Devilish Whispers: Milton’s Influence on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

This article analyses how in Neil Gaiman’s comic series entitled The Sandman, there is a great influence from the figure of Lucifer, the character at the core of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Furthermore, the article aims to engage with and portray a deeper understanding of how Milton’s epic poem echoes in Gaiman’s comic series, and especially how the characters of Morpheus and Lucifer are totally based on Milton’s models. Yet, Gaiman is adapting the Miltonian narrative for newer audiences in a reinvention of one of the classics of English literature. Using Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation and the main ideas of inter and transmediality, this paper will try to build a bridge between Milton and Gaiman to analyse the correlations between the two. Paradise Lost greatly influences The Sandman, especially in the description of its characters, the conceptualisation of Hell and the concept of storytelling. By analysing their similarities and differences, readers will understand Gaiman’s reinvention of the Miltonian Satan to illustrate how the frontier between good and evil might be blurrier than humanity tends to think.