Dead Boy Detectives #8 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Ryan Kelly (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: It’s hard to tell the difference between the living and the dead in a nursing home.

The Review: In my line of work, I see firsthand how often kids take their parents’ mistakes to heart, which is probably one of the saddest things you’ll ever see besides an invalid alone in the hospital or the mentally ill talking to themselves at a bus stop in the rain. So it’s not surprising to me that Charles would internalize his dad’s problems so much, to the point that his dad’s litany of horrible qualities results in his own self-loathing and a desire for a second death.

It takes a bit of adjustment to handle this sudden emotional weight that’s been thrust on the previously quirky Dead Boy Detectives, but it works. If nothing else, it provides a springboard for the Charles-Crystal relationship, as his melancholy spurs her to show the sweetest parts of her personality. “Charles, you say that ever since I met you, you’ve done nothing but put me in danger. But it’s all been so exciting—even the terrifying parts! …If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t know about Clementine. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know about the Neitherlands. We need each other, Charles. …I wish I could give you a proper hug.”

Dead Boy Detectives #7 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Ryan Kelly (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Even ghosts can have daddy issues.

The Review: We’ve had a lot of fun with the Dead Boy Detectives’ miscellaneous adventures, but now seems like the right time for us to grapple with more long-term material. I expect most of us are new to the characters, so we really know nothing about Charles and Edwin before they attended, died, and returned to St. Hilarion’s. If a ghost exists only because of unfinished business in its life, then it’s essential we learn more about that life, no?

It’s easy enough to see what was left unresolved with Charles’ untimely death: his feelings toward his father. We’ve seen hints that Charles’ dad wasn’t a very nice guy, but the nature of his cruelty is unclear, even after Charles recounts his boyhood memories of the man. Obviously, Charles’ dad was kind of a douche for receiving his son’s thoughtful, handmade gift with more thought to its flaws than delight, and the fact that he was constantly away isn’t great, either. But these seem like typical paternal failings, not the kinds of things that’d keep a long-dead boy attached to the world.

Dead Boy Detectives #6 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: When seeking advice, ask a cat before the manatee.

The Review: As a kid, I was obsessed with Harriet the Spy,* mostly for Harriet’s adventurousness and daring. She, along with the Boxcar Children, those kids from The Egypt Game, and the boys from The Sandlot, had a subtle influence on my early life. I didn’t exactly become a mischievous, unnecessary risk-taker, but by their example I probably was more curious, took more chances, and got into more trouble (in a fun way) than my rigid Vietnamese upbringing would’ve allowed.

I think the charm I’ve recently found in Dead Boy Detectives is how it seems to carry the spirit of all my childhood heroes. As Edwin, Charles, and Crystal slip (and literally break) into Marigold’s house to investigate the precarious situation of the trapped Persephone and Beatrix, I was reminded of bygone tales of kids going places where they shouldn’t be, and finding and solving mysteries there. It’s the kind of story that’s painfully absent from comics these days, despite efforts from titles like the hopelessly commercial Seekers of the Weird.

Dead Boy Detectives #5 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Never enter a crazy cat lady’s house unless you’re prepared to not like what you see.

The Review: For all you bottom-line people wanting to know what it takes for a title to stay on my Pull List, it’s this simple: it has to feel different. “From what?” you may well ask. From other titles in its genre? From everything else on the market? From all the stuff I’m personally reading? Yes, yes, and yes—one of those, at least; all of those, ideally. The moment I start making clear comparisons between one title and another usually coincides with my waning interest in a series.

That’s why I have such a good feeling about the longevity of Dead Boy Detectives on my Pull List. It may have its share of technical flaws, disappointments, and missed opportunities, but you can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like it out there in the big, wide comic book universe. It’s supernatural, yet it doesn’t fit with any of the classic supernatural sub-categories: sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, even magical realism. More than anything else, it’s like the fun, quirky, imaginative stories you read in your childhood years, spun with enough substance for grown-up tastes.

Dead Boy Detectives #4 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Need to ward off demons from hell? There’s an app for that.

The Review: We all knew some shady things were going down at St. Hilarion’s, between the military-grade tech in the headmaster’s office and the demon-creatures crawling out of a hell-pit and all. Given the long history of the place, you’d think it’d take an equally long time to uncover all its secrets. Any hope of a long storyline at Hilarion’s, however, went out the window the moment Crystal, Charles, and Edwin directly confronted the source of all the school’s evil.

Even if our heroes managed to escape, it’s not as if they could stay on the D.L. from their enemies after that. So you understand why Litt had to wrap things up at HIlarion’s so quickly, but that doesn’t make the school’s destruction, along with most of its fell denizens, any less sudden. As climactic as all this sounds, it’s also a little disappointing. You’ve barely had a chance to get acquainted with Theodore, Nath, Cheeseman, Skinner, and Barrow, and now they’ve gone before achieving much of note.

Dead Boy Detectives #3 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: The dead boys are about to become even deader.

The Review: You’d think that once a person dies, one of the great fears of life has been extinguished (and fulfilled), but if this series is trying to get anything across, it’s that with the existence of an afterlife, your fear can go on long after death.  That lends some danger in a story where the main characters can’t technically die anymore.  Actually, it soon becomes clear that Charles and Edwin have nearly as much to be afraid of as any of the living.

Our detectives, true to their ghostly nature, are caught in a kind of stasis, fearful of moving on completely, but terrified of spending eternity in a place like Hell.  Edwin, who once experienced that chilling prospect, describes it thus: “the years of loneliness and the years of despair.  The decades of terror…  I crave non-existence—eternal absence.”  That is the peril and horror of Saint Hilarion’s: not just that it can kill you, but that it can torment you for ages afterward.

Dead Boy Detectives #2 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: A school where mean girls are almost as bad as grim reapers.

The Review: With the first issue of this series, Litt not only revitalized the whimsy of the Dead Boy Detectives, he also reclaimed what makes them profound.  More than ever, you’re aware of Charles and Edwin’s undead nature, as they grimly muse on their murders and uncertain futures.  Yet they retain their youthful enthusiasm and adventurousness, which gives them a distinct resemblance to Coraline, another Neil Gaiman creation.

You’d think Crystal, the dark-haired girl with a slightly rebellious streak and intense curiosity, would be even more of a Coraline figure in the series, but she reveals that she’s not made of quite the same stern stuff.  Her flaws and peculiarities seemingly make her less a heroine than Coraline, but they also make her far more recognizable: her reliance on technology; her escapes into “Yonda,” a fictional MMORPG; her desire to not end up like her parents and her subsequent phobia of too much attention.

Dead Boy Detectives #1 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: It’s bad if it takes a couple of deceased prepubescent kids to solve a case, right?

The Review: My first introduction to the eponymous Dead Boy Detectives was in the pages of Vertigo’s recent anthologies.    During all that time, it never registered on me that they were anything other than Litt’s original creations.  To discover that they are in fact a Sandman spin-off was surprising, because they seemed like such unlikely candidates to be products from the mind of Neil Gaiman.

A lot of this had to do with Litt’s treatment of the eponymous heroes in those anthologies.  While the young duo’s misadventures started out kind of charming in Ghosts, they steadily grew less so in Time Warp until they became a harmless but rather dull feature in Witching Hour.  It retrospect, it was a mistake to reintroduce them in that piecemeal fashion, because given a whole issue to develop and state their purpose, the Detectives reclaim that Gaiman-esque combination of the whimsical and macabre.