I think, overall, the character that people responded to most was Death, whom I represented as a cheerful, sensible sixteen-year-old girl—someone attractive, and fundamentally nice; I remember my puzzlement the first time I encountered people who professed to believe in the characters I had created, and the feeling, half of guilt and half of relief, when I started to get letters from readers who had used my character Death to get through the death of a loved one, a wife, a boyfriend, a mother, a child.

(I’m still bewildered by the people who have never read the comics who have adopted the characters, particularly Death and Delirium, as part of their personal iconography.)

Creating a new pantheon was part of the experiment, but so was the exploration of all other myths. (If Sandman was about one thing, it was about the act of storytelling, and the, possibly, redemptive nature of stories. But then, it’s hard for a two-thousand-page story to be about just one thing.)

I invented old African oral legends; I created cat myths, which cats tell each other in the night.

In Sandman: Season of Mists I decided to tackle myths head-on, to see both how they worked and how robust they were: At what point did suspension of disbelief roll over and die? How many myths could one, metaphorically, get into a phone booth, or get to dance on the head of a pin?

The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbé Mugnier had once said—that he believed that there was a Hell, because it was church doctrine that there was a hell. He was not required to believe that there was anyone in it. The vision of an empty Hell was one that fascinated me.

Very well; Hell would be empty, abandoned by Lucifer (whom I represented as a fallen angel, straight out of Milton), and as prime psychic real estate would be wanted by various factions: I culled some from the comics, took others from old myths—Egyptian, Norse, Japanese—added in angels and demons and, in a final moment of experiment, I even added in some fairies, and was astonished to find how robust the structure was; it should have been an inedible mess, and instead (to keep the cooking metaphor) seemed to be a pretty good gumbo. Disbelief continued to be suspended and my faith in myth as something fundamentally alive and workable was upheld.

The joy of writing Sandman was that the territory was wide open. I wrote it in the world of anything goes: history and geography, superheroes and dead kings, folktales, houses and dreams.

III

MYTHOLOGIES HAVE, AS I said, always fascinated me. Why we have them. Why we need them. Whether they need us.

And comics have always dealt in myths: four-color fantasies, which include men in brightly colored costumes fighting endless soap opera battles with each other (predigested power fantasies for adolescent males); not to mention friendly ghosts, animal people, monsters, teenagers, aliens. Until a certain age the mythology can possess us completely, then we grow up and leave those particular dreams behind, for a little while or forever.