The two best ghost detectives that happen to be ghosts, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, are back to solve more cases in the new The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives series by recent Eisner Award-winning writer Pornsak Pichetshote and artist Jeff Stokely in December.
The boy’s latest investigation takes them to Hollywood to look into the disappearance of a Thai American girl, where the boys encounter a terrifying ghost from Thai folklore called a krasue, which consists of a floating, severed head and less than internal organs trailing behind it.
Pichetshote (who formerly worked as as editor on Sandman in the bygone Vertigo-era) says that “The genius of Sandman is how seamlessly it fits different genres, histories, and folklores together, something that definitely inspired Jeff and I for Dead Boy Detectives. As a Thai-American, I grew up around all this wonderful Thai folklore that’s never made it to American pop culture, so by introducing some of my favorite Neil Gaiman characters to the truly terrifying and bizarre world of Thai ghosts, we will give horror and Sandman fans something new.”
The writer is also quick to point out that the six-issue series “…is definitely a horror book, as the boys discover Thai black magic’s getting more powerful in Los Angeles (the home of the largest Thai population outside Thailand), and it might even be changing the rules governing ghosts. All this, while Charles and Edwin, two ghost detectives, are secretly craving changes themselves—in a coming-of-age story starring two boys who can’t grow up.”
The Sandman Universe: Dead Boy Detectives #1 arrives on December 27 with a cover by Nimit Malavia, along with variant covers by Alex Eckman-Lawn, Tyler Crook, Filipe Andrade (1:25) and Yoshitaka Amano (1:50).
If you’d like to learn more about Pichetshote’s last two critically acclaimed comics, check out our interviews with him about Infidel and his 2022 Eisner award-winning series The Good Asian.
Check out Malavia and Crook’s cover below and keep coming back to Conskipper for all of your comic book news.
