As a story about stories, it’s no wonder that Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman would have some characters that other creators would want to pick up and play with. Sandman spinoff comics have starred Dream’s sister Death, the strange denizens of the Dreaming, and even Lucifer himself, leading to the the cult success of an entire Lucifer TV series years before a Netflix series adapting The Sandman itself.
Netflix’s Dead Boy Detectives is plowing the same path. Ever since they first appeared in the pages of The Sandman, comics creators have been drawn to the eventful afterlives of Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine. These ghostly sleuths might not be the biggest Sandman characters, but who could resist the pitch “He’s a 70-year-old ghost boy, and he’s a modern ghost boy. They solve ghost mysteries!” Not Netflix, is the answer.
So with season 2 of The Sandman currently in production, here’s how Dead Boy Detectives ties into Netflix’s expanding Sandman universe.
Who are the Dead Boy Detectives, anyway?
The Dead Boy Detectives are Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, two ghost boys who died 70 years apart in the same awful British boarding school. When Charles passed on in a 1991 issue of The Sandman, he and Edwin banded together and refused to go to their afterlives.
They pass their eternal ghostly existence by opening the Dead Boy Detective Agency, where they solve mysteries for other ghosts and whatever mortals can see them — and do their best to evade the notice of (the honestly very kindly and not scary at all) Death of the Endless so that she doesn’t force them to move on.
How does this all connect to Sandman?
Charles and Edwin first appeared in a 1991 arc of The Sandman, in which Lucifer abdicates his position, throwing the gates of hell open and leaving the realm without a ruler. This has some big ramifications for Dream, but Charles and Edwin show up to illustrate the ramifications on Earth. With the gates of hell open, the souls of the damned wander back to the places they “haunted” in life — and Charles finds himself the only living person at his boarding school over the winter holidays, as the staff was driven away by all manner of horrible ghost bullies and teachers.
There’s one nice ghost there, however: a boy about his age named Edwin. In 1914, Edwin’s classmates murdered him in an attempt at satanic ritual, and hid his bones in the school attic. He’s spent the last 70 years in a nightmare realm. Charles eventually dies of exposure in that attic, and when he and Edwin refuse to go to their afterlives, Death — who is very busy dealing with all these escaped spirits, not to mention the newly dead with nowhere to go — doesn’t have time to argue.
Neil Gaiman showed the boys with their own detective agency in the 1993 Vertigo crossover The Children’s Crusade. From there, every five or 10 years, someone would return to the well of the Dead Boy Detectives, in 2001 (The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives), 2005 (The Dead Boy Detectives), 2014 (The Dead Boy Detectives), and 2023 (The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives). Charles, Edwin, and their ghostly mysteries are just too charming to be left alone for long.
I don’t remember any of that in Netflix’s Sandman?
That’s because in the TV show, it hasn’t happened yet!
You might remember Gwendoline Christie’s turn as Lucifer, in which she and Tom Sturridge’s Dream battled in a game of stories for the information he wanted, and he trounced Lucifer soundly. And you might remember that the end of the season teased Lucifer’s upcoming revenge.
If Netflix’s The Sandman follows the events of the Sandman comics, we’ll get to see that revenge as soon as the show returns. Lucifer will close up shop in hell and “gift” the keys to Dream, making him the target of a dozen powerful figures of myth, religion, folklore, and the cosmos, who want the valuable metaphysical real estate that the keys to hell represent.
You could say that Dead Boy Detectives has skipped ahead in the plot of Netflix’s The Sandman series — but it was really an accident of television production. Dead Boy Detectives wasn’t originally planned as a Sandman spinoff at all, but as a series on Warner Bros.’ Max streaming platform, as a follow-up to the similarly DC/Vertigo-inspired Doom Patrol.
But in 2023, possibly because it didn’t mesh well with Warner Bros.’ changing plans for its DC-based projects, DBD was released from its obligations and purchased by Netflix. Shortly after, Gaiman announced that the show would be considered a part of the same canon as Netflix’s The Sandman.
How do the Dead Boy Detectives and Sandman shows connect?
Even though Dead Boy Detectives wasn’t originally built to fit in with Netflix’s The Sandman, it does now. Gaiman stepped aboard as executive producer, and there’s more than one cameo from a Sandman actor, most notably Kirby Howell-Baptiste reprising her role as Death.
[Ed. note: The rest of this piece contains some light spoilers for Dead Boy Detectives.]
Dead Boy Detectives season 1 touches the Sandman TV show lightly — Charles and Edwin meet under basically the same circumstances as in the comics, but there’s no mention of Lucifer, or a school full of damned spirits. The show does, however, leave the door tantalizingly open for more Sandman characters if DBD gets a season 2, with a short appearance from Death’s little sister, Despair, played by Donna Preston.
Among her Endless cohort, Despair is objectively the least used in the comics, and it’s no wonder; it’s just challenging to make a fun story about, well, despair. But after watching the first season of Dead Boy Detectives, I’m more than willing to see the show try — all we really know about Despair beyond the basics is that in all of time she is the only one of the Endless to have died and assumed a new aspect (that is, until… well, that’s a big spoiler for The Sandman). Suffice to say, there are a lot of places to expand on her character and history.
And who knows! With Dead Boy Detectives as a Netflix series, Jayden Revri and George Rexstrew could even return to play Charles and Edwin in The Sandman season 2. But we’ll have to keep waiting to see on that one, as the next installment of Gaiman’s comic book epic is currently still filming.
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