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Charles Rowland & Edwin Paine (The Dead Boy Detectives)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Neil Gaiman & Matt Wagner

Originally created by Neil Gaiman in his popular Sandman series from DC/Vertigo back in the nineties, EDWIN PAINE (died 1916) and CHARLES ROWLAND (died 1990) are two British schoolboys who have shuffled off this mortal coil–but that hasn’t stopped them from making like the would-be Hardy Boys of the afterlife, investigating cases that involve the supernatural.

The obligatory origin story? Evidently Charles and Edwin refused to head off with Death to the afterworld, and instead spent years together haunting assorted theatres and libraries learning how to become first-rate detectives. Trapped for eternity in between worlds, locked in perpetual youth, with Death always on their case, they can’t really be seen by mortal adults, although children can see them.

Get it? Me neither, or at least not exactly, but then, truth to tell, I never quite got Sandman either.

Fortunately, for Charles and Edwin, there definitely was life after Sandman. After making their debut in the five-part story arc “Season of Mists” (Sandman #21-25) in 1990, they reappeared in a short story in Winter’s Edge #3 (1991), written by Peter Gross, and then in a couple of Sandman annuals in 1993-94.

The spectral Sherlocks returned seven years later in In The Dead Boy Detectives and the Secret of Immortality (2001), a four-issue mini-series written by Ed Brubaker (a man who knows his way around crime comics) and drawn by Bryan Talbot and Steve Leialoha. This one had the ghostly gumshoes–who are operating their detective agency out of a tree house–investigating the macabre case of bodies of homeless children washing up on the shores of the Thames.

It was this version that convinced me that the Dead Boys were actually pretty fun. Definitely for adults, although older kids will probably get a kick out of this light-hearted boys’ adventure tale with its supernatural overtones and easy-going humour, despite the macabre trappings–sorta like the Harry Potter gang as P.I.s.

And that’s a notion that must have crossed the minds of the good folks at DC/Vertigo, because in the summer of 2005, the boys returned in their own manga digest, The Secret of Immortality, with text and art by artist Jill Thompson. In it, the boys travel to Chicago on a missing persons case, where they’re forced to go undercover at an all-girl’s school.

Charles and Edwin survived that indignity and returned in 2012, in three one-shots, as part of the Vertigo Anthology series.which revived several of DC’s anthology series. The boys introduced new audiences to Ghosts, Time Warp, and The Witching Hour.

A proposed series never quite caught on, but in 2014, Vertigo decided to try again, this time with a monthly series, which lasted twelve issues.

And at the tail end of 2022, DC tried yet again, as part of a concerted expansion of the Sandman universe which already included several other Sandman-related comic titles, a TV adaptation of Sandman and… a Dead Boys Detective television series from HBO (later Netflix) slotted to debut late in 2023 or possibly early 2024.

It bounced around a while, but eventually it saw the light, premiering on Netflix in April 2024.

A sort of “backdoor” pilot, “Dead Patrol,” had already aired on September 23, 2021, as part of the third season of the HBO television series Doom Patrol, albeit with different actors playing Charles and Edwin. Jayden Revri played Charles and George Rexstrew was Edwin, and it was , and it was about as weird and wonderful as you’d hope. Possibly too weird and wonderful, in fact. It only lasted eight episodes, and was not renewed.

 

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Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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