Kevin Smith explains how Neil Gaiman’s Sandman inspired Clerks

The fantastical Sandman stories by Neil Gaiman were an inspiration to Kevin Smith when making his breakthrough film Clerks, but not the way you might think.

Before he himself was a creative force, and before he knew filmmaking would work out as a substantial career, Kevin Smith was an avid comic reader who drew inspiration from the edgiest, most provocative material, especially the work of Neil Gaiman such as Good Omens and the groundbreaking Vertigo series Sandman.

This was so much so that those tales influenced his first movie, the cult classic low-budget era-defining indie Clerks. No two things could be further apart in terms of genre and themes and formula as that film and an issue of the phantasmagoric Gaiman character, so it’s a confusing inspiration on paper.

It’s All a Dream

But Smith clarified how Dream of The Endless sparked his creative fire as a young and aspiring artist when he addressed New York Comic-Con during a panel covered by CBR. “I think I always associate reading Sandman with a time in my life in my early to mid-twenties before I did anything, before like I made art myself,” he said.

“And you know, it’s wonderful to consume, anybody can consume Sandman and find enriching subject matter, things that hit close to home and whatnot,” he added. “Not only is it like fun to read and enjoyable, it also fuels your passions, your fire.”

Comfort Food

Smith then explained Gaiman’s books “sustained” him for his entire career of close to three decades. A lot of the supernatural, dreamlike tales seeped into his movies as if by osmosis because as Smith said, when you read Gaiman’s imagination unfolding, “your imagination cannot help but unfold as well.”

His imagination keeps unfolding into new film projects but especially new installments in the View Askew-niverse. Kevin Smith is currently at work on Clerks 3 which has no set release date but Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson are on-board, who play the notorious Dante and Randal, along with Rosario Dawson and Trevor Fehrman.

Neil Gaiman and the envelope-pushing Sandman comics essentially invented DC’s Vertigo imprint. The property is being adapted by Netflix following the Amazon Prime adaptation of Good Omens and all 75 issues of the series are available in audiobook form via Audible. Kevin Smith, unsurprisingly, contributes to that rendering as the voice of Merv Pumpkinhead.

Let us know if you were surprised by Smith’s devotion to Sandman and Neil Gaiman when conjuring his Muse, a la Dogma, down below.