Netflix’s The Sandman is out now. It brings together a variety of actors for an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed work, and, star John Cameron Mitchell, who plays Hal in the production, enjoyed his time so much he wants to do another comic piece next.
Mitchell reveals their interest in The Invisibles in a new report published by ComicBook. This piece from Grant Morrison and several artists ran from 1994-2000 and followed a secret society of anarchic freedom fighters who wage a war against humanity’s unseen oppressors. It has influenced a number of other creators and Mitchell says he looked into doing something with it in the past but became wary due to the amount of money involved to do the material justice on screens.
“I think I would be up for writing an Invisibles series. At one time my producer was saying, ‘you should pursue that.’ I get a little wary with things that are going to cost too much money because more money means more trouble, more jockeying for money and effects and it just gets unwieldy. So, I didn’t really pursue that. But The Invisibles, the most famous book and maybe memorable is called Apocalipstick. It’s about a trans member of the group of superheroes named Lord Fanny, who is this Brazilian boy in the tradition of Candomblé, which is a kind of Afro-Brazilian religion dealing with death. It’s an incredible book. That alone would make an incredible feature just right there, and it’s definitely echoes of [Hedwig and the Angry Itch] by way of a deeper tradition that I find fascinating. Maybe having grown up super Catholic, I still have the idea of ritual in me.”
Later in the article, Mitchell goes on to praise Gaiman, Morrison and Alan Moore as three parts of the same artistic vein. Mitchell says they work with things everyone knows, but twist them around and experiment with them, so they can be special in new ways.
“They work with old tropes and make them new, but they also are quite different.”
The first season of The Sandman currently has an 86 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
