Comic Book / The Dead Boy Detectives

The Dead Boy Detectives are Vertigo Comics characters, a pair of undead schoolboys who form a detective agency and investigate various supernatural mysteries.

They originated as minor characters in The Sandman (1989). The younger of the titular detectives is Charles Rowland, a young student at St. Hilarion's, who witnesses dead teachers and alumni come back to life while Hell is changing hands. He befriends Edwin Paine, a student who was murdered at the school in 1916. Though Edwin tries to help him survive the ordeal, Charles dies — but Death allows them to stay in the world of the living for now. The two then go on to solve various mysteries throughout the Vertigo universe, including kicking off the The Children's Crusade (Vertigo) crossover, all while wondering when Death will come for them again..

Comics bearing the name (The) Dead Boy Detectives and starring the characters include:

• The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives (2004): A four-issue miniseries written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Bryan Talbot. Charles and Edwin are contacted by Marcia, a teenage girl worried that her friends are being turned into ancient husks.
• The Dead Boy Detectives (2005): A manga-style graphic novel by Sandman artist Jill Thompson. The boys travel to America after being contracted by a schoolgirl, Annika Abernathy, to find her missing best friend.
• The Dead Boy Detectives (2014): An comic book run that lasted twelve issues. It was written by Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham with art by Buckingham and Gary Erskine. An encounter with teen medium Crystal Palace Surname von Hovverkraft brings the boys back to St. Hilarion's, and she tags along on their further adventures.
• The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives (2022): An ongoing series. For tropes about that, see that page.

The Dead Boy Detectives appear in an episode of Doom Patrol (2019), played by Sebastian Croft and Ty Tennant. Joining them is their friend Crystal Palace (Madalyn Horcher). A SpinOff featuring the trio but starring a new cast has been announced for HBO Max, though it has now been announced to instead be distributed on Netflix, in addition to now being tied to The Sandman (2022) instead.

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Tropes:

In general

• Fat Bastard: One of the three bullies who killed Edwin and Charles is Barrow, who is overweight and just as horrible a person as his cohorts Skinner and Cheeseman.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Edwin and Charles are both boys who are close friends, though the miniseries made for The Sandman Universe implies that Edwin has a secret crush on Charles like his Doom Patrol (2019) incarnation.
• Spin-Off: Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland made their debut in the 25th issue of The Sandman (1989) before playing a major part in The Children's Crusade (Vertigo) and going on to have a few titles of their own.
• Undead Child: Edwin and Charles are both adolescent boys who happen to be ghosts.

2004 Miniseries

• Damsel in Distress: Marcia comes to the Dead Boy Detectives with a case. Lampshaded repeatedly since Charles develops a crush on her and calls her a 'damsel' they have to save.
• Evil Mentor: Marquez teaches the boys some tricks on using their ghostly powers for investigation. In order to aid them in his agenda of killing Hob and stealing his immortality.
• Genre Savvy: The first issue mentions that since their revival they spent a lot of time in the library reading detective fiction to learn how to become detectives.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Charles develops a crush on Marcia. When he gains the ability to use his ghostly form to observe others, he goes to spy on her and calls it a teenage boy's dream, then starts feeling guilty.
• Historical Domain Superperson: Gilles de Rais was not only a child murderer obsessed with the occult like he was in the historical record, here his magicks actually worked, and he'd drain the lives of children around him.
  Marquez: It was more palatable that the murderer was merely a madman, and not a black magician and heretic.
• Julius Beethoven da Vinci: The Count of St. Germain is stated to be one of the aliases of Gilles de Rais, who had escaped his execution and maintained his immortality.
• Life Drinker: Gilles de Rais uses his magic to drain the youth of children to keep himself immortal. The children are then turned into husks.
• My Grandson, Myself: Charles becomes suspicious of the marquis when he notices that all the men in the portraits of the Marquez ancestors are identical. The marquis is the immortal Gilles de Rais, posing as his own descendants.
• Obviously Evil: Double Subverted. The creepy man with the beard and the cape observing the two young heroes turns out to be a mentor who wants to find the killer...until it's revealed that he's an Evil Mentor and the killer.
• Rhyming Names: The man in the tunnels introduces himself as the Marquis de Marquez
• Teenage Wasteland: In the tunnels under the city, young runaways have set up something of a colony. Lampshaded: "Like something out of Dickens!"

2005 Graphic Novel

• Alpha Bitch: There's three of them at the private school. They like to bully Annika and her friends and are referred to as "Les Itches-Bay." Surprisingly, Principal Gorse seems well aware of how awful they are and actively punishes them for their behavior.
• Animesque: The Western comic is advertised as a "manga digest" and is drawn in the style of a manga. It's black and white, the characters have oversized heads and eyes, the characters are introduced with hobbies and blood types ("he hasn't got any; he's a ghost!") and hallmark Japanese visual arts tropes like Luminescent Blush and Face Fault are used to indicate the characters' feelings.
• Barbaric Bully: Charles and Edwin, who were both killed in their old boarding school by bullies, immediately suspect a Girl Posse of murdering Elizabeth.
• Berserk Button: The lunch ladies take their cooking very seriously. Charles and Edwin almost immediately blow their cover when they don't put anything on their trays (seeing as how don't eat), which leads Mrs. Calderon and Mrs. Levar to assume they're... dieters. Annika calls them off by appealing to their egos, stating her "cousins" were simply overwhelmed by such a delectable array of international delights. They chase after Professor Pim when they find out he was cheating on his diet, seeing as how hard they worked to create low calorie but delicious meals for him.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Elizabeth Parker is initially presented as a quiet, nerdy girl who surprisingly knows martial arts but just wants to be left out of the spotlight her famous parents love. Then we find out she's also a pre-teen art thief willing to steal from her school.
• Disguised in Drag: Charles and Edwin are shoved into womens' clothing and makeup so they can blend in at the girls' school.
• Engineered Public Confession: The girls get Elizabeth to confess to her thievery thanks to having the cameraman for her family's reality show present as she blabs about her plan.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Annika's friends fear Elizabeth was either kidnapped or murdered because the faculty's making no attempt to look for her and are acting like she didn't exist. After discovering Mr. Bourne's got numerous candid photographs of her, they even start to suspect he was stalking Elizabeth or having a relationship with her thanks to snippets from her diary. They learn there was no faculty plot and Liz is fine. Her family are famous rock stars with their own TV show. The teachers were simply paid to keep her identity a secret, but Bourne was a paparazzo who infiltrated the school to get a scoop on her.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Wellingtons may be wild and hard partying rock stars and celebrities, but they're outraged to learn their daughter was trying to rob her school of valuable artwork.
  Helen Wellington: ELIZABETH PARKER! We might be lewd, crude, and tattooed, but that doesn't mean we don't have any family values!
• Evil All Along: Elizabeth was trying to steal artwork hidden inside the school, one reason why she tried not to draw attention to herself. When she states she found the art, the boys point out it still belongs to the school since they bought the furniture the art was hidden in.
• Food Fight: A food fight erupts in the cafeteria after a trio of female bullies target the main group. All the girls start throwing food at each other.
• Funetik Aksent: The German Frederika's pronunciation of certain words are spelled out in the notes. When she accidentally refers to one of the disguised boys as "him," the bullies initially laugh saying "They should make you learn how to talk American real good before coming to this school."
  Frederika: You are not even wearing warm chakets*, what stupit heads!
  * - jackets, stupid, (German accent)
• Good Parents: Elizabeth's parents totally respect her desire to not be a star, and paid her school a handsome amount of money to keep her identity a secret. When they find out she was trying to steal hidden artwork, they quickly admonish her with "We taught you better than that, Miss Lizzie!"
• Identical Stranger: Charles and Edwin panic when they see Ms. Dierdre, the gym teacher, as she looks eerily identical to Death. It turns out she's not actually Death in disguise, she just kind of looks like her.
• Missing Child: The girls contact the Dead Boy Detectives because their schoolmate Elizabeth has vanished and the staff is not only quiet about it, but also bear suspicious links to her. She is revealed to be totally fine; she is the daughter of an unconventional reality TV family who did not share their love for the spotlight, and the staff were compensated to keep her identity secret.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: When the boys find photographs of missing schoolgirl Elizabeth in their teacher Mr. Bourne's bag, they suspect him of having perverted intentions. He's actually a paparazzo, photographing Elizabeth at school because she comes from a famous family.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The girls beat the crap out of Les Itches-Bay to steal the spotlight in order to expose the supposed "crimes" the faculty's covering up. It helps that said bullies bragged about how they lied to their music teacher about helping her jumpstart a career in the industry (one of them has a dad who's a music producer) moments before they got knocked out.
• One-Gender School: Edwin thinks they can blend in by borrowing male school uniforms at the girls' boarding school. He's quickly disabused of this notion when Annika reveals they go to an all-girls' school.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: One of the bullies makes fun of the German Frederika for how her accent makes her pronounce certain words by remarking that she should've learned how to speak English properly before attending the school. Or in her words, "talk American real good."
• Precocious Crush:
  • The schoolgirls all swoon over their attractive pretty boy teacher Mr. Bourne.
  • The youngest of the schoolgirls, five-year-old Frederika, has a crush on Edwin to the point of referring to him as her "husband", which Edwin chooses to play along with for her sake.
• Sweet Tooth: Frederika loves sweets, so much so that she takes it pretty hard when the student body is sent to their rooms before getting dessert (chocolate cake) as punishment for starting a food fight.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: One of the initial faculty suspects is Ms. Caine, the world literature teacher. Annika mentions Caine always seemed to hate Elizabeth but didn't understand why because she was "Miss Scholastica U.S.A.," but she vanishes from the graphic novel immediately after her introduction. The fact that Elizabeth comes from a family of rock stars might've had something to do with it.
• You Can See Me?: Charles is surprised when a storeowner catches them sneaking around his store, commenting that he'd thought only children could see them. Edwin replies that supernaturally sensitive adults can likely see them.

2014 Ongoing

• Art Shift: The series' irregular panel designs shifts to a rigid 2x2 grid of monochrome illustrations with lengthy captions underneath to mimic older stories when it exposits the teleporting mirror.
• Blatant Burglar: Invoked, Crystal's performance artist mother has her family wear domino masks and black and white striped shirts for the opening heist to steal a Van Gogh painting.
• Chased by Angry Natives: Since Persephone's grandfather dies shortly after Persephone and Beatrix arrive, the villagers suspect them of being cursed with death and chase them out. In the escape attempt, Beatrix is killed while Persephone is partly stuck in the teleporting mirror.
• Dominance Through Furniture: Both Charles and Edwin have flashbacks to being used as human footrests for bullies at St. Hilarion's.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Crystal's parents, Maddy Surname and Seth von Hoverkraft, are a pair of spoiled performance artists who gallivant around the world in the name of art and mostly leave her to her own devices. When confronted with the possiblity that Crystal's school burned down they're not even upset that they may have to pay for the damages, they only hoped she was involved.
• Let the Past Burn: The first arc concludes with St. Hilarion's burning down. Edwin and Charles have no problem with the location of their demises being destroyed by flame.
• Magic Mirror: Beatrix' grandfather procured a mirror that would teleport them to Africa.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: In the cover to the second issue, the ghostly boys spook Crystal. She sees clothes moving of their own accord; the mirror behind her shows Charles and Edwin.
• Molotov Cocktail: Crystal sets fire to St. Hilarion's and emerges from the carnage holding a couple of alcohol bottles with cloth.
• Tele-Frag: Persephone is stuck halfway through a teleporting mirror, and Beatrix has been trying to find a way to free her.
• Undeathly Pallor: Ghosts in this run are drawn a little blue in the face even when corporeal.

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