Neil Gaiman doesn’t create singular worlds. Instead, he produces an entire universe held together by the gravitational force of his imagination. 

Dead Boy Detectives, the new series based on Gaiman’s teenage ghost duo Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), exists within the same narrative reality as The Sandman. The undead detectives solve mysteries and fight demons and witches, while trying to evade the attention of Death (Kirby) herself. The series, developed for television by Steve Yockey — who serves as co-showrunner alongside Beth Schwartz — lives on its own, but the influence of The Sandman radiates throughout. 

“I grew up reading Sandman and Books of Magic and Children's Crusade and Dead Boy Detectives and all the sort of Vertigo imprint stuff for DC Comics,” Yockey tells Tudum. “I found Dead Boys when I was going through a particularly difficult loss in my life and just found it oddly comforting in a sort of psychedelic way and fell in love with it.” 

Schwartz was a newcomer to the Dead Boys world. “I actually saw Steve’s adaptation first, and then I read the comic and then fell in love with it,” she tells Tudum. “And I love Neil Gaiman from all his other stories, but Dead Boy Detectives I had not previously read, and it’s just so beautiful. I love all the artwork and the stories.”

Yockey created The Flight Attendant, and had a connection with Warner Bros. So he approached them with a request. “I was like, ‘Hey, you guys have this property that’s probably sitting on a shelf somewhere that no one’s asking about, but can I please have Dead Boy Detectives?’ And DC said, ‘No.’ ” Later, Yockey “snuck in” and asked again. “Somehow the request got to Neil, and he said, ‘Yes.’ So then, with the studio’s blessing, I started adapting the comic book.”

Now, a television series of Dead Boy Detectives has been conjured up for our viewing pleasure. Intrigued about how the spirit of The Sandman and Gaiman’s philosophies haunt the series? Read on to learn more. 

Does the character Death appear in Dead Boy Detectives?

Dead Boy Detectives works within the laws of the The Sandman universe: Life exists after death, but where you go is determined by your actions in life. A family of seven cosmic beings called the Endless preside over humankind, much like Greek gods, sometimes mingling nefariously in humans’ lives. The Endless sister of Morpheus (played by Tom Sturridge on The Sandman), Death — played by Kirby in both series — kindly ushers the newly dead to their destinations. In The Sandman,  Death appears in Episode 6, gently ushering scared dead souls to the next life. Kirby’s touching portrayal quickly became a standout moment to fans. In Dead Boy Detectives, she arrives in Episode 1 to bring a lost WWI soldier to the afterlife once he’s freed from demonic possession.  

“Death is the basis of our entire show; our leads are running from Death,” says Schwartz. “So that was a very important character to cross over for us to actually show what they’re scared of, which is this wonderful character created on Sandman.”

Yockey continues: “And getting permission from Neil and [The Sandman series creator] Allan [Heinberg] to use Kirby [was] amazing.” 

What poem does Death recite to the soldier ghost in Episode 1 of Dead Boy Detectives?

Once healed, the soldier inquires about reincarnation and struggles to recite Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Sack of the Gods.” Death finishes it for him: “They will come back — come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls./ He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls?” Gaiman has professed his respect for Kipling. He also described his Newbery-winning work The Graveyard Book as like The Jungle Book set in a graveyard.

Ed Araquel/Netflix

Was Edwin released during Lucifer’s purging of hell in The Sandman?

Lucifer (Gwendoline Christie) looms large in The Sandman, directly confronting Morpheus. In the comic, the lord of evil opens up the gates of hell so demons can roam free. But Lucifer and their demons are not an ever-present specter in the background of Dead Boy Detectives for a special reason. “In the comic book, they’re connected,” says Yockey. “In our show, they are not, because that hasn’t happened on Sandman yet. And so, we are in continuity with the show. In our version, Edwin mapped his way to escape hell, as opposed to being released during [the comic collection] Season of Mists, because they haven’t got to Season of Mists over in the other show yet.”

How does magic work in Gaiman’s worlds?

During the Dead Boys’ battle with the gas-masked ghost in the mirror world, Edwin sees a dusty tome among a shelf of young detective books (not unlike Dead Boy Detectives!), including the 1932 Hardy Boys novel While the Clock Ticked and Arthur S. Maxwell’s 1951 The Secret of the Cave. The tome he spots is a spell book called Minor Arcana, and he uses it to exorcize the demon from the soldier. The book comes in handy again later when Edwin needs a “binding and removing” spell to purge a demon named David from Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson). 

In The Sandman, Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) uses a spell from the magic book Magdalene Grimoire in an attempt to summon and capture Death and force her to resurrect his son who died in the Great War. But instead, he accidentally summons her brother, Dream, who remains in captivity for 106 years.  

While Lucienne (Vivienne Acheampong) is the a keeper of knowledge in The Sandman, in Dead Boys exiled walrus king Tragic Mick (Michael Beach) bestows wisdom and magical items in his whimsical shop. Yockey says the shop is loaded with fun objects. “In Tragic Mick’s shop, on the desk, not where the soapstone polar bear is but next to it, there’s a glass case full of clams,” says Yockey. “It’s there because that’s what Tragic Mick snacks on. So even though we never say that, that’s why they’re there.”  

Ed Araquel/Netflix

What about the afterlife in Gaiman’s realms?

Nothing is black-and-white or binary: Everything exists in a gray area, including the afterlife. In The Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, there’s little boundary between the living, the dead, and the world in between. The afterlife in Dead Boy Detectives functions as an administrative state complete with departments for lost-and-found ghosts and bungling paper pushers who were responsible for Edwin’s accidental banishment to hell. The Sandman’s rules of the world beyond aren’t rigid either — Morpheus and the other Endless members change their minds or bend laws on a whim. 

Does Despair appear in Dead Boy Detectives?

Like Death, Despair (Donna Preston) is a member of the Endless family in The Sandman. She’s a twin to Desire, sumptuously played by Mason Alexander Park. In both series, the dour immortal revels in the pain of others. 

“In the comic books, she is by far my favorite of the Endless and definitely the one that I find the most frightening,” says Yockey. 

In Dead Boy Detectives, she watches Simon (the boy who cast the hell spell on Edwin) while he lives out his punishment of an eternity of suffering constant paper cuts in hell. “Our goal was to do sort of a comic book–accurate version of her gallery, and then allow Donna to play the most powerful version of that character and the most menacing version of that character,” says Yockey. She wears her sigil (a hook) as a ring, which she sometimes uses to tear her own face in The Sandman.  

“For Despair, we knew in the hell episode, that’s where we wanted to put [her], when Edwin was at his lowest possible moments because that’s where she, as a character, would enjoy watching him the most. And the fact that she’s also watching Simon be punished forever also speaks very much to her,” says Yockey. 

Ed Araquel/Netflix

 Is the hell in Dead Boy Detectives the same as in The Sandman?  

Like Dream, who was locked away in a glass dome for over a century, Edwin was trapped in hell for seven decades before escaping in 1989, when he met a recently deceased Charles. Later, when Charles descends the downward spiral into hell to find Edwin, we learn the underworld’s architecture is organized into rooms housing transgressors of the seven sins. Despair voyeuristically watches those banished there through a series of mirrors. The Sandman’s hell also locks away sinners into cells, including Dream’s lost love, Nada (Deborah Oyelade).

“There are things that they did in The Sandman, which luckily came out while we were working on our season, that we were able to look at and go, ‘Oh, we need to tweak some things.’ Just to make sure the show fits before we ever knew that we were actually going to be allowed to use people [from The Sandman],” says Yockey. 

To ensure continuity with The Sandman series, which has a vision of hell where Lucifer lords over a single vast realm of demons, Yockey tweaked the script to account for the layers of the underworld featured in Dead Boy Detectives. “The Night Nurse says in her dialogue, ‘There’s a lot more to hell than the fiery plains of Lucifer. That’s only the very bottom. And there’s a bunch of layers above that.’ ”

What is the “Orpheus and Eurydice moment”?

As Charles and Edwin finally ascend out of hell, Charles looks back and makes a joke about their “Orpheus and Eurydice moment.” In Greek myth, Orpheus descends into the afterlife to find his wife, Eurydice. With his beautiful song, Orpheus convinces the underworld’s rulers Hades and Persephone to release Eurydice, under the condition that he doesn’t look back at her as they depart out of the land of the dead. Of course he does, and she disappears just steps from freedom. The myth was the impetus for the whole episode, says Yockey. “We knew we wanted to do an Orpheus and Eurydice riff, but give it a happy ending.”

While Yockey says their reference was focused on the classical story only, the Orpheus mention is in line with Gaiman’s Greek myth obsession in The Sandman. Orpheus is the son of Calliope (Melissanthi Mahut) and Dream, whose relationship is shown in the bonus Episode 11 of the series.   

David Bukach/Netflix

What’s up with Neil Gaiman and cats?

Gaiman’s cats have an entire world of their own in both Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman. In Dead Boy Detectives, we witness Cat King (Lukas Gage) and his legion of felines on the prowl in Port Townsend. 

Revi says the tamed cat blew his mind. “It was so cute and, as an actor, you are told you can't stroke it. You have to let the trainers do their thing and you do your thing, but it took every bone within my body not to want to stroke it.”

The on-set cats were kind of divas, according to Yockey. “We had fun with the cats,” says Yockey. “Filming live cats is not fun. Even the trained ones don’t really do what they’re supposed to do.”

In the bonus animated The Sandman episode “A Dream of a Thousand Cats,” Dream appears as a huge black cat who assists an alternate universe where cats rule the world. 

In Gaiman’s realms, cats can talk, plot, and have a particular disdain toward humans. “Cats feature in the Dead Boys comic book, but they also spout philosophy,” says Yockey. “We decided to go with more blue-collar cats because we were in the Pacific Northwest on the docks. So we gave them a little more colorful language. [And] we needed the cats to be enough of a threat to kind of keep the boys in their place. And so, we decided to make cats poisonous for ghosts.”   

While the Cat King sometimes wears little else than a fur coat and a feline swagger, Desire (Park) lets their feline side out, donning a catsuit and kitten ears in The Sandman.  

“I would think if you went back far enough, the Cat King has been gifted by Desire in some way to cause trouble,” says Yockey. “I feel like Cat King's main goal is to toy and cause trouble. So yes, there is definitely a thematic connection there. It wasn’t our intent that they would mirror each other, but I do think to a certain extent, Lukas brought a fluidity that matches what Mason was doing on Sandman.”

And what about the birds?

In The Sandman, Matthew the Raven is a former human who became the ghostly bird in the afterlife, and he provides quips and advice to Dream. In the series, he was played by an actual bird named Mr. T and voiced by Patton Oswalt. 

Yet in Dead Boy Detectives, the process happens in reverse. Monty (Joshua Colley) is a crow who’s transformed into a teenage boy by witch Esther Finch (Jenn Lyon) to be her lackey. He later becomes the object of Edwin’s affections.

“We had a raven on set as well who actually plays Monty the Crow,” says Revri. “He was a character! Grimble, his name was. He would make some crazy noises and ruined a couple of takes. That was an experience!"

Watch Dead Boy Detectives now.