Rowland and Paine are two schoolboys who died almost a century apart. Now, due to a technicality, they're stuck on earth as ghosts, and making the most of their time before Death tracks them down. Now, they've been summoned to Chicago by the wealthy and beautiful Annika to track down her missing roommate at her prestigious all girls school.
As a rule, I'll read just about anything that claims to be a Sandman tie-in. I've also heard Neil Himself endorse Thompson's work, so I thought I'd give this a try. Unfortunately, this was a bit more of a stretch than I could manage. For those unfamiliar with Gaiman's epic comic series, Rowland and Paine only appear in one issue, but it's one of the creepiest issues in the entire run, and definitely one of the most memorable. Both attended the same boarding school, where they are tormented by bullies. In Paine's case, he was eventually murdered on campus; Rowland died almost a century later, killed by the ghosts of another set of bullies. Their story is dark and brutal and terrifying, so it's more than a little jarring to be thrust into a bright and bubbly, slapstick world of this manga. The tone was just too zany for me to reconcile with my main idea of these characters.
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