It Is Impossible To Separate Neil Gaiman From ‘The Sandman’

This is not a review of Netflix’s The Sandman, which premieres the first half of its second and final season tomorrow morning (July 3). Reviews are embargoed until the episodes launch on Netflix anyway, so I wouldn’t bother posting a review of something that is free and available to watch. But this is a discussion about how The Sandman, which was once one of the most eagerly anticipated adaptations of all time, is now near impossible to watch… We often discuss the need to separate the art from the artist, but you just can’t separate Neil Gaiman and his reported abusive actions towards women from his self-insert character, Morpheus. What should be a must-watch is now physically painful to even look at.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely familiar with the assault allegations surrounding Gaiman, who wrote The Sandman comics and was a key figure in bringing the books to the screen. But if not, without getting into the gruesome details, Gaiman was accused of assault and abuse by five women on a podcast in 2024, with one of them giving further details to the New York Times. Though certain projects were halted or reevaluated, the bombshell was reserved for a harrowing story in New York Magazine in 2025 titled “There is no safe word.” The podcast had suffered from questions around its journalistic practices; the New York Mag article did not. Gaiman was dropped by multiple publishers, and projects on TV and movies were killed entirely. Multiple lawsuits were also filed, and while Gaiman has denied all accusations, the allegations – including a human trafficking lawsuit – swirl around him and his ex-wife, Amanda Palmer.

It’s a horrific series of circumstances that have led to a reevaluation of not just Gaiman but his entire career. He had previously been lauded as a feminist, a champion of the downtrodden and underserved groups, a friend of the LGBTQ+ community, and all-around one of the good guys.

He is not one of the good guys, as it turns out. And particularly with The Sandman, which is a foundational text not just for comic books, but the way many people structured their lives inspired by the series, the reveals about Gaiman’s true nature are a complete and total betrayal.

The reason Gaiman’s actions have hit so hard in relation to his seminal work is that, despite any protestations to the contrary, it’s hard not to see Morpheus, the King of Dreams, as Gaiman. First launched in 1989, the DC Comics book took the name of a vigilante – The Sandman – and changed him into a goth god. Tall, lanky, wearing all black with a mop of loose hair, anyone who saw Gaiman knew instantly that Morpheus was him. Gaiman has deferred from stating this in the past, and artist Mike Dringenberg has even given other influences. In a 2014 interview, he broke down where Morpheus came from.

“Certain well-known people influenced the design — his mop of hair came from Robert Smith and ballet dancer Farukh Ruzimatov was always in my mind for his dramatic physique, but face wasn’t so much Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, but rather a type of English face, of which Murphy’s is a shining example,” Dringenberg said. “That face can be averaged between Dirk Bogarde, as he appeared in the 1959 version of A Tale of Two Cities; the young Terrence Stamp of Billy Budd, and David Bowie in the ’70s, with a dash of Syd Barrett.”

But whether Drigenberg used inspiration unknowingly or Gaiman himself modified his look to match Morpheus, the resemblance is uncanny. Only adding to that idea is that Morpheus, like Gaiman, is obsessed with stories, and stories about stories. They are, in essence, one and the same, something that has been abundantly obvious since the get-go. What was not so obvious is how the more toxic aspects of Morpheus were also one and the same with Gaiman.

As soon as the allegations initially came out, fans (former or otherwise) immediately called to mind “Calliope,” a tale of a writer with writer’s block from The Sandman, and one of the most controversial issues. In it, the writer finds inspiration by raping a Muse who is gifted to him. He keeps promising to release her, but for the sake of his career, continues to keep her under lock and key, violating her physically and mentally to help him write. It’s only through the eventual rage of Morpheus that she’s freed.

The book was adapted into part of a bonus episode of the Netflix series released in 2022, which corrected a lot of the aspects of the story that have not aged well. But even at the time, given that Gaiman looks like Morpheus, he was seen as the savior. Once those allegations were revealed, the perspective flipped. Again, without getting too far into details, Gaiman has been accused of holding women captive and sexually violating them. Instantly, it became clear that Gaiman wasn’t the Dream King; he was Richard Madoc, the blocked author. Is it possible that Gaiman was writing this to exorcise his own perversions? Or was he already engaging in the activity he’s since been accused of? It’s impossible to say, but the end result is that a lauded comic book story and TV episode cannot be read or watched, respectively, without thinking about what Gaiman did.

That problem, to bring things back around, is exacerbated exponentially in Season 2. As the season will adapt the entire rest of the comic series, there’s not much to spoil about the circumstances that you can’t read for yourself in a 30-year-old book. But in the episodes, Morpheus (Tom Sturridge) sentences a character to Hell because she broke up with him, he generally struggles to relate to women who won’t recognize him as their master, and the whole plot arc is centered around the female characters on the show teaching Dream how to say “I’m sorry” and be less of a control-freak monster.

Read that back, and tell me that it doesn’t bring to mind the detailed accusations against Gaiman, which stay consistent across the accounts of multiple women. His former nanny has expressed feeling like she was in hell when he turned against her. He does not say “I’m sorry” or apologize at any point in an extraordinarily passive-aggressive note titled “Breaking the Silence,” his first public statement after the allegations came out. And he regularly, reportedly, told the women he abused to call him “master.”

Rather than what could have been an interesting TV arc about a god-like character slowly learning to care about the people around him and becoming more human, instead, Netflix’s The Sandman comes off as a pseudo-documentary/fanfic about redeeming Neil Gaiman.

The unfortunate part here (at least as far as the show is concerned) is that’s likely not at all what was meant by the series. And by making the TV production complicit in what on the surface seems like a Gaiman rehabilitation project does everyone who worked on it a massive disservice.

Filming for the second season began in 2023, before the allegations came out, and ended in August 2024, right after the podcast dropped. Netflix has clearly aimed to distance itself from Gaiman – once a central feature of the ad campaign, he was mysteriously absent during the first behind-the-scenes featurette. And the folks behind the scenes have also downplayed his participation. “Neil wasn’t as involved in Season 2 as he was in Season 1,” David S. Goyer, who co-developed the show, told Variety.

Goyer, though, also gets to the heart of the main issue here. “Obviously, it’s complicated,” Goyer continued. “I have tremendous respect for women that come forward in those situations. It’s really concerning, but I know that Netflix, at the time, felt, ‘God, we spent two years making this thing. There’s all these actors and writers and directors involved that, if we didn’t air it, wouldn’t be fully compensated for it.’ And so we just decided, we’re going to let this work speak for itself. But I’d be crazy to say it wasn’t weird.”

“Weird,” perhaps, isn’t the word I would use. But what Goyer notes here is the core of the internal conflict that wracks anyone who is tainted by a terrible man like Gaiman: hundreds of other people’s work are financially and artistically impacted by one man’s deeds. The cast, the crew, the producers, they were just there doing their jobs. And to not release the show like Goyer notes means they won’t be fully compensated, and won’t have their work seen.

But! There’s the added issue of whether Gaiman also gets financially compensated by the release of The Sandman, and the answer is: likely, yes, he does. In that case, does that money go towards fueling lawsuits he can use against the women he reportedly abused? That’s certainly the sort of path people can draw between, say, a J.K. Rowling and buying Harry Potter merchandise: she uses that money to harm and attack trans people all over the world.

It’s complicated and it’s awful, but trying to put aside Gaiman’s acts to support the cast and crew of The Sandman just isn’t something you can do. They’re too tied together, financially and textually. Even if you watch as a large group, so it technically counts as one view (or minutes, as Netflix measures it), the issue here is that the six episodes in Volume 1 (five more will stream on July 24, followed by an additional episode on July 31) double down on the idea that Morpheus is Gaiman.

Look, art changes over time, both through the general shifts in society and with revised views of the artists themselves. In this case, Gaiman has turned from a champion of millions to a heinous abuser of women, a vile human being who more resembles the hellish monsters he wrote about in The Sandman than its titular hero. And if you were a fan of the books – I certainly was – it’s impossible to read them now without thinking about what Gaiman did. The same holds true for the TV show, even more so. It’s a grueling experience to watch episodes of this series, unerringly seeing parallels between words ripped off the page and put on screen, written by Gaiman, that eerily and upsettingly parallel the disgusting deeds he’s accused of committing in real life. It’s unfortunate that this is the reality, but it is.

In some cases, you can separate the art from the artist. In the case of The Sandman, the artist is the subject. But unlike the women Neil Gaiman abused, you can choose to turn away and look at anything else, instead.

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