Re-enter 'Sandman'

''One of the things people miss about every system of belief is that it's true. Absolutely true.'' Gaiman is recalling his religious upbringing, which he characterizes as ''messy, and primarily Jewish.'' After a bookish childhood spent acing religious studies at a deeply Anglican school and inhaling C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Gaiman was packed off to London for bar mitzvah training with an Orthodox cantor. He found he had a spongelike memory for mythic Judaica, and later incorporated this acquired midrashic wisdom into the mythos of ''Sandman.'' (''I got people coming to me and saying, 'How do you know that?' I just thought everyone knew that Adam had three wives and the middle one never even got a name....'')

Later, as a young London journalist, Gaiman discovered a form that would accommodate that confusion: comic books. He marveled at the work of Alan Moore, author of such milestones as ''Watchmen'' and ''V for Vendetta.'' Moore's early-'80s ''Swamp Thing'' comics inspired Gaiman to try his own hand at it. In 1986, Gaiman teamed with artist Dave McKean (who would become a longtime collaborator) to publish the graphic novel ''Violent Cases,'' about dark memories of childhood. The book caught the eye of Karen Berger, Moore's editor and DC Comics' liaison to Britain's word-balloon literati. She indulged Gaiman's desire to revisit an obscure 1940's crime fighter called the Sandman, who knocked out thugs with sleeping gas.

Gaiman's Sandman -- first depicted by artists Mike Dringenberg and Sam Kieth as pale, thin, and raven-haired, with starlit hollows for eyes -- didn't go in for WHAM! POW! fisticuffs. As the lord of dreams and stories (called Dream, Morpheus, and many other names), he found himself embroiled in cosmic politics, tangling with ethereal notables from Lucifer to Norse deities Odin and Thor. ''I just kept adding things, seeing if it would hold,'' recalls Gaiman, who approached the comic with an ''everything is true, everything is now'' mind-set. ''I thought, Let's put Shakespeare in there. Okay, that worked. Well, surely I won't be able to add the Norse gods...no, that worked too. But I certainly won't get away with ANGELS....''

He got away with angels, and more. In a typical ''Sandman'' tale (if such a thing exists), a caliph ruling the magical Baghdad of legend asks Dream to preserve his perfect realm forever. He gets his wish: The shimmering city remains only in dreams, leaving the crumbling Baghdad of today for waking eyes to see. ''It's a perfect legend,'' enthuses Moore. ''It's so good that it shouldn't really even have a writer. It should be one of those stories that's just always been there.''

''Neil has a patent on the mythic at the moment,'' says friend and fan Stephin Merritt, of Magnetic Fields fame. ''Knowing Neil is like knowing Thor. I never tell anyone I'm friends with him because they'll think I'm bragging.''

Knowing Thor -- REALLY knowing him -- means visiting western Wisconsin, and finding a house that doesn't want to be found: a rambling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a frowsy pack of watch-cats. Gaiman has lived here since 1992 with Mary McGrath, his American wife of 18 years, and their 9-year-old daughter, Maddy. (Eighteen-year-old Holly and 20-year-old Mike have already left the nest.) Gaiman likes the remoteness and often eschews air travel for the train ''to get a sense of the vastness of the country.''

Nearby, there's a town, but just barely: It's little more than a suture in the countryside, with narrow roads stitched across. Gaiman trolls these corn-lined byways in his new black Mini Cooper, which looks about as alien to these parts as, well, a pale, black-clad Englishman. ''You are on an undigitized road,'' his Global Positioning System informs him. ''Odd,'' he says, ''I thought all roads were digitized nowadays.''

Getting a fix on the man Alan Moore calls a ''gothic butterfly'' must be a challenge for the GPS: It's that pesky omnipresence again. For, after seeing ''Endless Nights'' ship more than 100,000 copies for DC, Gaiman will be (a) prepping to direct a film based on his ''Sandman'' spin-off ''Death: The High Cost of Living'' for Warner Bros.; (b) working on an adaptation of Nicholson Baker's erotic novel ''The Fermata'' with Zemeckis; and (c) pecking away at a new book, ''Anansi Boys.'' (There's no room here for the d's, e's, and f's.) Meanwhile, the Jim Henson Company is in postproduction on his fantasy script ''MirrorMask.'' Harvey Weinstein wants to make Gaiman's short story ''Chivalry'' into a movie that the mogul himself plans to direct. Any second now, it seems, Gaiman will be everywhere, a Media Oversoul.

''You have arrived,'' the GPS informs him. He hasn't, though. The Mini sits at a crossroads. ''You have arrived,'' the computer repeats. Gaiman doesn't listen. He just smiles and keeps driving.

Additional reporting by Rachel Lovinger