Concept History
The characters were created by Gaiman and Wagner during the "Season of Mists" storyline in Sandman #25. In this story their origin is given as the two characters meet for the first time.
The story and characters are clearly a macabre spin on two genres of British children's fiction - boarding school literature and teenage detective stories.
Gaiman revived the characters in the Children's Crusade Vertigo's first and only crossover event which ran through all that year's Vertigo annuals that were published between December 1993 and January 1994. Gaiman wrote the two Children's Crusade bookend annuals which prominently featured both characters and first gave them the official title the "Dead Boy Detectives". The characters also appeared in a The Books of Magic short story in Winter's Edge #3, written by the then current writer Peter Gross.
In 2001 they received their own four-issue mini-series Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives by writer Ed Brubaker and penciller Bryan Talbot. They have also made appearances in the Books of Magic ongoing series, which was also based on a Neil Gaiman work.
Jill Thompson briefly depicted the characters in her Death: At Death's Door (2003) graphic novel which retold the events of "Season of Mists" from Death's perspective. The writer/artist later produced a manga-style graphic novel starring the characters, titled The Dead Boy Detectives (2005, ISBN 1-4012-0313-2).
Although the characters are children and their stories often involve other children and child-related themes, the The Dead Boy Detectives carry the "suggested for mature readers" label.
Read more about this topic: Dead Boy Detectives
Famous quotes containing the words concept and/or history:
“The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
—Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)