Ghost Comics grabbed me for three reasons: it is full of artists I love like Corinne Mucha, Lucy Knisley and Maris Wicks, its topic is close to my heart and it was only ten bucks. The B&W collection, put together by contributor Ed Choy Moorman, covers ghostly ground in a myriad of ways, and with the exception of uninspiring one-pagers, none of the contributors took the easy way out. I appreciated the variance of tone in the stories; it kept the book readable for one sitting. In fact, there were so many standouts that, before this review, my copy looked like it grew little, yellow post-it feathers.
“Dear Dave,” Ed Choy Moorman’s tale of growing up probes both the anger and sadness of losing a formerly idolized family member to drugs. Toby Jones’ auto-bio take on becoming invisible in a relationship in a time of grief, “I Can’t Deal,” strikes the balance between funny and thought provoking. In “The Point” Alison Cole’s signature yeti-looking character finds a way to deal with the ghosts that plague her day—a nice meditation piece for the haunted! Jenny Tondera’s piece uses a single hazy image that gets progressively whiter over the single-sentence story to look at anger associated with certain memories. Monica Anderson’s gut-wrenching tale of abuse and neglect shows the legacy that that kind of treatment leaves behind, using only drawn lettering to tell the story, which makes the piece feel immediate, like she is speaking right into your ear. “This is a Ghost,” by Warren Craighead III is a fun, good lookin’ pencil exploration of the titluar subject in diagram form.
I really enjoyed this book. Since, as the subtitle says, part of the price of the book goes to support,
RS Eden, a drug rehabilitation program in Minnesota, your purchase will be doing double duty.
