'The Sandman' Spin-Off 'Dead Boy Detectives' Will Arrive on Netflix In April

Netflix's The Sandman franchise is set to get a bit bigger this spring. The streamer has announced that Dead Boy Detectives, an adaptation that was initially meant to be part of the DC Comics television universe before that vertical basically collapsed at Max, has returned to its Neil Gaiman-oriented roots on Netflix and will premiere this April, hopefully with all its references to Dream and the Endless restored.

The eight-part series will follow the story of Edwin Payne and Charles Rowland, a pair of ghosts born decades apart but who have found one another and become best friends in death. Choosing to forgo the afterlife in the name of further adventures together, they launch the Dead Boy Detective Agency, where they investigate all sorts of supernatural crimes (and occasionally do some good along the way).

The characters originally appeared in "Season of Mists," the fourth volume of Gaiman's Sandman, and their story was meant to help illustrate the problems caused by Lucifer's decision to empty and abandon Hell. (I'm not even going to try and explain this further, just read the comics and thank me later.) aiman liked the characters so much that he brought them back for a Vertigo Comics crossover event called Children's Crusade. The pair went on to get their own spin-off comic from writers Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham, which followed them as they investigated a mystery involving the corpses of homeless children washing up on the shores of the Thames.