Neil Gaiman on Absolute Sandman, Death

Over on his online journal, Neil Gaiman has been answering fan questions about the upcoming Absolute Sandman collections.

On recoloring the first 18 issues:

We're recolouring the first 18 issues, and may do some colour fixes beyond that (Brief Lives is particularly problematic, not because Danny's colours were bad but because the colour separators in Ireland didn't follow instructions.) There are a lot of Morpheus word balloons that are hard to read that we may simply have Todd Klein re-letter, for example. But nothing's going to be "improved" or rewritten or even changed, if that's what you're worrying about, unless it was an error at the time and we simply couldn't afford to fix it then.

It's astonishing how much better the art in Sandman #1 looks recoloured. There are sequences that didn't quite make sense before that now flow really well. The colouring process of the time involved people with scissors cutting things out, and the colour processes at the time were for cheaper paper that the inks soaked into (as opposed to the nice white paper in the books that the ink sits on and glows). And our colourist at the time was, I imagine, up against deadline issues, and in those days the colourist couldn't talk to the artists, and once something was coloured it couldn't ever be fixed -- now we're colouring with today's range of techniques, for today's paper. (Compare, if you have them, Preludes and Nocturnes with The Kindly Ones, just looking at the colour, to see what I'm talking about.)

Danny Vozzo coloured every Sandman comics from #23 on (except #50), so it's not like we're bringing a stranger aboard, and Danny's also using the original colour schemes for things, unless they were just plain wrong (so someone wearing a green shirt will still be wearing a green shirt, unless the script had asked for a red shirt for plot reasons and we got green by mistake. A brown car will still be brown, but the blue London bus in #1 is now a red London bus). We're also not planning to add any digital dinosaurs in the background. (Although there's one panel of John Constantine in Sandman 3 where he looks about three feet tall that I'd love to have redrawn. But I won't.)

On including scripts:

We've chatted about it in the past -- Fantagraphics wanted to do a Sandman script book about ten years ago. One of the reasons it's never happened is that there aren't any copies of the scripts to Sandman #2 or Sandman #5 in existence as far as we know. (And there are only paper copies of Sandman #1 and #4, although that's not really a problem.) Scott Nybakken suggested reprinting the script to Sandman 19 (Midsummer Night's Dream) in the back of the first volume, and I expect we will.

Also, bear in mind that each Sandman script was at least 10,000 words long, so the finished script book would be about 800,000 words long -- which, would be rather unlikely to come in at less than thousand pages...

On the Death books:

I suspect the Death books will wind up, along with some other content, like the Jeff Jones short story and the Death Gallery, in an Absolute Death, in a year or so.