10 Comic Book Characters Who Are Better Off Dead
4. Dead Boy Detectives
The Dead Boy Detectives are Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, and were created by prolific writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III. Their stories cross two genres of young adult fiction, and the boys met for the first time in the pages of Sandman #25.
In 1916, Edwin was killed in his boarding school. He was sent to Hell for unknown reasons and stalked down a long corridor for many decades by an unseen menace. When Lucifer abandoned his post and emptied Hell, many of the dead students and teachers returned to the boarding school in the present day. There, Charles Rowland was the only student staying at school over the holidays, with a few teachers to supervise him. Edwin helps Charles avoid most of the horrors, but in the end, he doesn’t survive. The pair have a conversation with Death and decide to stay on Earth as ghosts.
The ghostly pair read up in the school's library on how to be detectives, and they take their first case from a young girl to find out what happened to the missing children of the town of Flaxdown. This case caused them to track down young magician Tim Hunter, who was hiding at the Inn Between Worlds before being yanked back into Death’s domain but was promised that they would never be forced to return to the afterlife against their will.