SDCC 2018 – The Sandman: House Of Whispers Panel With Nalo Hopkins

The Sandman: House of Whispers Panel featured Nalo Hopkins talking about her work writing a book as part of the newly expanded Sandman Universe.
Hopkins was surprised by the presentation of an Inkpot Award for Achievement in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Hopkins has been a sci-fi writer since 1995, and it’s mostly the genre that she reads, including comics, and watches. She’s known Neil Gaiman for a couple of decades, Hopkins said. Gaiman used to turn up unannounced to shows, and Hopkins met him at an IAFA conference in Florida.
She wasn’t originally a huge fan of Sandman when it came out, when she was in her later 30’s, early 40’s, and as a black woman, it would have been very unusual to walk into a comic shop in Toronto. She got to know his work through prose initially. Later, she enjoyed the Sandman stories.
In 2016, she was at a conference, and got an e-mail asking if she’d like to pitch for a reboot of the Sandman universe, and she said “Hell yeah”. Gaiman’s notes came back on Hopkins’ pitch, about half a page in length. While there’s a misnomer that Gaiman has written these stories extensively, he has not, instead providing notes, Hopkins clarified. She was asked to set up a new house in The Dreaming which would focus on an African Goddess of love.
There were delays until April 2016, and then in the summer of 2017 finally, she was contacted again and asked if she’d still be interested. A month later, editorial discussions followed. There was still no clear direction until October 2017, when she was told it was a go. In December 2017, there were video meetings and she wrote her first outline, Hopkins said.
January 2018, she was told there would be a writers’ summit in New Orleans. Hopkins was delighted since she’s always wanted to be part of a writers’ room. The day they arrived in New Orleans was the day the city froze over. That was when she decided to set the waking world parts of the story in New Orleans, bringing in Caribbean belief systems.
Gaiman encouraged readers to “play in the sandbox” of this big world that’s been created, while a few characters have been reserved for other plans. But the characters she has requested have always been granted, Hopkins said.
Hopkins is learning how to write mainstream comics as she goes, what deadlines mean, watching an artist being selected.
Hopkins is working with religions that vastly misrepresented, she said, including voodoo and the origin of zombies. Though she is not a member of these religions, she knows a great deal about them. Believers who read the stories may find they go off book, but she tries, even as a fiction writer, to keep within the sensibilities of the religions.

New Orleans also gets exoticized and misrepresented, and it’s sold in a very romantic way. She spent some more time there recently, and it was extremely hot. She took tours, ate all the food, and walked around the city, purchasing books also.
She’s creating a fantasy New Orleans and a fantasy French Quarter, an imagined version, with made up names of clubs and things, while some names will be familiar.
Domo Stanton, the artist on the book, created colors for the book, too, and he presented black people in different shades, which she was overjoyed by, as well as his figure designs. He’s also excelled in bringing in a sense of queerness for queer characters.
One of the challenges Hopkins faces is not messing with other writers’ stories.
Hopkins has ADD and Fibromyalgia, so having the energy for the work is a challenge, too. Writing 12 issues of a comic series rather than a novel feels like writing 12 novels, she feels. She’s learning comics, too, so she’s rewritten different issues multiple times, and then make revisions. This is a full time job, but she already has a full time job as a professor.
Figuring out how to writer her own Sandman story in such an iconic series is also difficult. She has to invent her Sandman and her Dreaming, she said. She’s also aware that by the time she’s working on the second half of the story, readers will be reading the first half, and it will be a point of no return.
She feels a great joy now in being able to tell people about her work and share her experience with her brother, who introduced her to Dark Knight and other comics.
For those interested in reading Hopkins’ prose work, she recommends Brown Girl in the Rain, her first book that’s been out the longest and so has been the most popular.
Asked about diversity in the Sandman world of the new books, Hopkins said one of her joys was setting the story within an African originated religion, and being able to say, “Assume the characters are black unless I tell you otherwise”, which is the inverse of the normal way things go.
She’s also keeping in mind some of the representations that she has not worked as much on. Disability has been a big part of her own life, and she tries to keep differing levels of ability, people who are ambiguously gendered, and people who aren’t 20, in mind in this book.
Hopkins also has to think about handling differently abled peoples’ interaction with the Dreaming and how they might address abilities there, she said.
Asked what storylines most spoke to her in the Sandman comics previously, she said that there are images that stick with it, for instance the scene when the Endless are going to Dream’s funeral. Human beings see them for the first time, and their image in the eyes of human beings gave her chills. She felt it was lovely.
The story of Orpheus has always been important to her, so the references to that mythology in Sandman have always been important to her.
Regarding the distinction between fantasy and sci-fi, Hopkins said that both are about cultures and what we can imagine cultures becoming. They both talk about invention, and fantasy may do even more so than sci-fi. We fantasize ourselves as a race or culture in both, she feels. Both mess with our expectations and biases, too. For that reason, she can hav e fantasy characters use technological terms to remind us that our imaginations create technologies, too. For science writing, she researches it. For folklore writing, she researches it, Hopkins said.