Ghost 1

Short Review: Babe Comic. Babe Comic with guns, even. Skip.

The lady on the front cover of Ghost 1 is fairly demure, if you can be demure while holding two smoking guns. It's only inside that it becomes apparent that she's another of the comic book women who have a penchant for tight clothes and lace up tops that aren't. In other words, what the fanboys want to see. The plot for the first issue (except that it isn't, due to the magic of issue 0's) is that the ghost, Elisa is trying to track down her sister, Margo, who has turned into porno modeling (cue dodgy pictures, with convenient intrusions to avoid a Mature Reader tag. So, Elisa goes and rescues her.

The apparent problem with the series, apart from the blatant titillation value, is the deus ex machina quality of Ghost's powers. She can fly and move through things (while packing two automatics, not a bad trick) and can control her intangibility perfectly, except where there's other paranormals around. She can also move through space instantaneously, by travelling through a psychic zone which is populated by evil forces (cue angst about whether she can withstand it, each time the plot calls for it). There's no real reason to get interested about the character. She seems motivated entirely by revenge, and her purpose in the comics company is almost certainly to look cool and pack guns.

On the subject of placements within the company, this is also the first month of Dark Horse Heroes (Motto: We're not Comics' Greatest World revamped, we swear!), a collection of superhero titles which is set to grow and intermesh over the next few months. This isn't so bad, (except in the sense that superheros per se are bad), since most of the titles are fairly dire numbers like Barb Wire, Ghost and Agents of Law, but someone smart decided that The Mask belonged in this world as well, and sometime after Arcudi and Mahnke finish their first run, there's gonna be crossovers. With some luck, this won't be incredibly lame, but some luck won't last forever. Bleah.