Dead Boy Detectives: Do You Need To Read The Comics Before Watching The Show?

Dead Boy Detectives is the latest Neil Gaiman comic to get adapted into a television series. The Sandman was turned into a show on Netflix in 2022 and is expected to get a second season, but not before the show’s spinoff gets its time to shine on the streaming site. The Dead Boy Detectives made their first comics appearance in The Sandman #25 in 1991 before they got their own series. ComicBook.com recently attended a meet and greet with Dead Boy Detective showrunners, Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz, and we asked if they recommend watching Sandman or reading the comics before starting the spinoff series. 

“Well, I think that you don’t need to do any homework for the show, and I feel like it’s more fun,” Schwartz explained to ComicBook.com. “I don’t know, everyone’s different, but I think it’s more fun not to do anything before you see it. So you can be surprised and then you can go back and watch Sandman and read the comics after.” 

“And we are true to the boys’ origins and how they started the detective agency and Crystal’s backstory,” Yockey added. “But the rest of it is us kind of taking things from the comic books and sort of re-appropriating them, re-imagining them so that people who are familiar with the comic books will get to have those kind of like, ‘Oh, I recognize this, moment.’ … But regular people can just watch the show.”

Is Neil Gaiman Involved With the Dead Boy Detectives Series?

Gaiman is credited as an executive producer on the series, but he isn’t writing episodes like he’s done with his adaptations in the past. 

“He’s been incredibly supportive,” Yockey revealed to ComicBook.com at the meet and greet. “I would say most of all he’s just been a cheerleader, like, ‘Yes, this is crazy. You can be even crazier,’ which is good for us because we did not set any limits. But look, we set out to make the Hardy Boys on acid and I feel like that’s what we did.” 

“I’m quite proud of the fact that tonally, we’ve created our own thing, and as you go deeper into the season, it just gets darker and darker and darker and darker and more adult. So it’s a lot of fun,” he continued. 

“I think the most important thing is to not make an identical copy of the comic book because you will always fail,” Schwartz, who also worked on other DC Comics adaptions like Arrow and Sweet Tooth, explained. “So I think it’s taking the heart and why people fell in love with the comic in the first place and adapting that into screen form.” 

What Is Dead Boy Detectives About?

You can read Netflix’s description of the series here: “Do you have a pesky ghost haunting you? Has a demon stolen your core memories? You may want to ring the Dead Boy Detectives. Meet Edwin Payne (George Rexstrew) and Charles Rowland (Jayden Revri), “the brains” and “the brawn” behind the Dead Boy Detectives agency. Teenagers born decades apart who find each other only in death, Edwin and Charles are best friends and ghosts… who solve mysteries. They will do anything to stick together – including escaping evil witches, Hell and Death herself. With the help of a clairvoyant named Crystal (Kassius Nelson) and her friend Niko (Yuyu Kitamura), they are able to crack some of the mortal realm’s most mystifying paranormal cases.”

Stay tuned for more updates about Dead Boy Detectives, which is expected to debut in April.