‘The Sandman’ Is Building Out Its Extended Universe in ‘Dead Boy Detectives’

It’s the golden age of extended universes in film and TV, and The Sandman is carving out its own weird, fantastical world on Netflix.

Dead Boy Detectives, coming later this spring to the streamer, tells the story of Edwin (George Rexstrew) and Charles (Jayden Revri), two young(ish) ghosts who solve mysteries the living can’t handle. Together with a troubled psychic named Crystal (Kassius Nelson), the two former boarding school students go after demons, ghosts, witches, and other paranormal terrors, while running from the destiny that’s trying to catch up to them: Death.

Dead Boy Detectives started out as a story in Season of Mists, the third volume of Neil Gaiman’s classic graphic novel series The Sandman. After their debut, in which the ghostly Edwin helps Charles survive an onslaught of demons before Charles himself is killed, the two starred in their own spin-off comics series.

Netflix has made it clear that Dead Boy Detectives is set in the same universe as The Sandman, even including a nod to a Sandman character in its claim that the boys are on the run from “Death herself.” However, you won’t have to do Marvel Studios-levels of homework in order to understand the series. As co-showrunner Beth Schwartz makes clear, the show is largely self-contained.

“We live in the same universe, but the two shows are very different,” Schwartz told The Mary Sue at a press event in March. “We wrote it separately [from The Sandman Netflix series], and when we felt like crossovers fit in naturally, that’s where we focused on integrating the two shows.”

So does that mean Dead Boy Detectives will include Sandman cameos and Easter eggs? Gaiman himself is serving as an executive producer on both The Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives, and the two series are ripe for crossovers in both directions. Remember that the next batch of Sandman episodes, which are currently in production, will be adapting Season of Mists. That means Edwin and Charles could potentially play a role in that series.

For now, though, Dead Boy Detectives promises the same hallucinogenic dark fantasy as Dream’s world.

Dead Boy Detectives is coming soon to Netflix.

(featured image: Netflix)