Dead Boy Detectives
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The Dead Boy Detectives are fictional characters that have appeared in comic books published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. They were created by writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III in The Sandman #25 (April, 1991).
The characters are the ghosts of two dead children, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, who rather than enter the afterlife stay on Earth to become detectives investigating crimes which involve the supernatural.
[edit] Concept history
The characters were created by Gaiman and Wagner during the "Season of Mists" storyline in Sandman #25. In this story their origin is given as the two characters meet for the first time.
The story and characters are clearly a macabre spin on two genres of British children's fiction - boarding school stories and teenage detective stories.
Gaiman revived the characters in the Children's Crusade Vertigo's first and only crossover event which ran through all that year's Vertigo annuals that were published between December 1993 and January 1994. Gaiman wrote the two Children's Crusade bookend annuals which prominently featured both characters and first gave them the official title the "Dead Boy Detectives".
In 2001 they received their own four issue limited series Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives by writer Ed Brubaker and penciller Bryan Talbot. They have also made appearances in the Books of Magic ongoing series, which was also based on a Neil Gaiman work.
Jill Thompson briefly depicted the characters in her Death: At Death's Door (2003) graphic novel which retold the events of "Season of Mists" from Death's perspective. The writer/artist later produced a manga-style graphic novel starring the characters, titled The Dead Boy Detectives (2005; ISBN 1-4012-0313-2).
Although the characters are children and their stories often involve other children and child-related themes, the The Dead Boy Detectives graphic novel was their first full appearance which did not carry the "suggested for mature readers" label.
[edit] Fictional history
Edwin Paine was murdered at his boarding school in 1916. His ghost haunted the boarding school for decades until he met up Charles Rowland in 1991, during the Seasons of Mist storyline when Hell was emptied of its residents.
As a result of this the school is overrun by the souls of its past teachers and pupils who have escaped Hell. Rowland the sole living student at the school (the story occurs during school holidays, and Rowland was unable to go home), gets aid from Paine in avoiding the evil new residents, though as the story concludes he is killed. He next appears as a ghost and decides to forego the afterlife in preference for prospective future adventures with Paine.
The two ghosts next appear during the Children's Crusade crossover. In this story it is revealed that they have been studying the schools library books and films (mostly children's adventure fiction) in the hopes of learning how to become detectives. In their first case they are hired to by a young girl to discover what happened to the children of a small British town, ("Flaxdown"), who have all disappeared.
In the 2001 limited series Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives the two ghosts investigate the mystery of why and how numerous corpses of homeless children had begun washing up on the shores of the Thames.
During the 2005 graphic novel The Dead Boy Detectives the pair travel to the United States to investigate the disappearance of a student at an all girls boarding school. It order to properly go undercover at the school the two ghosts go in drag.
