It’s the hologram in the sky, who controls all energy on Earth. This we know because the promotional material tells us so. It’s part and parcel of a confusingly ghostly apparition, part of this new comic from Image Comics: Ghost Cage #1.
Co-writers and co-artists(?) Nick Dragotta and Caleb Goellner splice together their energies in this first issue. We are thrown off our keisters right away, though, as we endeavour to figure out what is going on. Our mission as weightless readers is to be a Challenger for Discovery. But here’s my theory on the beginning of the book: terrible terrorists have attacked Ohm, earth’s enormous energy utility. And there is damage.
So Dr. Karloff, the puppetmaster of Ohm sends a robot named Sam to crash land on a nuclear reactor and ‘fix’ things. (Sam looks like an astronaut, only slimmer.) Meanwhile, Karloff ALSO sends a little animated sprite to recruit and pester Doyle, a keyboard nerd. Doyle is all excited, this is their big chance for a promotion, or whatevs. So after that, it’s Sam and Doyle fighting against monsters that have mutated out of the raw materials from which electric power is created. Like Coal, Hydro, and so on. Stuff like that. Oh, and Karloff continually calls Doyle by a different wrong name.
The story is overwhelming and disorienting, unfortunately. The book’s creators have not taken the tried and true road of ‘making things abundantly clear to the reader’ and therefore the reader is left to their own clues and theories, with no encapsulation or ‘in other words’ moments to sum it up for us.
The drawing style is perhaps manga-influenced, with thin lines, exaggerated expressions, large panels. The black and white halftone occurring around Karloff is courtesy of screentone maybe. The (Rus Wooton) word balloons are drawn in jagged fashion sometimes, perhaps to heighten the tension. Stuff like that.
All is not lost, however, as Ghost Cage has its cool moments. When Doyle and Sam plunge into deep Hydro, there are some thrillingly well-drawn panels. Heavy dark tidal circles, wonderfully vibrant, energetic snippets of the descent into the depths that are simply brilliant.
But it’s not grabbing me, it’s confusing me instead. What’s to come in future issues is hard to say, but I may not be curious enough to plug into the Electrified Ghost Cage long enough to find out.
Image Comics, Ghost Cage #1, $5.99 for 46 pages of black and white interiors.
Newsdesk