Neil Gaiman

Gaiman's career doesn't have a clean origin story — it built. He was working as a journalist and interviewer in the early 1980s before fiction took over entirely. The real turning point came in 1989 with The Sandman, a DC/Vertigo comic series that ran until 1996 and did something unusual: it convinced people who didn't read comics to read comics. Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams at the center of the series, became one of the most discussed characters in the medium. Hard to say if anyone at the time predicted it would still be generating adaptations more than thirty years later. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Gaiman's output was relentless and varied. Good Omens (1990, co-written with Terry Pratchett) blended apocalyptic comedy with genuine warmth. Stardust (1999), American Gods (2001), Coraline (2002), Anansi Boys (2005) — each one landed differently, reached different readers, and eventually attracted different screen adaptations. The Coraline film (2009) is probably the most visually distinctive of the bunch; that opening sequence with the Other Mother's button eyes is the kind of thing that sticks with you. The Graveyard Book (2008) won him both the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal — the first time a single work had taken both prizes (Wikipedia), which is the sort of footnote that sounds minor until you realize how long both awards have existed. The 2010s and early 2020s saw Gaiman move more deliberately into television production. He co-created the Good Omens series for Prime Video (premiering 2019) and the long-awaited Sandman adaptation for Netflix (premiering 2022), both of which he shepherded closely rather than licensing out and stepping back. The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) took a different path — a stage adaptation at the Royal National Theatre in London that drew strong reviews (Wikipedia). By 2024, though, the landscape around his work shifted significantly when sexual assault allegations from multiple women became public, disrupting or halting production on several projects. Gaiman has denied the allegations (Wikipedia). Where his screen projects go from here remains genuinely unclear.