They Dead Girl'd Nancy Drew

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of iconic sleuth Nancy Drew, a comics publisher is releasing Nancy Drew & the Hardy Boys: The Death of Nancy Drew, in which the brothers will solve the mystery of their counterpart’s murder. That’s right: They made Nancy Drew a dead girl.

Polygon reported that it’s the latest in a series of crossovers by publisher Dynamite featuring Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. A site called Previews World had more details:

All bets are off, as the series by writer Anthony Del Col (Luke Cage: Everyman, Kill Shakespeare) and artist Joe Eisma (Riverdale, Morning Glories) opens with Nancy’s iconic friends, the Hardy Boys, at Nancy’s grave. Through twists and turns, this dark noir-infused story unfurls as the biggest Nancy Drew mystery of all time. Nancy’s mysterious death follows one of her highest stake investigations into organized crime.

“Over the years, there have been a lot of difficult mysteries to solve in the lives of Nancy Drew as well as the Hardy brothers,” said writer Anthony Del Col. “But I wanted to top them all, and so put together the ultimate case – solving Nancy’s death!” As feminist bookstore the Second Shelf pointed out on Twitter: “Canonically, Hardy Boys don’t even SOLVE mysteries. They like, run out of gas in their boat and get stuck on an island with a smuggler or something.”

Of course, this being a comic book, she’s probably not actually dead, because nobody in comic books is ever actually dead. Most likely, she faked her death in service of her investigation into organized crime and didn’t tell the Hardy Boys. (Would you?) Even if it’s just a gimmick, it’s still another version of the same inescapable narrative, a woman dumped into a grave to give the Hardy Boys something interesting to do.