Dead Boy Detectives #5 – Review

By: Toby Litt (story), Mark Buckingham (layouts), Russ Braun (finishes), Lee Loughridge (colors)

The Story: Never enter a crazy cat lady’s house unless you’re prepared to not like what you see.

The Review: For all you bottom-line people wanting to know what it takes for a title to stay on my Pull List, it’s this simple: it has to feel different. “From what?” you may well ask. From other titles in its genre? From everything else on the market? From all the stuff I’m personally reading? Yes, yes, and yes—one of those, at least; all of those, ideally. The moment I start making clear comparisons between one title and another usually coincides with my waning interest in a series.

That’s why I have such a good feeling about the longevity of Dead Boy Detectives on my Pull List. It may have its share of technical flaws, disappointments, and missed opportunities, but you can’t deny that there’s nothing quite like it out there in the big, wide comic book universe. It’s supernatural, yet it doesn’t fit with any of the classic supernatural sub-categories: sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, even magical realism. More than anything else, it’s like the fun, quirky, imaginative stories you read in your childhood years, spun with enough substance for grown-up tastes.

There’s nothing jaded or cynical about Edwin’s sense of curiosity and wonder at his Great Aunt Araminta’s secret, one she claims that only “[e]veryone truly magical knows[.]” The statement dares you to ignore her, thus confining yourself to the stubbornly drab category. So hooked, you listen as intently as Edwin when Araminta reveals, “If you ever wish to travel to another world, follow a cat.” Rubbish? Sure—but it’s rubbish you want to believe in, because it’s strange and grounded enough to make the ordinary world around you see that much more interesting.

With this opening salvo of creativity, Litt proves that he knows the trick to good magical storytelling: rules, at least in the “of thumb” variety. Without them, it’s too easy for the magic to become random to the point of absurdity, driving readers from that suspension of belief so necessary for the story to work. Hence, we have “The Seven Rules and Seven Buts of Being a Ghost,” which ranges from the traditional (“Rule #1: If you are a ghost you can walk through walls…but you can also stop yourself falling through floors.”) to Litt’s own conceptions (“Rule #3: You can use ghost objects like our disguises…but only when you find them lying around…or buy them from secret shops.”).

These Rules and Buts are just a starting point for us to work with, to give us some logistical clarity against all the wild and crazy ideas we might encounter as the Dead Boy Detectives take on new cases. And it looks like we have a good one on our hands as Edwin takes his aunt’s advice and follows a cat into a room that turns space and time topsy-turvy, wherein the fair Beatrix and her maid Persephone, both natives of the late 1880s, reside. In a risky but effective use of pure prose, Litt recounts how the two young women used a magic mirror to travel to Africa and how, after a series of unfortunate circumstances with a jealous shaman and a village of Zulus, Beatrix ended up with a bloody hole through her abdomen and Persephone half-trapped in the mirror. This is the stuff good mysteries are made of.

And if that’s not enough, Litt gives us plenty of interesting things to mull over in the real world as well, mostly in Crystal’s bizarre and slightly sad life at home. All the elaborate tree-teahouses in the world can’t make up for the fact that her parents (Seth Von Hoverkraft and Maddy Surname*) are hands-off to the point of uncaring. After Crystal admits she burned her school down, Maddy asks, “Are we going to have to pay for a whole new school, Crystal?” Crystal no sooner comes home when her parents take off, leaving a note instructing her to call Maddy’s agent if anything goes wrong and to get some pizza in the freezer if she’s hungry. And to prove they’re really good parents, when the press shows up inquiring about the fire at Crystal’s school, Maddy gushes, “Well, she tells me it looked absolutely gorgeous—dove-gray smoke! Vermillion flames!”

Buckingham’s art is so simple in appearance that you’d be forgiven for overlooking his classy taste in design and perspective. His chibi-influenced visuals for the Rules and Buts of Being a Ghost is inspired, adorable, funny, sweet, even slightly disturbing, all at the same time: hypothetical ghost Crystal eating ice-cream and having it plop onto the stool where her bowels should be instead; the Ghost Road made of doe-eyed spirits screaming for help (“Fail! Didn’t! Come back!”); the mini-spirits popping out of Crystal and Charles’ eyes and meeting above them in the shape of heart. I only request that Loughridge saturate his colors just a little more, because these uniform pastels aren’t too easy on the eyes.

Conclusion: Mysterious and whimsical in just the right amounts to tickle your fancy but keep your brain working.

Grade: A-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Best fictional names ever? Quite possibly.

– “Most of Dad’s anecdotes end with him being banned from somewhere.” I could say the same of my friend Evan from undergrad. Most of his anecdotes also start with him having ingested some combination of recreation substances.