Mini-Mania: Serious Space Ghost!

Mini-Mania: Taking a look at limited series of comic books for fun and thought-fodder.

I started a column about individual comics about Space Ghost, so for parallelism's sake, I'm starting off a mini-series column with a review of Joe Kelly's serious Space Ghost adaptation. I recently bought the issues on eBay (as they're easier to find than the trade), unsure wether the story would be good but certain the Alex Ross covers are awesome.

Ross's covers seem to set the visual style of the comic. While Ross' paintings are intricate and detailed, the series interior art is bold and digitally colored. And the series makes nice use of neon accents as evidenced by this picture of Space Ghost lightining-punching your face.

The narrative tries to match this visual depth with character depth. It doesn't entirely succeed, but fans of Coast to Coast can scoff at the silliness. An Amazon reviewer suggests reading in George Lowe's voice whenever the comic takes itself too seriously. Like the first page, for example, which posits thoughts on entropy, "The universe tends toward entropy. This is commonly considered truth, taken to mean that at its heart, the cosmos is inherently corrupt flawed, because it cannot hold it's center. What are we then, children of stars and earth, but symptoms of this great chaos?..." Entropy kinda relates to everything, but usually people just make it mean "chaos" or in this case, "space chaos" Fun! We learn, Space Ghost's origin is riddled with revenge, justice, and ultimately discovering how to be a moral person (specifically for a super-powered post-mortal space traveling crusader type of person).

The first issue reads like typical space opera. An advanced space civilizations run by intergalactic politics is conducting a space war. Thadius Bach, (nod to Thad Ghostal from Coast to Coast, probably) is a rookie space fighter unwilling to compromise his morals.and fully throw himself into the intergalactic ideology.  So, Thad's superior officer murders his wife in front of him and frames him for the crime--weird, right? This superior officer thinks the empire should preemptively attack alien races and reap the spoils of war. Thad abandons the ghost-warrior brigade a meets a gruff, hard-boiled alien dude--who has both a heart of gold and an invisible spaceship. Drunk with anger, Thad steals the ship to go creepy-space spector on the general who betrayed him.

Thad flies to attacks his military nemesis in issue 3, but an army of Zorak mantises get in his way! Joe Kelly made Zorak suitably menacing, perhaps even adding to the Zorak's of other SG cartoons. When the 1960s cartoon made all the Zoraks look the same, everybody assumed it was because Hanna and Barbara were cheap lazy schlubs who only wanted to pay for a on villain drawing per episode. "Just make more of the bug guy!" Joe Hanna drunkenly screamed at his tepid brother (I assume). Coast 2 Coast goofed on the many Zoraks by showing the Mantis' many shades. But Kelly's comic takes the idea of Zorak clones in a cool direction--a race of would definitely look similar, as well as strong and creepy. This Zorak can also exchange his consciousness within any of his minions, making him effectively a Bug-God

Zorak destroys planet with his mantis army. Then, Space Ghost finds two little orphans who lost their parents in this war--it's Jan and Jayce! Space Ghost's teenage wards, practically the main characters of the 1960s and totally non-existent in Coast to Coast, are helpless orphans. Issue 5 is all about Space Ghost becoming a father to Jan and Jayce--it's goofy, if not boring. The faces Thad makes are right out of Coast to Coast. Jayce, presented as a scared baby boy, say Thad is like a Space Ghost, the legendary ghost from space who attaches bad kids to the moon for punishment (stupidest urban legend ever). 

In the last issue, Space Ghost confronts Zorak and his nemesis. He smashes the intergalactic ghost-army ship into Zorak's and saves the day. He ominously confronts the council of space-elders, and effectively says, "Stop being evil. You're entropy, but I'm justice--and justice beats entropy. It's pretty bad ass.

This mini-series was alright. Mostly, the art was cool and the story was hoaky. But I don't regreat reading it, and I'll probably thumb through it occasionally just to remember Epic Serious Space Ghost!

3/5 Franchise Reboot Robots out of Five