“Most characters in comics simply didn’t have any families, and it was something I loved. It was something I loved to write about. When I first came out to America, people told me that in The Sandman I created a dysfunctional family, which was not a phrase I had heard before that in England. I talked to people about it, and I realized that what people in America called ‘a dysfunctional family’ was the same thing that we in England referred to as ‘a family.’ You didn’t see a lot of functional ones.”
– Comic-book storyteller Neil Gaiman describes to the Los Angeles Times how his now famous Sandman character — and his magical siblings — came to be.