Comics creators can’t quit the Dead Boy Detectives, and the TV world has finally noticed

polygon.com:

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 LuciferTV 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.

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.

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