The Dead Boy Detectives by Jill Thompson (2005)

               

Lee's daughter is a voracious reader, and she's the one who keeps me in touch with what young people are reading these days. She's pretty omnivorous, but does have a predilection, a skew, towards books with a supernatural theme.

I often end up reading what she leaves lying about. She has good taste and finds fun books so I'm rarely disappointed.

Tonight I read the graphic novel The Dead Boy Detectives by Jill Thompson.

This is a title from 2005 and it uses several characters created by Neil Gaiman and introduced in his hugely successful Sandman comic book.

The dead boys are Edwin Paine and Charles Rowlandson and you can read about them at Wikipedia here: Backstory on Gaiman's Dead Boy Detectives

In case you failed to notice, Neil Gaiman is probably the Lewis Carroll of our time; his works are universally known and read. The influence of Sandman is pretty much beyond calculation at this point. The images and characters have shown up in pop music, adult and juvenile literature, the visual arts...everywhere.

Neil is in Tori Amos's lyrics and he was on the lips of Norman Mailer, who praised the Sandman series as "a comic book for intellectuals."

Gaiman's comics were collected into eleven books and charted repeatedly on the New York Times Bestseller list. (That's only happened with two other graphic novels apart from Gaiman's, and not multiple times with those.)

The Dead Boy Detectives is the story of two dead young Londoners who come to a girls school in Chicago and ectoplasmically schlep around, trying to solve the mystery of a missing schoolgirl. Neither the young student who summoned them, Annika Abernathy, nor her clique of friends (with one exception) ever realizes that their brave companions from overseas are actually spirits.

The book is illustrated in the typical manga style with all the usual charm and visual brio. It's a delightful book and though it is "SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS" there's really nothing that disturbing in this book. The obligatory clique of evil snobby girls is referred to as "Itches Bay" in Pig Latin, but that's about as bad as it gets.

Oh, and the girls disguise the boy detectives by doing them up in drag, so that Japanese element of yaoi gets in here too. (But the boys don't make out or fantasize about each other as they would in your standard yaoi manga.) Does drag require a "mature reader?" I'm not sure.

Oh, and one girl makes a lesbian joke. But it's not mean-spirited or serious. It's just silly and cute.

There is a suspicion (which prevails briefly) that the missing girl has been kidnapped by a pervy professor at the institution, and this theory leads the girls on a wild goose chase, but in the end everything is innocently resolved and there is no tragedy, horror or untoward goings-on.

The book's cover proclaims "Featuring a Cameo by DEATH" (another Gaiman character) and yes She (Death is a beautiful woman as she is in Cocteau's universe) is in here, as well as a teaser feature in the back of the book for another Jill Thompson book where Death is more the star. That one is At Death's Door.

I didn't research Ms. Thompson, but I tend to think she (or he; I suspect a nom de plume) is a baby boomer and not a member of the generation that consumes these graphic novels most voraciously.

I say this because I noticed many, many references which would be wasted on this generation--references to noted chefs, to Mussolini, to things like Reagonomics and "trickle down" theory.

I'm sure the kid readers just breeze right past these since the story itself is well-paced and the art is quite absorbing, with the usual acceleration from zero to 100 m.p.h. hysterical distortions of characters' physical features, which is the hallmark of the manga comic.

The ghostly protagonists are likeable and allow the artist to insert some scary art when they transform their appearance to frighten suspected evil-doers. And then they can ectoplasmically float through walls, so the artist has some fun with drawing scenes incorporating that gift.

There's even a cute parody of the Osbornes included in this tale.

It's so strange to think this came out under the VERTIGO imprint under D.C. Comics, which I read rather voraciously myself back in the day.

But I never paid $9.99 for a comic book! Well, maybe some older collectible ones. But then comics weren't nicely bound and this thick back in the day (some rare digests were but didn't cost this much). Awww, if I adjust for inflation, they probably came close! But they weren't really "graphic novels." They were just thicker collections of tales.

This would make a good gift for that young reader in your life, especially for a young girl. Or that girly boy in your family. STOP WITH THE DENIAL ALREADY...HE'S A FLAMER!! There are all types of girly subplots in here.

I know: you could give them a LEARN CALCULUS book instead of enforcing the gender stereotypes, but then they will hate you. Even more than they already do I mean.

Jill Thompson has created a delightfully frothy tale.

I look forward to seeing what else by her gets left lying around downstairs.

I'd take her to my bathtub again. And I'll add even more bubbles next time.