Came in a graphic novel bundle I won in a raffle. I'm clearly not the target audience, but sheesh. Everything about this was excessively twee.

This was mediocre but don’t take my rating that seriously as this isn’t the age range for me to read. Note though that I do still read some kids books & enjoy them. This one not as much.

A younger member of my family was reading this and left it lying about, so I read it in the tub in about twenty minutes lol.The two main characters (and Death who also appears) are lifted (with permission) from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series.It's a cute story, and an amusing read for younger folk, I suppose. It's a manga aimed at girls more than boys, and it features two eternally young ghosts who solve a mystery at a girls school in Chicago. While they're dressed in drag. I suppose they're sort o...

I like Jill Thompson, but I like her Scary Godmother and Fables work better. Her Manga style work has a decent look, but oddly it is the layout that doesn't fit. This book was chaotic and confusing to follow from a visual flow standpoint. There is an art to shojo manga, and Jill hasn't mastered it yet. From what I have seen of her Death manga, it flows much better. Storywise, it was clearly aimed at a young female audience that really doesn't necessarily mesh with the average Vertigo reader. Row...

Jill Thompson expands on the adventures of Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland, the Dead Boy Detectives. This time they head to America at the behest of a young girl attending an international school in Chicago who is concerned over the disappearance of her friend.Each clue the boys find lead them to some sinister conclusions, and everything finally comes to a head during the school Christmas pageant. Also, the boys are forced to disguise themselves as girls since they are investigating in an all-gi...

Maybe I'm being a wee bit generous here, because I like Jill Thompson. It's an odd idea, though: take two characters previously seen only in one issue of Sandman and spin them off into a shojo manga. It's an odd change of tone from their previous appearance. Especially since both have been given the bishonen treatment. Ok, but is it good? To which I can only say, "Well..." The truth is that I enjoyed it out of my shameless affection for shojo. But if you don't like shojo manga in general, you mi...

Oh, I found a new library to wander through her corridors searching for a literary gem. The Scottsdale library also boasts a much larger graphic novel section.I thought this might be one of those gems. But alas no. This book uses a couple minor characters from the Sandman Universe drawn in manga form. Two ghost boy detectives are asked by students from a girl school to investigate a murder. They zoom across the Atlantic and go under cover as girls.It's aimed at a much younger crowd than the Sand...

Neil Gaiman's clever and witty writing adapted into an incredibly adorable Moe Manga? -- honestly, it's everything good in the world rolled into one story. I was a little skeptical I would "get" it since I never had a huge interest in the Sandman comics, but it works well as a quick, lighthearted standalone and was incredibly enjoyable despite my meager knowledge of the larger storyline it branches off from. I'm now interested to read Jill Thompson's other Sandman Manga adaptation as her style s...

I really enjoyed Thompson’s work on Beasts of Burden but her black and white manga style wasn’t for me. The story itself was okay but not great. I like seeing some of the Endless, especially at the end but overall this didn’t do much for me.

Absolutely one of my fave graphic novels of all time, only wish there had been more Dead Boy Detectives

Wow. How did this get published?

The Dead Boy Detectives are fictional characters that have appeared in comic books published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. They were created by writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III in The Sandman #25 (April, 1991). The characters are the ghosts of two dead children, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, who rather than enter the afterlife stay on Earth to become detectives investigating crimes which involve the supernatural.The characters were created by Gaiman and Wagner...

Ghosts Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland, introduced in Gaiman's fourth Sandman opus: "Season of Mists" and featured in Thompson's "At Death's Door", are still avoiding Death (the most adorable goth girl ever) and still finding time to run their own detective agency. The ghosts are only visible to children and to a few adults, which comes in handy when solving mysteries. Their latest case brings them stateside to a girls' posh boarding school in Chicago. While undercover, they work their way throu...

I really like Jill Thompson's art, and this story shows just how cute that can be. This is kind of a Sandman spinoff (it has some cameos) but it's really a stand alone comic. I found the recap kind of annoying since I've read the first one too, but I guess that has to be done. The plot centers around two young British ghosts who act as detectives for lack of something better to do I guess. They get hired buy some American private school girls to investigate the disappearance of one of their frie...

I love Sandman and it was nice to see Rowland and Paine get out and play, but this was not the strongest addition to the Sandman universe. First, Death actually is not in this story, despite saying "featuring a cameo by Death". It is more like a brief mention of Death. Also, I can't figure out who is the audience for this book. The goofy manga style is offputting to Sandman die-hards, and the series isn't going to pick up new fans from a story that they won't understand unless they've read them

The Dead Boy Detectives manga is done by Jill Thompson, who also did the Death: At Death's Door manga. The art is really cutesy and the whole atmosphere is much lighter than in the actual series. It's fun to see Edwin and Charles, although there aren't really any other characters from the series in it. Death, Dream and the Corinthian all briefly appear, but only for a panel or two each, and not for any great plot purpose.The plot is ridiculous and silly, and includes ghost boys in drag. It's fun...

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 pre...

My god, the cover alone near put me in saccharine shock. This book is so appallingly cutesy I'm ashamed to see it associated with Sandman, and the artwork is as twee as the plot.Profoundly un-recommended to any Sandman fan.Extremely tentatively recommended as shared-reading material between pre-literate children and parents who for some inexplicable reason wish to destroy the likelihood of the child ever enjoying Sandman proper and/or warp developing conceptions toward Shoujo-style manga.Please

I like the art a lot, and I'm always happy to see Rowland and Paine. But in plot and characterization, this needs some work. I think that if you're going to take up telling stories about characters on whom the original work was done by Neil Gaiman, you're inviting readers to hold you to a high standard in these departments; and in these regards the book is disappointingly fluffy and depthless. (NB to Thompson: making a group of giggly girls multiethnic does _not_ substitute for giving them chara...

Following the ghosts of Edwin and Charles, this book sees them travelling stateside to an all girls boarding school where one girl appears to have vanished. As the boys have to go undercover (and they look so cute doing so I must say) they manage to find many a clue as to the girl's whereabouts although they do find themselves a little off base in their conclusions. This is quite an entertaining read with brilliant illustrations to boot with a guest appearance by Death herself just to top it all...