One of the many beloved concepts to come out of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman were the Dead Boy Detectives, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, who debuted in Sandman #25 and won over our cold, dead hearts with their cold, dead bodies.
Now they’re coming back for a new series, The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives by writer Pornsak Pichetshote (The Good Asian, Infidel) and artist Jeff Stokely (The Ludocrats).
“The genius of Sandman is how seamlessly it fits different genres, histories, and folklores together, something that definitely inspired Jeff and I for Dead Boy Detectives,” said Pichetshote. “As a Thai-American, I grew up around all this wonderful Thai folklore that’s never made it to American pop culture, so by introducing some of my favorite Neil Gaiman characters to the truly terrifying and bizarre world of Thai ghosts, we will give horror and Sandman fans something new.”
Here’s the description from DC:
In Pichetshote and Stokely’s new six-issue comic book miniseries, Edwin and Charles are hired to find a missing Thai-American girl named Jai, only for her to turn up dead. Except not. Because Jai, along with her two friends Tanya and Charles, are all ghosts like Edwin and Charles. Except not. Each child is Thai, with power unlike anything Edwin and Charles have ever seen before, and they all died in LA at different times over the past fifty years! And perilously close by to the boys’ adventure, Thessaly the witch finds herself held hostage by dangerous magics—both a threat to her life and an insult to her ego that simply will not go unanswered…
Check out some of Stokeley’s art for the book:
“This is definitely a horror book,” said Pichetshote, “as the boys discover Thai black magic’s getting more powerful in Los Angeles (the home of the largest Thai population outside Thailand), and it might even be changing the rules governing ghosts. All this, while Charles and Edwin, two ghost detectives, are secretly craving changes themselves—in a coming-of-age story starring two boys who can’t grow up.”
The first issue will, naturally, have a few variant covers by Alex Eckman-Lawn, Tyler Crook, Filipe Andrade and Yoshitaka Amano.
Discover it in stores on Dec. 27.
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