Dead Boy Detectives, Arrow, and Sweet Tooth's Beth Schwartz Talks Adapting Comics

Dead Boy Detectives is debuting on Netflix this month, and it is set in the same universe as The Sandman. The Dead Boy Detectives were created by writer Neil Gaiman and artists Matt Wagner and Malcolm Jones III in The Sandman #25 in 1991 before they got their own series. The new adaptation is being showrun by Steve Yockey and Beth Schwartz, and the latter is no stranger to comics. She served as an executive producer on both Arrow and Sweet Tooth, so ComicBook.com asked if she learned any lessons from those shows that she's applying to Dead Boy Detectives. 

"I don't think anything could really prepare me for this show," Schwartz joked. "No, a serious answer is working from adapting a comic book to screen, I learned a lot of things from those two shows just in terms of telling the best story while honoring the IP. And I feel like that's what we did here on this show."

"But Dead Boy Detectives is by far the most creative and no holds barred," she continued. "Our stories are like, 'We can basically do whatever we want,' which is the most freedom I've ever had in any writers' room, which hopefully shows on the screen where we basically ask our writers in the first couple of weeks, 'Come up with your craziest ideas.' And usually on most shows, you use maybe one or two or three. But on this show, we use all of them. So yeah, it's been amazing."

"I was super happy, too, when Beth came on board because first of all, I didn't think she was going to say yes," Yockey added. "And then she came on board and the just wealth of shows, genre and not genre, that she's worked on far exceeds the amounts of shows that I've worked on. And so it's like, 'I'll come in with this craziness,' and then Beth is like, 'Right, but what's Edwin feeling right here?' And I'm like, 'Oh, okay, let's slow down and talk about how Edwin's feeling.'"

"And I think because I love to put everything and the kitchen sink in, and Beth likes for characters to be grounded and having the grounded emotional stakes, lets us do every crazy thing in the world that we want to do. So partnership works," he added.

You can watch our interview with Schwartz and Schwartz at the top of the page.

Is Neil Gaiman Involved With the Dead Boy Detectives Show?

Gaiman is credited as an executive producer on the series, but he isn't writing episodes like he's done with his adaptations in the past. 

"He's been incredibly supportive," Yockey revealed to ComicBook.com at the meet and greet last month. "I would say most of all he's just been a cheerleader, like, 'Yes, this is crazy. You can be even crazier,' which is good for us because we did not set any limits. But look, we set out to make the Hardy Boys on acid and I feel like that's what we did." 

"I'm quite proud of the fact that tonally, we've created our own thing, and as you go deeper into the season, it just gets darker and darker and darker and darker and more adult. So it's a lot of fun," he continued. 

"I think the most important thing is to not make an identical copy of the comic book because you will always fail," Schwartz explained. "So I think it's taking the heart and why people fell in love with the comic in the first place and adapting that into screen form." 

Dead Boy Detectives will debut exclusively on Netflix on Thursday, April 25th.