Dead Boy Detectives has hit Netflix, and the first episode has a cameo that will make any Neil Gaiman fan scream: Death herself, played by Kirby Howell-Baptiste.
Maybe you’ve been a Neil Gaiman fan since the ’80s. Or maybe you’re just now learning all your Sandman lore! If that’s the case, here’s the lowdown on one of Gaiman’s most unforgettable characters.
Death in the Sandman comics
Death is a member of the Endless, or the personifications of the primordial forces that govern the universe. Death is there at the end of all living things, and it’s her job to shepherd them to whatever comes next.
Death first appeared in The Sandman #8, “The Sound of Her Wings,” in which she visits her brother Dream after his century-long imprisonment. With a character design based on the dancer and goth Cinamon Hadley, Death appears as a kind and warm-hearted woman with an ankh necklace and a spiral design at the corner of her eye. She’s a stabilizing influence in the sometimes chaotic family of the Endless, where she often acts as the voice of reason and compassion.
Death in Netflix’s The Sandman and Dead Boy Detectives
Death’s introduction in Netflix’s The Sandman is very similar to her comics debut, right down to her hitting Dream with a baguette in annoyance. Thanks to Howell-Baptiste’s acting, Death keeps all of the warmth and big-heartedness that makes her such a compelling character in the comics.
We only see Death for one scene in the first episode of Dead Boy Detectives, but even in that short amount of time, she stays true to her character. After Edwin and Charles help a WWI-era ghost move on, Death appears beside him and explains that she came for him a century earlier, but he was too confused to go with her. When he struggles to remember a line about reincarnation from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Sack of the Gods,” she supplies it for him: “They will come back—come back again, as long as the red Earth rolls. / He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think He would squander souls?”
Death’s presence is so gentle that when The Mary Sue spoke to Dead Boy Detectives co-showrunner Beth Schwartz, she joked that she hopes there’s some truth to Neil Gaiman’s vision of death. “She’s so great,” Schwartz told us, laughing. “I hope this is real when I die. I hope this is how it really happens. She’s so comforting.”
Why are Edwin and Charles running from Death, though? Because they believe that if she finds them, she’ll force them to go to the afterlife, thus breaking up their friendship. Would Death really do that to them, though? Is it even possible that she doesn’t know where they are all the time? It’s an interesting mystery to ponder.
(featured image: Netflix)
