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.