I needed a break from all the unfinihed post so I thought : " Why not add another one to the mix ? "which sounds kind of crazy but makes sense when you are doing the work. And since it has been almost two and a half years since my last Neil Gaiman SANDMAN post I am taking the opportunity to put more comic content out there while people actually care about it.
Which is all because of the SANDMAN tv show everybody´s raving about - and rightly so. This was another reason for me to make this post : so I can give you my two cents on it. Because as longtime followers of this blog know I have been a Neil Gaiman fan pretty much since day one - meaning I was already a fan when I started this blog - and after the AMERICAN GODS tv show turned into a gay sausage fest I had my share of reservations.
Because I knew before they even started there would be some changes from the original source material to what will appear on the tv screens.
Which usually falls into two categories : the necessary and the obsolete.
The first ones are changes that are made to fit the tv or movie format better like in Neil Gaiman´s brilliant animated CORALINE movie with cult siren Teri Hatcher where the main character was given a person she could talk to if necessary so she would not be talking to herself and seem crazy.
The second ones are changes that are made arbitrary because Hollywood has to " fix "the source material or because it would not work with U.S. audiences like in the CONSTANTINE movie with Keanu Reeves where they changed basically everything about the main character except the name.
And then there is the sub category consisting of the changes that are nowadays necessary to appease the SJWs and LTGBQWXÖ communities if you make a tv show. So I already knew there would be some characters who would have a different skin color, gender, sexual orientation, race etc. Which can make for an interesting drinking game : take one shot for each change which for some characters is a double or even triple shot.
But that´s part of the fun now with comicbook adaptions : who´s black, who´s asian ( I was so rooting for Death being a hasian sexsation like 40D cosplay Busenwunder Yaya Han but they missed the mark slightly on that one ), who´s gay, who´s a lesbian ( I was a bit confused when the lesbian in episode 24 / 7 said she was gay but that´s what you get from Today´s uneducated generation of snowflakes, they throw sexual orientations around without any idea what the right term is as long as they can avoid somebody man - splaining it to them ), who´s a woman, who´s a man ?
Okay, I made that last one up. It won´t be a man. It never is a man. You will never have a character in a comicbook adaption who is a woman in the original version and who is turned into a man in the tv adaption.
Because that just makes no sense. I mean, who would this pander to ?
Anyway, so how does the SANDMAN tv show fare with these changes ?
Actually pretty good and I have to say the change from white librarian dude Lucien to black librarian dudette Lucienne bothered me more than the change from a white skinned personification of Death ( and in the original comicbooks she is not only white but white white like her brother Morpheus ) to a dark skinned one. Because the second one at least makes sense in the context of the story. Those who have already seen the episode where Morpheus goes to hell - quite literally I might add - know that all the Endless are just antrophomorphic representations and they are not really human so they have the same skin color as the one they interact to. Like Morpheus had black skin when he talked to Nadia. Or turned into a freaking cat in Dream Of A Thousand Cats. So Death being black is not that much of a stretch especially when she is hot like Kirby Howell - Baptiste.
dream