Space Ghost 12 Days Of Christmas

[Regenia Junke]

Thanks to Dynamite Comics, a beloved and unexpected superhero is going to live again in Space Ghost #1. Despite his legacy on the small screen, the character has been out of the spotlight for years. Thankfully, fans will get the chance to see Space Ghost in action sooner than they think.

Dynamite Comics has revealed that following its successful revival of the Thundercats, the publisher would be bringing back the 1960s space-faring hero Space Ghost. This May, Dynamite Comics will release Space Ghost #1 by David Prepose and Jonathan Lau for an exciting new series.

Details on Prepose and Lau's new series were kept to a minimum, but it hinted at the epic adventures in store for Space Ghost. Dynamite Comics also revealed several unlettered pages, showcasing returning characters such as the space pirate Tansut, Space Ghost's sidekicks Jan and Jace, as well as Space Ghost himself.

Space Ghost was originally a cartoon that was produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and premiered in 1966. Space Ghost, created by cartooning icon Alex Toth, followed the titular hero's adventures in outer space. He was joined by his sidekicks Jan, Jace, and their pet monkey, Blip. The animated series lasted for about a year before ending. However, the hero received a second life in the re-imagined sequel series Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. Instead of being a straightforward superhero, Space Ghost was reinterpreted as a talk show host who worked with several of his former villains.

This isn't the first time that Space Ghost came back in comic book form in recent years. In 2005, DC Comics published a miniseries that retold Space Ghost's origins. Over a decade later, DC Comics launched its Hanna-Barbera Beyond initiative and published Future Quest, a team-up book featuring several iconic cartoon characters, including Space Ghost. But last year, Dynamite struck a deal with Warner Brother Discovery to publish comics based on cartoons such as The Powerpuff Girls, The Flintstones, and the aforementioned Thundercats. With the groundbreaking success of Thundercats, it's safe to say Space Ghost is in very good hands.

Space Ghost might not be the most notable hero, but he's got an impressive and unique history. Dynamite Comics is revitalizing cartoon properties that have stagnated a bit and it's already been a successful venture. Thundercats has already become one of 2024's hottest-selling comics and if the same love and care is put into Space Ghost, there's no reason to think why this comic won't see comparable success. Space Ghost's days as an irreverent talk show host may be behind him, but Dynamite Comics' new series is giving him another chance to live the life of a superhero.

Winter was a haunted time in ancient European cultures, when the door to the supernatural creaked open. As the cold and dark gathered and the old year drew to a close, ghosts were likely to pay a visit, bringing unfinished business and warnings to the living. Through the centuries in England, Germany and Scandinavia, households would gather around the crackling fire on a snowy night to share bracing drinks and blood-curdling tales, especially at midwinter, the longest night of the year. Ghostly traditions receded as Christian customs arose, but still found a way to coexist: in her introduction to Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings, Tanya Kirk reminds us of the medieval belief that troubled souls in purgatory are especially restless on the eve of feast days like Christmas, just before the soothing effect of the sacred day. (This was also the basis for the holiday of Hallowe'en, as ghosts were thought to abound on the eve of All Hallows' or All Souls' Day.)

In the 19th century and the early 20th, the short story was elevated to a high literary art, and the ghost story with it. The Victorians had a fervid interest in ghosts and seances, partly stemming from the rise of science and technology, which for some heightened the fear of the still-unknown and for others was a spur to try to resolve spectral appearances as some kind of physical or psychological phenomena. Many brilliant writers rode the publishing boom in magazines and serials, and especially the 'Christmas numbers,' filling them with ghost stories that range from grisly shockers to finely wrought narratives. Washington Irving and Charles Dickens, in particular fused Christmas cheer and ghostly visitations into blockbuster entertainments that still chill and thrill today.

Horror traditions keep abreast of the times; nowadays for a shiver, many turn to movies about bloodthirsty revenants in hockey masks or cursed internet memes. But there's something incomparably spooky about the old stories, full of snowy churchyards, candlelit halls, and echoing footsteps, and the bygone mastery of evoking dread with a few well-wrought lines. So turn back the clock and enjoy some quintessential winter tales with these recommendations.

"The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child." So begins Henry James' masterpiece of atmospheric horror. Though known for his subtle novels of character, which plumb depths of psychological ambiguity in impressionistic traceries of prose, James had a childhood love of the ghost stories of Hawthorne, Poe, and Le Fanu, and returned to the somber form in the 1890s after a lull in his literary fortunes and the deaths of several close friends. In relating the vivid experiences of a young governess who is hired to care for two orphaned children in a cavernous manor house and comes to believe that they are under the malign influence of her spectral predecessors, James fully updates the ghostly tale into a profoundly modernist creation, beautifully subjective and leaving just the right questions unanswered. "The Turn of the Screw" may be his most famous (and terrifying), but all of the 18 stories that Leon Edel collected into The Ghostly Tales of Henry James are imbued with otherworldly frights.

Stories that feature child ghosts or (as in "The Turn of the Screw") children haunted by ghosts are often among the most disturbing in the genre, since we tend to feel a particular sympathy and protectiveness toward innocents threatened by evil or violence. A good example is this tale by one of England's leading novelists of the mid-Victorian era. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) was the daughter and wife of Unitarian ministers, and her work with her husband's parishioners in Manchester led her into fiction writing to dramatize conditions among local mill workers. Charles Dickens was impressed by her sympathy for the working class, and her novels Cranford and North and South were serialized in his magazine Household Words. Gaskell's feelings about Dickens and his work as an editor were ambivalent; when she told a friend that a certain story of hers was "good enough for Dickens," she was not paying him a compliment. But in spite of this, he brought some of her best work into print, including "The Old Nurse's Story," which appeared in the special Christmas 1852 issue of Household Words. The issue was called "A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire" and featured ten tales in all, including two by Dickens himself. Hester, the narrator, is just a schoolgirl when she is asked to go to work as a nursemaid for a young couple expecting their first child. After five happy years, the husband and wife both die within a couple of weeks, and little Rosamond is left an orphan. Rosamond's mother came from an aristocratic family, and her cousins decide that the girl, along with Hester, who is devoted to her, will live at the family's country estate, Furnivall Hall. Hester envisions a happy family environment for the child, but it turns out that the family all abandoned the manor house decades ago, with the exception of an elderly great-aunt and her companion. Hester tries to create a cheery environment for Rosamond, but as winter approaches, strange things start to happen, including occasional music from a broken pipe organ in the great hall. When Rosamond disappears one day during a snowstorm, a frantic Hester finds her lying unconscious out in the snow some distance from the house. Rosamond recovers and tells Hester that she saw another little girl through the window who beckoned her to come outside... If you find ghosts of the Victorian era particularly appealing, you can find this story and other classics in The Phantom Coach: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Ghost Stories.

I have a special fondness for humorous Christmas ghost stories, and this one is both scary and a laugh riot to the end. Our narrator meets a man on his passage to London who has been unhappily betrothed via distant relations to a lass with the plausibly Victorian name of Chlorine and stands to inherit a fortune if he can overcome some kind of family curse to which it is attached. The narrator hears only the fortune part and ignores the rest, and contrives to switch places with his fellow passenger. He shows up at the gloomy old house and blithely passes for Chlorine's suitor, eventually realizing that he is expected to confront and dispel the family curse at midnight on Christmas Eve. They leave him alone with mounting emanations of infernal evil from the Grey Chamber, and the rest I will not spoil. A catafalque, incidentally, is a bier or platform used to display a coffin at a funeral. This and other holiday yarns can be found in the anthology Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings.

One of the most influential ghost story writers, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin and best known in his lifetime for novels of mysterious foreboding like Uncle Silas. His classic ghost stories are unforgettably creepy, as attested by his many admirers from M.R. James to Stephen King. Le Fanu has a special knack for articulating an uncanny scene, slipping into it from ordinary reality like a cloud passing overhead. "The Ghost and the Bone-Setter," however, is more of a comic romp, although there are glimpses of his gift for evoking a supernatural experience. It takes place on a stormy night when the Irish dialect-slinging narrator is compelled to house-sit at the drafty old manor of his landlord. Sure enough, the eyes of the haunted portrait of the old squire start following him around the great hall. What happens next is based on the Irish superstition that "the corpse last buried is obliged, during the juniority of his interment, to supply his brother tenants of the churchyard in which he lies, with fresh water to allay the burning thirst of purgatory." This story can be found in a number of anthologies, including Gothic Tales of Terror: Classic Horror Stories from Great Britain, Europe, and the United States, 1765-1840.

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