Neil Gaiman’s iconic
comic seriesThe Sandman
was a story about stories. Its
focus on Morpheus, the
anthropomorphic personifi-
cation of dreams, allowed
Gaiman to flit among a wideNEIL GAIMAN on the inspiration behind the scariest comic book of all time.By Christian Holubrange of genres: There were
issues modeled afterThe
Arabian Nightsand Shake-
speare plays; there were
high-fantasy installments
alongside road-trip buddy
comedies. But very early on
in its run,The Sandman
dipped its toe in horror and
produced the single most
terrifying comic of all time:
The Sandman#6 (1989), a
story called “24 Hours.”
“I think I was definitely
trying to find my voice,” the
American Godsauthor tells
EW. “I was trying on different
hats over those first eight
issues, but that one was just
mine. I wanted to sail the hor-
ror ship out as far as I could in
Sandmanbecause even if I
never went that far again in
the rest of the run, people
would know this thing was
dangerous. They would know
the ship could sink under you
at any moment, and that felt
like the right way to do it.”
The Sandmanbegins with
our hero Morpheus losing all
of his tools, including his
magical ruby, which by issue
#6 has fallen into the hands of
the insane Doctor Destiny.
Destiny eventually puts it to
use controlling the minds of
everyone in a 24-hour diner,
making them worship him,
then confess their darkest
secrets (necrophilia is one
particularly salient example),
then ultimately brutally tor-
ture and kill one another—
usually with their teeth—over
the course of 24 hours.
Gaiman says the inspira-
tion for the story’s structure
came from a 1988 art-housefilm by Peter Greenaway
calledDrowning by Numbers,
in which the numbers 1
through 100 count down over
the course of a story about
three women drowning their
husbands. The movie sparked
the idea to count down
24 hours of increasing
depravity inside the diner.
“Normally, if you’re talking
story and people ask for the
inspiration behind it, the
answer is ‘I have no f---ing
clue, I made it up.’ With ‘24
Hours,’ I actually know how
I got there, which is very
unusual for me,” Gaiman
says. After seeingDrowning
by Numbers, “suddenly
I went, ‘Hang on. I’ll stay in
one location, and awful
things are going to happen
in this one location over
24 hours.’ And it came into
focus suddenly and beauti-
fully. I knew roughly what
had to happen in each hour
and just brought a bunch of
people onto the stage and
destroyed them. And it was
an awful thing. It was like,
‘Okay, where does my imagi-
nation go? What would I do
to these people?’ And then
going, ‘This needs to be
relentless. It needs to be
horrible. And it can never be
torture porn. You can never
enjoy what is happening to
these people.’ ”
By the time the 24 hours
are over and Destiny’s vic-
tims are all dead, the mes-
sage has been conveyed to
both overwhelmed readers
and a haggard Morpheus:
This comic will never again
go the way you expect.
COURTESY DC COMICS (2)