Gaiman grew up in Sussex and attended Whitgift School in Croydon. Upon graduating, he worked as a freelance journalist before earning his first author credit for a paperback biography of the pop music group Duran Duran in 1984. While the subject matter was certainly not indicative of his later work, its success was, and the first printing sold out in a matter of days. It was around this time that he met artist Dave McKean, and the two collaborated on the graphic novel Violent Cases (1987). The work established them as rising stars in the comic world, and soon the two were noticed by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. They submitted story and art treatments to DC Comics, and the result was Black Orchid (1988), a three-part miniseries that helped establish the atmosphere for the DC renaissance of the late 1980s. Along with Alan Moore's work on Watchmen (1987) and Swamp Thing (1983–87) and Frank Miller's gritty interpretation of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the success of Black Orchid showed that a market existed for dark, mature stories written for an adult audience. This became even clearer with the launch of Sandman in 1989.

Sandman was a completely new kind of comic. While McKean stayed on as cover artist for the book's entire run, a rotating series of interior artists helped flavour each individual story arc. In addition, the stories were unlike any previously seen in mainstream comics. The protagonist was Morpheus, the manifestation of the ability of sentient beings to dream. Like many other pantheons, the Endless—Morpheus's siblings—were godlike beings with human foibles and drives. A typical story was so littered with literary allusions and historical references that Internet fan sites soon began offering detailed annotations of individual issues. By the time the series ended in 1996, Sandman had captured an enviable list of awards and was DC Comics' top-selling title. Gaiman also topped best-seller lists with his novels Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett, 1990), Neverwhere (1996), Stardust (1999; filmed 2007), and American Gods (2001) and with his children's book Coraline (2002; filmed 2009). He revisited the Sandman characters in 2003 with Endless Nights, an anthology that had the distinction of being the first graphic novel to earn a place on The New York Times best-seller list for hardcover fiction.