Did you expect it to become as big as it did?

NG: No. What I expected was not necessarily what I hoped for. Back then they would let comics go for a year. So I expected that at issue 8, they would say, "OK, looking at the last five months of sales, it’s time to cancel it, time to wrap it up, we’ll let you go until issue 12 and then we’re canceled." That’s why I plotted an eight-issue story arc. And then I thought that I would do four one-off stories, and then we’ll close, and then a year later I’ll come back and do a Sandman special or whatever.

It’s worth bearing in mind that the biggest difference between comics pre-Sandman and post-Sandman was that critical success was commercial failure. Critical success tended to mean that it was a book that didn’t sell. I assumed that Sandman would be a minor critical success and an utter commercial failure. And I was good with that! But that didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to dream this giant impossible dream, not only a dream that the story would continue, but the dream of building a story that began, middled, and finished, and that when it finished DC Comics would stop the comic. And that was impossible. Nothing like that had ever happened before — the idea that an ongoing series that was commercially successful would end or would have an ending, that was unheard of. And so I was planning all this stuff that I knew wouldn’t happen, but I had to plot as if it would. I had to build the stuff in to the first eight issues that would pay off, some of it, six years later. I was doing this in the knowledge that I would probably get a year, but I had to try. If I didn’t try, there was no point.

Mythology factors strongly into almost all of your writing, and especially Sandman. If every age constructs its own mythology, do you think that ours will be different because it will be more accessible, in that we’re telling these stories so openly?

NG: I think that everything is changing due to social media. But I’m also watching social media change. I'm fascinated right now watching Twitter start to die. I’m feeling like we’re in the last days of Twitter; it doesn’t feel as though it’s alive and growing and being the thing that it was. And on the one hand, I’m already kind of missing it even though I’m still there, and on the other hand it’s gone on for three times as long as I thought it would. I assumed that things would come along to supplant it, and they haven’t. I assumed that things would come along to supplant Facebook, and they haven’t. I wonder if we’re starting to get into shark world. In Internet terms, Facebook is a dinosaur. But nothing’s as good as being Facebook as Facebook is, so it keeps swimming.

Do you think there's any permanency to it? There's the possibility that what we write on Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr might be historical documents at some point. Is that kind of access better for storytelling?

NG: I no longer believe in the permanence of anything on the net. I’ve been bitten too many times. These days I’m shocked at how many times I will go looking for something that was big and important on the Web, and I’ll look and simply find evidence that it once existed and that I haven’t hallucinated it.

That makes me think of oral storytelling. Is the internet a new version of oral storytelling, do you think?

I think it is. What the internet gives us that’s fascinating is the long tail, and what I like to think of as the big village, the village of your own kind. I think that’s the strength of something like Tumblr and the weakness of it.

You wind up in a village of people who think the same thing as you, who say the same thing, who like the same thing. On the one hand that’s wonderful, because when I was a kid, finding the people who liked what I liked and thought what I thought and read what I read and could have recommended to me things that I would have loved was a magic pipe dream. If there was one of us in each town, it didn’t matter that there were hundreds of thousands of towns in the world, we’re still never going to find each other. And the fact that now, you can find each other, is wonderful.