superman, when I should be doing stuff by a British writer?” Not that I didn’t love Superman, but I thought this was where the BBC should be culturally, because as a public broadcaster, we had a duty to encourage British talent. At this point, Neil was working with Terry [Pratchett] on Good Omens, but he wasn’t the towering media figure he is now. Still, I thought this needed to be on the radio.
That was the point I got in touch with Neil. He’d heard my work, and he said he’d love the idea, but that the comic wasn’t in his gift, as the copyright was vested with DC Comics. But since I already had a good relationship with the company, I tried getting it underway. The first time I pitched it unofficially in our department [at the BBC] was around ’92 or ’93, so about thirty years ago exactly. They didn’t get the idea, probably because the comics weren’t as well-known as they are today. Neil and I have talked about that since, and we’ve realized it was just as well, because he and I both learned so much in the meantime about storytelling through sound, leading up to when we finally released The Sandman in 2020.
To delve into some specific aspects of that adaptation, I want to start with Sandman #19, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the last story from the first installment. It’s one of the most acclaimed stories from the original comics, a testament to Sandman’s transcendence to recognized high culture. But as a metafictional story that plays on layers of theatrical performance, it also seems like that would have been a difficult story to adapt in an aural medium. How did you approach that?
Well, that’s a good one to discuss, because it was bloody difficult! It’s one of my absolute favourite Sandman stories, because here’s Neil Gaiman: this young upstart British writer, deciding to rework Shakespeare into a mythical context—the bravura is gob-smacking. And then it’s illustrated by Charles Vess, one of the great modern artists to depict fantasy and faerie. It’s also one of the most haunting of the Sandman stories, in fact any comic story. This pretty much summed up my attempt to make, for lack of a better word (and it really is a terrible word), “audio-movies”. It would have been really easy to mess this up: for the listener to not know where they were in any given location of the story, when I’m jumping from the performance of a widely-known play, to reactions within the audience of said play while it’s going on, plus action backstage—also while the play is going on. That’s the result of three decades of experience in audio storytelling, deciding to execute that, and trusting you won’t get lost while I’m doing it.
You—the listener—and I—the director—work in collusion. I’m using a kind of telepathy through sound to transmit images and places that you, as a listener, pick up through your imagination. It was one of the hardest stories to adapt for the cast; we ended up having to perform and record about a third of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to create a Shakespearean background layer, on which we could then base the elements of Neil’s story.
- 4 Within the Sandman series, Gaiman portrays fictionalized version of the historical William Shakespe (...)
But first of all, we had to establish the characters: the players of Will Shakespeare’s traveling theatre company.4 The conceit is, in 1594, Shakespeare’s taken a bunch of actors on the road because there’s a plague in London, so they might as well go out and perform in the countryside. It’s a bold idea to start with, for Neil to have done that—historically, that’s not necessarily how it happened. But in the story Will Shakespeare has made a deal with Morpheus: the power of dreams is on Will’s side to conjure visions and create immortal plays. To help Morpheus raise his status with the kingdom of Faerie, this play—a farce involving the Faerie monarchs, Oberon and Titania—will be performed in front of the ‘real’ Oberon and Titania. It’s a completely mind-bending idea. There’s the play, which has human actors playing characters like Puck, Peaseblossom, Oberon, and Titania—and then you have the audience of the real Puck, Peaseblossom, Oberon, and Titania.
What I had to do was anchor the piece with the genuine Shakespeare play being performed as the core element. That having been established in the background preserves the continuity and momentum of the story. It’s ambitious, and involves what are essentially ‘camera set ups’ where we move our point of view from the audience to the actors to events backstage while the play proceeds, apparently seamlessly.
For the descriptive elements, the images rendered into verbal descriptions that are narrated by Neil Gaiman—where did those come from?
There’s a bit of collaboration involved in that. What I tried to do was expand on his original notes for the artists like Charles Vess in the original drafts for the comics, information that was for their eyes only. I wanted something that Netflix couldn’t do, which was to get inside Neil’s head when he was writing these stories. I’m giving you, the listener, information that wasn’t in the comics, allowing Neil’s voice to guide you through his world and explain what’s going on. That was the unique selling point for me about the project: letting the audience experience Neil’s imagination while he’s creating the world, and hearing the action in his head.
But in terms of the sound effects, and creating the physicality of the stories, that’s my contribution. We started working together properly about ten years ago, adapting his novel Neverwhere for BBC Radio. There’s no narrator in that one. I’m not a fan of narrators. Neil and I agree to disagree about this. I argue, “Why not let the action tell its own story?”, and Neil says, “No, I want people to know exactly what’s going on.” Well, in the case of Sandman of course, Neil is the only logical choice of narrator, and it’s wonderful, because we can convey all this additional information from the creator himself. Neverwhere happily worked without narration, although Neil did play a few roles in it for fun. I think it helped that he saw what I could do with the material, and learned to trust me not to lose the pictures he painted in the book, but instead to paint them with sound, using the way the characters spoke, sound effects, music—all the tools of our trade, to remain faithful to his story.
On that note, my favourite moment from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is at the very end, when Neil, as the omniscient narrator, recites the final captions of the comic: ‘Hamnet Shakespeare died in 1596, age 11. Robin Goodfellow’s present whereabouts are unknown”. It struck me that in a series that’s largely about storytelling, having the actual author narrate these events that will unfold—in a sense, bringing them into being—perhaps adds a special meta quality. Did this connection occur to you at all?
Fig. 1: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (The Sandman, Volume 3: Dream Country. 30thAnniversary Edition).
DC Vertigo.
Probably not, only because at a certain point in the process it becomes a technical exercise for me. That’s not to diminish that feeling. I get what you mean, and I would feel that way if listening to it as someone not involved in the creation. What usually goes through my mind is more like, “Holy smokes, we’ve only got twenty minutes to record nineteen minutes of audio, before Neil has to get in a taxi to go somewhere else!”
But yes, it does feel special to have the author so involved in recreating the work. When Sandy Resnick at DC Comics originally reached out to me to greenlight the project in 2017, he also contacted Neil for his approval, to which he thankfully said, “Yes please!” Then shortly after, Neil emailed me to ask, “Are you looking for a narrator? Because if you are, I’d quite like to put my hand up for that”. I replied, “Who else is going to do it?!”. And he said, “Well, Benedict Cumberbatch, or whoever…” (because Benedict was in Neverwhere). And I said, “Don’t be daft, it has to be you!”
- 5 From The Sandman, Volume 5: A Game of You.
That said, when I send the scripts, and he reads them, and isn’t happy with something I’ve done, I feel extra pressure to address those issues immediately. Even thirty years after he wrote them, Neil knows everything about the world he created and is totally in tune with his creative intentions. In Act II, we have the story of the trans character, Wanda, which needed bringing up to date—not that Neil wasn’t being current in his attitudes when writing the original comics, but because he was introducing characters and situations that weren’t so much in the public eye at that time.5 We wanted to build up Wanda, give her a stronger, more assertive presence in today’s terms. So when we were assessing how the parameters had shifted, I wrote three different versions of a particular scene—one was faithful to the comic, the other a long way away from it—to see where we would go with that.
I remember an encounter I had with Douglas Adams years ago. Before I was taken on to adapt A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, he enlisted someone else who did unforgivable things to the story, like adding a dinosaur that talked. I went from the BBC broadcasting house down to his house in Islington. Douglas was in his basement, banging away on his MacBook. He looked up at me and said, “I can’t write this fucking thing twice”. And I understood that; it was hard enough to write the book the first time, why should he write it again?
It’s the same way with Neil. He’s super conscientious about protecting his work, which I admire. But at the same time, I don’t expect him to do his own work twice.
Another story I wanted to discuss was the three-part “The Song of Orpheus” arc later in the series, specifically the title song. How did this come about, did you collaborate on this with James Hannigan, the composer for The Sandman?
- 6 Adapted from the passage in Book X of Ovid’s Metamorphoses describing Orpheus’ journey to the Under (...)
When I first read those evocative lyrics in the comic, I asked Neil where they came from, and he told me he took the context of the verse described in written mythology.6 They didn’t have the sort of metre that one would expect of a lyric, though. When I was working on the script, I asked Jim [Hannigan] if he could write a heartbreaking tune that somehow could fit these words. A little while later, he sent me back this piece of music, and I said, “That’s lovely, but how do the words sound”? Jim hates singing, but he begrudgingly sent me a recording of him singing the lyrics (I’m still keeping a copy of that to blackmail him someday). But it scanned, he made the lyrics fit this tune, and it was astonishing. We didn’t change a single word from the original lyrics.
That’s one of the interesting things about adapting this series. Everything Neil has written in these comic books can be read aloud effectively, and that’s not something you can say about a lot of adapted work. The lines of dialogue have rhythm, they have a scan, and quite often they are poetic. There’s actually a lot of iambic pentameter in the Sandman dialogue, which you wouldn’t know unless you’re directing it with actors who do Shakespeare.
So we had the music, but we needed an actor to play Orpheus and sing it. We were all keen to get Regé [-Jean Page], who was popular at that point because of his role in Bridgerton. Jim originally planned to hire a singer to perform the song, but Regé wanted to sing it himself—apparently, he used to play in bands with his brother, and they grew up as huge fans of the Sandman comics. Still, Jim said, “Ok, well I’ll keep someone up my sleeve in case he isn’t as good of a singer as he thinks he is.” Regé was in Belfast shooting something at the time, so we recorded the performance remotely, but it worked fine and it was also very clear: this guy can really sing.
In the end, it comes down to Neil’s skill at writing words that have a natural metre, Jim’s ability to write heartbreakingly good music, and Regé’s ability to sing. As long as I didn’t mess it up, nothing could go wrong.
It must have been interesting, since this was one of the rare instances of an innately aural element in the comics being adapted into a more fitting aural form, rather than the reverse.
Fig. 2: “The Song of Orpheus: Chapter Three” (The Sandman, Volume 6: Fables and Reflections).
DC Vertigo.
It was, but there were also written moments from the recital in the story, in the form of narratorial captions that describe the surrounding environment in the Greek Underworld, like the vultures gnawing on Tityus’ liver, or Ixion’s wheel ceasing to spin. Although Neil’s narration was a vital overarching part of the whole book, it may have been the least important thing for this specific scene. I toyed with the idea of forgoing the narration, but I understood it was also important for the larger story—especially the Furies hating Orpheus for making them weep with his song, which as long-time Sandman readers know, will eventually come back to bite Morpheus later on.
I look forward to seeing how this pans out in Act IV. The release of Act III last September was a pleasant surprise.
Indeed, Neil and I were worried about Audible just dropping the new installment without advertising or building up any hype for the release. I think it was partially a reaction to the Netflix show just coming out. They wanted to do something to pull the focus back on us, basically making the statement, “Look fellas, we’re back!” It’s all part of public relations gamesmanship, I suppose.
Neil Gaiman helms a majority of the narration in the audio-drama, but the “World’s End” story arc stands out, as the perspective character Brant Tucker, voiced by Wil Wheaton, narrates most of the story. How did you approach adapting that aspect?
The subtext of “World’s End” is a whole set of stories that aren’t being told by Neil, but instead by other characters. Brant Tucker doesn’t actually “host” all of the stories in the original comic, but I decided to make him the listener’s guide for the larger narrative. So for instance, when another character finishes narrating their story, they return to the Inn, and Brant sets the next scene.
What listeners may not realize is that a lot of the frame narratives in “World’s End” are read by established audiobook narrators, which is where I can tip my hat to some of the stars of single-voice audiobook narration. Thus Simon Vance—who also voices the characters Lucien and Charon—plays Gaheris, who narrates the first of the stories, “A Tale of Two Cities”. Then Elizabeth Knowelden narrates “Hob’s Leviathan” as the main character Jim. And a dear friend, Simon Jones, who voiced the protagonist Arthur Dent in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide radio broadcast, plays Hermas, one of the key characters in “Cerements”, while Billy Boyd—a seasoned musician and singer, and a mate of mine who I just wanted to work with again—voices the main character Petrefax.
For Brant Tucker, we needed someone well-known who had a lot of audiobook experience, so Wil Wheaton was the obvious choice. He’s a talented actor who’s been amazing since his debut in Stand By Me. I hardly had to direct him at all. The moment of truth was near the end of the story arc, during Brant’s epiphany at the funeral scene: an emotional, uninterrupted monologue that Brant speaks for about five minutes straight. We were running out of time, and I asked Will, “Do you think you could do this all in one take?”, and he said, “I’ll give it a go”. He did. You don’t need to ask someone for another take after they do something that amazing.
The final panel of the last “World’s End” story is a distinctly visual moment: Brant walks away from the bar-woman to whom he’s been narrating the entire series of events, dispelling the overarching narrative frame of the whole comic. Conversely, the audio adaption ends with dialogue between these two characters, before the sound peters out into a final gaping silence, which effectively serves the same purpose. Can you describe that creative choice?
Fig. 3: “World’s End” (The Sandman, Volume 8: World’s End).
DC Vertigo.
Well, silence is just as much of a sound effect as sound. It’s like white on the palette of colours. If you’re doing an oil painting on a white canvas, you don’t have to fill in every part of it with colour—sometimes you can produce it right down to nothing.
There are some other subtler aspects of the ending, as well. The bar-woman is actually the character Thessaly, who appeared as the flatmate in the earlier story arc, A Game of You, and was the woman who dumped Morpheus in the preceding arc, Brief Lives, leading to his anguish at the start of that storyline. This was all subtext, and you wouldn’t know it unless you go deep into Sandman. It was a detail even I wasn’t sure about—I had to ask the author!
So a lot was going on in that episode. It ends on a somewhat downbeat note, but there’s kind of a positive ending for Brant. It’s his story. He’s come out of it with more self-knowledge than at the start. His relationship with Charlene—the woman who travels with him to the Inn, and ends up staying there after he leaves—changes his outlook, and forces him to confront the uglier side of himself. When we pan out and he’s telling the whole story to Thessaly, he’s a sadder and wiser person. He just doesn’t realize that he’s talking to a Greek witch of ancient times, which is a nice touch in retrospect.
That’s the beauty of a story so intricate and interconnected as Sandman, these little details get revealed the further you go. As we work toward adapting the final two story arcs for Act IV, we have to keep all of this in mind. You can’t have a big epic ending where someone has come to terms with their weaknesses—even if they’ve confessed them to an immortal woman who’s just dumped the King of Dreams. It’s a deliberately low-key ending, because we still have a way to go. It’s like a runner in an Olympic race, you’ve got to pace yourself. If you’re sprinting by lap seven in a twelve-lap race, then you’re just screwed, aren’t you?
As you mentioned, audio-dramas are starting to become more ubiquitous and mainstream for North American comic book audiences. How much do you engage with other audio comics like these?
I’ve listened to bits of them, but when I spend a twelve-hour day mixing audio, the last thing I want to do is listen to anything. It may sound uncharitable, but often when I’m listening to these stories, I just get frustrated, because I’m thinking, “You could have told this in a much more dynamic way”, or, “You could have taken your foot off the gas pedal at this point of the narrative and just let it breathe”—kind of like how we were just talking about now.
I find that when people think about dramatizing a comic book into audio, they just assume it has to go “Bang, bang, bang!” But what happens then is the listener gets exhausted—it’s like poking someone’s ear with a knitting needle. A cleverly-told story has a rhythm which surges but then recedes, light and shade, with effects and music used tastefully but seamlessly, rather than listening to the equivalent of thrash metal on volume-11 for hours on end.