Green said that Gaiman characterized that policy as 'as modern a definition of sacrifice as there might be'. The 'torch' in Vulcan's hand would light up one of three colors to communicate the safety of the Mills - a green torch indicated that no employees had been injured during the previous 24 hours, a white torch indicated minor injuries and a red torch signaled there had been a fatality in the previous 24 hours. In an Entertainment Weekly interview, Green said that Gaiman was told that during Birmingham's heyday as a steel town, one steel mill had had a policy that it was cheaper for them to pay restitutional damages to the families of workers killed on the job rather than to pay to ensure their safety. Instead, the idea came from a story that Neil Gaiman told showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green about traveling through Birmingham, Alabama, and seeing the 56-foot-tall cast-iron statue of Vulcan that overlooks the city on Red Mountain. Now discover the mystery and magic of American Gods in this tenth anniversary edition. The character is based on the ancient Roman god of fire, the forge, and metalworking, but the inspiration for the new character did not come directly from ancient mythology. First published in 2001, American Gods became an instant classican intellectual and artistic benchmark from the multiple-award-winning master of innovative fiction, Neil Gaiman. The character of Vulcan (played by Corbin Bernsen) was not in the source novel he is a new addition to the TV adaptation.
