Customer Reviews

The Dead Boy Detectives

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Though it's hardly up to the epic storytelling of the Sandman series that inspired it, Jill Thompson's little spin-off title is a quirky, enjoyable, and affordable read.

Jill Thompson, The Dead Boy Detectives (Vertigo, 2005)

Thompson gives us another riff on Sandman, as she did in Death's Door the year before. This time, we get an adventure from two relatively minor characters from A Season of Mists, a pair of young ghost detectives who head off to Chicago to solve the mystery of a missing schoolgirl. When they get there, they find out it's an all-girl school. Wackiness ensues. Thompson's manga-style art is appealing, and while the ending is at least somewhat predictable (as are Thompson's constant jabs at anachronism, here extended to both characters rather than having them play off one another as Gaiman did), Thompson manages to throw in yet another pop-culture twist that's liable to floor the reader. Ultimately a minor Sandman spinoff, but an enjoyable one nonetheless. *** ½

Dead Boy Detectives follows two boy ghosts, one deceased in a bit before WWI, and the other deceased in the 1990s, as they run a "dectective agency". The ghosts are only visible to children and to a few adults, which comes in handy when solving mysteries. Here, they go to an all-girls academy to search for a missing best-friend of one of the girls. This involves going undercover as girls, and dealing with crushes given and received (completely crushes for some comic effect - nothing poignant or for any other purpose than comic relief).

The search for the missing girl unfolds well. Teachers' quirks are explored. Girls not in the same circle of friends fit into stereotype personalities, while the clic the boys are in gets developed. The art here was a nice touch. It's nice in the sense of flowing well and dropping detail when appropriate.

So, things are moving along nicely... and then the last maybe fifth of the book delivers the missing girl and gets the ghosts back to their home-base in London with an abrupt deus-ex-machina ending. It's very tacked on and doesn't relate to the rest of the book, so it doesn't so much solve a mystery as put things in place to start the next book.

This is a decent read if you have easy access to a copy, but it's all a bit soft, so don't go looking hard to find it.