Sameer Thakker

“A major defining factor was my wanting him to be part of the DC Universe. Because if someone as powerful as the Sandman was running all the dreams in the world, a natural question would be “Why haven’t we heard about him by now?”
The answer I came up with was “He’s been locked away.” And that solution formed an image in my head of a naked man in a glass cell.
My next question was “How long had he been trapped there?” The movie Awakenings hadn’t been made yet, but I’d read Oliver Sacks’s book a few months earlier, so I knew about the encephalitis lethargica, or “sleepy sickness,” that had swept Europe in 1916. Scientists to this day don’t understand what caused it, and I loved the idea of blaming it on the Sandman’s imprisonment, so I determined the length of his stay to be seventy-two years—ending in late 1988, when the series debuted.
And so on; each plot point just seemed to naturally lead to the next one.”
― Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion