Gary Erskine

Ed Brubaker and Bryan Talbot, two creators I respect loads, had a fist at a Dead Boy Detective miniseries, and it didn't really work. It's pretty hard to replicate the charm Neil Gaiman brought to Edwin and Charles in their introduction in one of the best issues of his Sandman run, an interlude in the middle of Season Of Mists when the souls released by Lucifer have all returned to Earth and Death is running around trying to round them up. Getting their voices right is probably impossible if show more you're not Neil Gaiman. Toby Litt doesn't quite manage it - the prelude adventure here is a bit weak and not very promising. The series proper kicks off, however, with the introduction of Crystal Palace, a cutting-edge contemporary personality, privileged daughter of self-obsessed performance-artist Mum and ex-rock star Dad who is welded to her phone and computer as well as engaged in a big online game and the subject of media scrutiny - an enfant terrible in the making. With Edwin haling from 1916 and Charles from 1990, the addition of a child of the new century is entirely appropriate and she works as a foil to their terrible innocence.

After a performance art stunt goes wrong, Edwin and Charles rescue Crystal, but her glimpse of the supernatural sends her to enroll in their old school where very evil doings are afoot, and old school bullies and new stalk the dorms. By this time, Litt has stamped his own mark on the series and made it his own, you stop comparing the boys' voices in this series to their voices as written by Gaiman, and with typically lovely Mark Buckingham art it turns into a wonderful modern supernatural adventure. show less

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In this volume, the zombie infestation spreads to two more universes, those of Star Trek and Ghostbusters. Turns out that I don't give a crap about Ghostbusters (saw the first movie when I was a kid, enjoyed it, haven't really thought about it since and don't care to, and Kyle Hotz's artwork made the characters difficult to distinguish), but Star Trek-does-zombies is just perfectly nailed by the Tiptons, Casey Maloney, and show more Gary Erskine. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two security guards end up stranded on a Federation colony that's been infested by zombies, and have to stay alive long enough to make it to their shuttle and/or send off a distress signal. It's a perfect little slice of the zombie genre infused into the Star Trek universe, down to the predictable but utterly satisfying moment where McCoy scans a guy, says "He's dead, Jim," and then he lurches back to life. (And guess which of the five Starfleet characters end up as zombies?)

Add in computers with reel-to-reel tape decks, and a comedy robot, and you basically have everything I could want out of this kind of tale. You even get Captain Kirk fighting zombie with a wrench and Doctor McCoy with a zombie-cure-serum gun. And I don't really understand what's up with the sexy vampire lady who appears in all four realities-- but when her form adapts to the Star Trek universe, it's of course in the form of a woman in a TOS miniskirt.

I had thought that the finale issue would involve all the different series coming together in some way, no matter how small, to provide a final solution. Like, I didn't expect Captain Kirk, Optimus Prime, Bill Murray, and whoever the hell leads G.I.Joe to meet, but I did think all four side stories would somehow contribute to the end of the story. Well, they don't; all there is is a single shot of the four universes through a portal. Instead it's a bunch of tedious supernatural nonsense to wrap it all up, and I don't care. But at least this misbegotten mess gave me a good Star Trek zombie tale.

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

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 show more 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.)

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).

That said, "Schoolboy Terrors" is a decent, if sometimes aimless, adventure; I felt like the boys spent a lot of time toing and froing with little purpose.

The last tale here is "Halfway House," which seems to set up the new status quo for the Dead Boy Detectives: solving supernatural difficulties with their new friend Crystal Palace. I remember complaining during Ed Brubaker's run that the rules of being a ghost often seemed arbitrary (the resolution to his storyline turned on a previously unseen ability of ghosts to create miniature ghost duplicates of themselves, as I recall), so I was pleased when Litt and Buckingham gave us a two-page spread explaining the rules of being a ghosts.

Otherwise, this is a cute if somewhat confusing story about a cursed mirror, dead Victorians, and philosopher cats.

Litt and Buckingham are clearly treating this as an ongoing; there are hints of something bit going on that I imagine will pay off in volume 2. The real highlight of this book is Mark Buckingham's art; I had mixed feelings about his very short run on Doctor Who, where he inked himself, but here, with other inkers, his work really pops and delights. Great facial expressions, great layouts.

* The first was called The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives and the second just The Dead Boy Detectives. One notes that the definite article has vanished from the title this time out.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

These detectives really need to be put to rest. Ed Brubaker's one-shot, "the Secret of Immortality," let readers know that two prepubescent ghost detectives didn't provide a lot of material to entertain Vertigo's target audience. Nor did Jill Thompson's manga-style run with the characters. Neil Gaiman's original Sandman series provided an interesting set-up for the characters, but every time they're dug up, they're stripped of all characteristics except their English accents and crammed into show more crummy stories written, somewhat confusingly, for 'mature audiences.'

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

The characters and the stories are geared towards the YA market, but then the occasional nudity and gore and decidedly ~adult~ content likely contributed to this series' low sales and fast cancellation. This short-lived series -- about two dead 12-year-old boys who solve supernatural mysteries with a young girl named Crystal and two halves of a, erm, philosopher ghost-cat -- ends up feeling as scatterbrained as the setup sounds.

Fans of Mark Buckingham's work in the Fables series won't be disappointed with his work here: It's on par with his best. (Although why the ghost of a cruel, white schoolmaster is drawn as a racist Fu Manchu caricature, I'll never know....) This is partially his pet project, and he shares story / writing duties with Toby Litt -- an English (i.e., literary) academic and newcomer to comics. Unfortunately, I haven't had as good an impression of Buckingham's writing chops as I've his artwork, and Litt's contributions don't enhance anything. It has a lot in common with Buckingham's work in Fairest, in that it tends to sacrifice a coherent plot in favor of unfunny, stupid, and ignorant jokes.

The stories across all 12 issues of the Dead Boy Detectives are rich in ideas, but too many ideas. Transitions between lines of dialogue, between pages, between groups of panels -- they consistently lack coherence. Universe rules are explained (4 issues late...) for new readers, and then broken numerous times throughout the series without any acknowledgment. And God, the coincidences and convenient plot devices -- every plot thread is born and bred on impossible coincidences, worst seen in the 5-issue 'Ghost Snow' story arc.

The powerful Sandman lore sometimes breaks through. We run into really neat mysteries, like the two young ghosts who have spent 130 years trapped by a shattered mirror that provided a gateway to H. Rider Haggard's racist Africa. And then random things happen, which is about the crux of this series' problems. Things just happen for no reason and then it's over. show less