Zip Comic Cod Ghost

[Perpetuo Carlson]

Ghostis the fictional superhero of an eponymous comic book published by American company Dark Horse Comics. The character appeared in specials and monthly titles detailing the afterlife of Elisa Cameron and her search for the truth surrounding her (apparent) death.

Ghost first appeared in Comics' Greatest World, week three, in 1993. After a popular special in 1994, a monthly title devoted to the character began publication in 1995. It ran for 36 issues, followed by a six-month break and a second series of 22 issues. The second series was a continuation of the first with a number of changes, including new details about Ghost's origin. The stories in both series were based in (and around) the city of Arcadia, in a self-contained fictional universe outlined in Dark Horse's Comics' Greatest World.

The series takes place in Arcadia, which is intended to be a grim, yet Art Deco city, as reflected in the artwork of the early issues. The body of protagonist Elisa Cameron contains nanomites which give her spectral powers. She becomes an assassin and her memories are erased. Now having few memories, she believes she is an actual ghost and adopts the alias of "the Ghost" in order to carry out investigations.

The series was re-launched in the fall of 1998 with a new creative staff. An attempt was made to make the artwork sleeker, sexier and more beautiful than the previous series. Like the first series, the second adapted a mini-series approach. The following is a list of the staff; when repeated, only the surname will be used:

Ghost was revived as part of Dark Horse's Project Black Sky with a new storyline entitled "Resurrection Mary", which launched the third series in Dark Horse Presents #13 cover-dated June 2012. In the three-part serialized story, Elisa's spirit is revived when two investigators from a Ghost Hunters-like TV series, armed with an experimental piece of paranormal technology, investigate a cemetery where a woman in white (called "Resurrection Mary") has been spotted. Eliza appears to have lost her memory; she and the paranormal investigators she befriends cover up her self-defence killing and resolve to solve the mystery of her identity. A notable change for this reboot is that the traditional setting of Arcadia was replaced by Chicago, Illinois. The serial concluded with DHP #15, after which Dark Horse published Ghost #0 in September 2012; this reprinted the three DHP chapters as a prelude to a new series, Ghost: In the Smoke and Din.

It is a too infrequent pleasure to pick up a book by an artist I am unfamiliar with and be delighted by it. Too often comics are so cliched and dull and I take a chance on them and then wonder why I even bothered.

Having read this book multiple times I have found something new to strike my interest each time, and if in the end I don't think I have all the answers to the narrative mysteries, I do end up with a feeling when I close the book, even without totally understanding what it is. This is an oddly mysterious book. (And I should state right now that I will to a certain extent be giving away aspects of the plot, and my interpretations of same that could constitute spoilers if you are concerned about such things.)

It is a truism in comics that they should be clear and easy to understand, both visually and narratively. The form grew out of newspapers and pulps, mass media meant to be read by the masses (and often children) and thus art is iconic, simplified, characters are easily differentiated and stories are linear, with consistent beats and a plethora of narrative cues (see: the ubiquitous and unnecessary narration in so many comics). This is still the overwhelming norm in all types and genres of comics from superheroes and manga to contemporary "literary" (if I dare call it that) graphic novels.

Clarity can take a number of forms: representationally, such that the reader looks at a drawing and it is clear that that person is character A and that thing is a car and that thing is a tree; sequentially, person A in panel 1 is talking to person B in panel 2, person A left the room and walked home; narratively, x meets y, w betrayed q because of z, scene 1 happens before scene 2 happens before scene 3. Most comics strive to be clear in all these senses, a frictionless reading experience.

And this can be well and good, leading to a pleasant time enjoying a comic, but many of the comics I like best and reread most frequently do not offer such clarity in some or all of these forms. This is probably most prominent in works with unusual visual styles (especially those that draw upon influences other than comics) or with no or limited narrative (comics poetry for instance, or abstract comics).

What is more unusual is a comic with a clean visual style and a strong narrative focus to work against such clarity, to offer room for interpretation, to not spell everything out. Such a work is A Gift For a Ghost.

The various user reviews of the book (take a look at the lower starred reviews on its Goodreads page) are a clear indication of the books less than clearly explained plot, which is exactly one of the aspects of it that I found so great. If you want a comic with a story that has all the signposts to let you know exactly what is going on then this is not the book for you.

To accompany this twisting narrative, Gonzalez uses a very clean drawing style and a fairly conventional use of layout and sequencing. Unusually, for a story focused on characters and emotions, he draws his characters with no faces and almost always at a consistent full body (except the feet which tend to be just below the panel border), eye level view. This view has an old comic strip, actors on a stage, style, that is reinforced by the flattened depth of the backgrounds and foregrounds. But Gonzalez gets a lot of expression out of his faceless characters, a great indication of his visual skill. You can quickly forget that the characters are small faceless figures as they never feel stiff or distant.

While I like Gonzalez's art style, it is sometimes hard to tell the girls apart since they do not keep a consistent model, especially the two lesser used girls in the band. Their hair color is a primary distinguishing feature, but due to the shifting color palettes in the art, it is not always clear. This improved on rereading, but on first read I found myself often a bit confused on which character was which, a lack of clarity that I do not think was purposeful.

The almost monochrome pages are frequently used for mood, when Teresa's mom is chewing her out about her poetry, the color drains from the page and Teresa, in her imagination, steps away from the scene into a grey world.

There is a frequent motif of a parallel reflection in water, shown mirrored in the panel top-to-bottom, that is used on the cover in a more explicitly metaphorical way: the ghost figure is reflected below as Teresa the girl from the 19th century. In the book itself this mirroring is always very exact (a little too exact for my tastes, if you look at it, it is clearly a computerized duplicate rather than a new part of the drawing). This mirroring of the two girls is obviously a major theme of the book, but their similarities would be easier to see if Laura, the modern girl, were more clearly shown as having a... stifled existence. Teresa is clearly having issues because she is falling outside the expectations of her parents and siblings and society in general. We do not see 2016 Laura in such a situation. She wears costumes regularly (surely an indication of some kind of alienation from her identity) and fights a bit with her bandmates, but there is nothing to grab onto to understand why she feels the way she does. She seems to have quite a lot of freedom, she can afford all those costumes and clearly no one is stopping from walking around in them (as I suspect many parents would), and she's got friends, and she's started a band with her friends (and they have instruments, or at least a guitar and a keytar (one more weird anachronism for their 2016 setting, in my opinion). It would have added another level to the narrative and the emotional resonance, I think, to get some better sense of her alienation.

That said, this criticism should not draw away from how much I enjoyed reading and rereading (I read this comic at least 4 times now) A Gift for a Ghost. It's an unusual and enjoyable read, with a delightful clean visual style, a charming narrative, and enough ambiguity in both to allow the reader to do a little work in trying to piece it all together. I look forward to seeing what Gonzalez does next and hope this book does well enough that there will be a translation of whatever it is.

In any adaptation from print to screen, there are going to be some changes from the source materials. This is more true in comic books than most print sources; comic books (well, superhero comic books) usually have decades of stories for moviemakers to choose from, and many of these stories contradict each other. This is the first in what I hope to be a series of articles showing how the comics have changed on their way to the silver screen.

Blackheart: Blackheart was the adversary of the second Ghost Rider in the comics. Just as in the movie, he is the son of Mephisto, who has rebelled against his father. Although he can make himself look human, he prefers his demonic form. In the movie, Blackheart remains in human form even after absorbing many spirits; he seems to look demonic only to intimidate or in a lapse of concentration.

Lab Rat/Dissection Bad End AU.

Angst Central. An upward view of Maddie and Jack with tools in hand, seen from the perspective of someone on their dissection table.

Wings AU.

That phenomenon of people putting wings on characters represented by a disembodied pair of black and white wings floating in a lime green void.

Full Ghost.

Danny died all the way in the portal accident. His transparent ghost tail is half phased into a patch of freshly dug dirt in front of a headstone, implied to belong to Daniel Fenton. A lone bouquet is laid on his grave.

Ghost King.

Danny in full royal regalia with the crown of fire hovering over his head and the ring of rage on his hand. The ghost zone and a few floating door behind him. He looks to the side warily mid-action.

Hazmat AU.

Danny died wearing a big, chunky, OSHA approved, real hazmat suit. He is only visible from chest up with his eyes glowing inside the hood.

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