Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXIV: Dead Boy Detectives: Ghost Snow

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2014-15)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

Dead Boy Detectives, Volume 2: Ghost Snow

Writer – story: Toby Litt

Penciller – layouts – story: Mark Buckingham
Finishers: Ryan Kelly, Al Davison, Emma Vieceli, Victor Santos
Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Todd Klein

The second (or fourth, depending on how you count) and final volume of Dead Boy Detectives pays off some plot threads left dangling from the previous volume. Dead boy Charles Rowland meets the half-sister he never knew he had, a Buddhist monk with a rationalist daughter. His sister tells him his father may have directly caused the dead of his mother, so it's up to the Dead Boy Detectives to investigate with the help of new friend Crystal Palace. At the same time, Crystal's comatose childhood friend Rosa is trapped in the dimension of the half-dead, the Neitherlands, along with another one of her friends, Hana, where a mysterious power is amassing to invade our reality. But Rosa's parents are read to pull the plug on her life support, which could doom both her and the universe.

There's a lot going on in this book, apparently.
from Dead Boy Detectives #8 (art by Mark Buckingham & Ryan Kelly)

I kind of like this set-up for the Dead Boy Detectives. Crystal Palace is great, as is Charles's skeptical rationalist niece, and the two cats that are each half a philosopher are fun. I'm less into the Buddhist sister, though at least Litt stops her from being a serene cliche. But I'd rather see the dead boys out in the world solving supernatural mysteries, not plunging the depths of their own backstories: I don't think we gain anything from Charles's family being anything other than an ordinary human family. Their deaths should have been an entry point into a weird world after banal yet horrifying lives, and involving Charles's family so much with ghosts and murder plots and mystical meditations undercuts that; it's like how Steven Moffat Doctor Who companions all have these complicated backstories where they're splintered across time or grow up near cracks in reality when Russell T Davies showed us all they really need is a life boring enough to want to leave it behind. This is a good set-up, but it's only being used to generate insular stories.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXIII: Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2014 (contents: 2013-14)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

Dead Boy Detectives, Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors

Writer – story: Toby Litt

Penciller – layouts – story: Mark Buckingham
Inkers: Gary Erskine, Andrew Pepoy
Finishers: Russ Braun, Victor Santos
Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Todd Klein

They've had a couple of confusingly-titled standalones to their names already,* but the Dead Boy Detectives have finally landed an ongoing series, some twenty years after the characters originally debuted in The Sandman (and almost as long since they became detectives in The Children's Crusade). I'm not sure why, but I committed to reading every Sandman spin-off years ago, so here I am!

Schoolboy Terrors contains three stories. The first, "Run Ragged," is a short tale of the two ghost boys (Edwin, d. 1910s, and Charles, d. 1990s) helping find a lost dead cat; events quickly spiral out of control and they end up enrolled in a creepy school. This is fun, if inconsequential stuff: like Jill Thompson did in her run on the characters, Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham extract a lot of humor from the two boys' interactions with girls. (Charles is obsessed, Edwin less so.)

Weirdly, after the first story sets up these girls and their claim on the Dead Boy Detectives' treehouse, they basically don't turn up again except very briefly, and then we get a whole story about the boys making a different female friend. Not sure what that's about.
from Time Warp vol. 2 #1 (art by Mark Buckingham & Victor Santos)

School turns out to be a fruitful setting for the Dead Boy Detectives (Thompson's run was also set in one), as in the title story, they end up traveling to St. Hilarion's, the very school in which both boys died, eighty years apart. They're there to protect Crystal Palace, the daughter of a performance artist who likes MMORPGs but is possibly being set up as the receptacle for demons coming through from another dimension. I like the idea of taking the boys back to the scene of their demise, but it shows up one of the fundamental difficulties of the Dead Boy Detectives premise. What happened to these boys was terrible and gruesome-- they were both killed by bullies-- but the inclination is to put them into light-hearted goofy adventures. The plot in "Schoolboy Terrors" is about kids being killed so demons can use their bodies, sure, but the writing and especially Buckingham's art emphasizes the goofiness more than anything else, and the danger is all "fantasy violence," not realistic violence. Yet the boys have this fundamental, disturbing trauma in their backstories that is difficult to reconcile with their ongoing adventures, and bringing them back to the scene of their deaths makes that disjunction hard to ignore. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty good at mixing horror with childlike whimsy, but Toby Litt is not as talented a writer (no slight to him, of course).

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXII: The Dead Boy Detectives

Comic digest, 124 pages
Published 2005
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2012

The Dead Boy Detectives
by Jill Thompson

The Dead Boy Detectives is the second solo outing for the two ghosts who previously appeared in The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives-- yeah, that's not confusing at all. This volume sees Jill Thompson (of The Little Endless Storybook fame) take over for Ed Brubaker and Bryan Talbot, and convert the whole thing into a manga style. While Thompson's previous attempt at the manga-conversion in At Death's Door didn't really work for me, I ended up enjoying this one a lot. 

The premise of two ghosts who only other kids can see is played for laughs, much as it ought to be I think, and this is only heightened by the manga-style hijinks: Charles and Edmund have to go undercover at an elite all-girl boarding school in Chicago to find a missing student. Wackiness is basically the order of the day, and that's just fine. Their fish-out-of-water status is utilized more than it was in Brubaker's story. 

Thompson's art is also suitably cute, with the manga styling put to good use. Though I had difficulty distinguishing the female students from each other sometimes, I typically enjoyed it. I'd read more adventures of the Dead Boy Detectives if she wrote them, though after seven years that seems a bit unlikely.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XVI: The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives

Comic trade paperback, 102 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2001)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2012

The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives

Writer: Ed Brubaker

Penciller: Bryan Talbot
Inker: Steve Leialoha

Colorist: Daniel Vozzo
Letterer: Willie Schubert

My long, ambling journey through all things Sandman continues with The Dead Boy Detectives, which brings back two character who previously appeared in Season of Mists (and in only one issue, I think): Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. Edwin was murdered at boarding school in 1916 and went to Hell, but escaped during Season of Mists. Charles, attending the same boarding school in 1991, was murdered during the same storyline. Due to the general chaos, both of them escaped Death and were not forced to go to the afterlife.

By the time of this story, they've set up as detectives. Why not? I'm sure there are worse ideas for Sandman spin-offs out there. And it's written by Ed Brubaker, who did an excellent off-beat take on the police procedural in Gotham Central, giving me confidence that he could do a mystery here.

Unfortunately, the book itself is not as fun as the premise "teenage ghost detectives" would imply. The mystery is as about as simplistic as simplistic could be; the characters spend the whole book being blatantly mislead, which is just frustrating to the reader. Who wants to read about a pair of detectives who are complete idiots? And like too many stories set in The Sandman universe, it revolves around the realm's ill-defined mysticism a little too much. Ghosts have the power to make miniature ghost versions of themselves, apparently. Why?

Worse, the characters are just dull. I couldn't ever remember which one was which, and given that one of them comes from 75 years before the other, that's a problem. At the very least Edwin could have been given comedy about being out of the loop from 1916 to 1991 (the story takes place in 2001). But we don't even get that. They're just interchangeable enthusiastic kids with creepy eyes.

Good premise, but nothing interesting after that point.