Dead Boy Detectives #2 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (pencils), Gary Eskine & Andrew Pepoy (inks), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: A school where mean girls are almost as bad as grim reapers.

The Review: With the first issue of this series, Litt not only revitalized the whimsy of the Dead Boy Detectives, he also reclaimed what makes them profound.  More than ever, you’re aware of Charles and Edwin’s undead nature, as they grimly muse on their murders and uncertain futures.  Yet they retain their youthful enthusiasm and adventurousness, which gives them a distinct resemblance to Coraline, another Neil Gaiman creation.

You’d think Crystal, the dark-haired girl with a slightly rebellious streak and intense curiosity, would be even more of a Coraline figure in the series, but she reveals that she’s not made of quite the same stern stuff.  Her flaws and peculiarities seemingly make her less a heroine than Coraline, but they also make her far more recognizable: her reliance on technology; her escapes into “Yonda,” a fictional MMORPG; her desire to not end up like her parents and her subsequent phobia of too much attention.

Actually, it’s a rather brilliant choice on Litt’s part to give Crystal such a fantastic upbringing yet render her vulnerable to many of the same ills that other girls her age tend to suffer.  It makes her simultaneously interesting and relatable, which is always a difficult balance for writers to find.  The downside of keeping her grounded is it brings in a few too many high school clichés into the story.  There’s Hana Watanabe, another loner geek-girl who offers her friendship to Crystal in a suspiciously unasked-for manner.*  There are also several of Crystal’s female classmates, who suffer from the timeless Mean Girl Syndrome.  These are the hazards of writing a semi-realistic story involving modern teens, and thankfully, Litt keeps them short.  There’s room for him to turn them into truly integral parts of the plot, but so long as they remain archetypes, it’s best for their presence to be minimal.

Litt wisely spends his time developing Crystal’s role in the series.  Quite honestly, I had little interest in seeing Crystal as the spunky human sidekick drawn into Charles and Edwin’s supernatural adventures.  It’s encouraging to see that her encounter with the two boy ghosts is more kismet than chance, giving her a chance to exorcise unresolved brushes with death from her past.  There’s certainly a similarity between the hellish hazing at Hilarion’s and the not-so-fake horror that robs the soul of Crystal’s late best friend in a carnival haunted house.  In both instances, there’s a gruesome twisting of common childhood fears that defines the tone of Dead Boy Detectives.

I’ve often expressed my theory on Fables that Buckingham is more often than not limited by the talky nature of Bill Willingham’s scripts, and there’s evidence to support that notion here.  With multiple scenes of horror, this issue allows Buckingham to show the reach of his craft in ways you haven’t seen for a long time.  The splash of a reaper, its fractured jaw and teeth hanging beneath the shadow of its hood, using its scythe-like skeletal arms to pierce the soul-body of a young girl, is definitely an unnerving visual.  Buckingham even goes a bit abstract at one point, depicting Crystal’s horror of unwanted attention as dozens of floating eyeballs surrounding her, their exposed nerves trailing behind them like the tails of some embryonic creature.  Loughridge uses a more limited palette in his coloring here than on Fables, but this only suits the title’s melancholy all the more.

Conclusion: A dependably interesting read that has pricks of real inspiration peeking out from the corners.

Grade: B

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * So what do you think?  Is Hana sincere in her overtures to Crystal or is she eventually going to reveal herself as a traitor somewhere down the line?

– “He will whimper and plead, and I will carry on.”  Yeah, I can think of several people in my own life that line could apply to.  I’m talking about you, jerk who keeps tossing your garbage in my recycling bin.  May a dump truck overturn onto your yard.