Review: Ghost Comics anthology

Ghost Comics is an anthology edited by cartoonist Ed Choy Moorman, with the proceeds benefiting Minnesota drug rehab/family services agency RS Eden. It’s also a themed anthology, as its title suggests, with each contributor tackling the subject of ghosts. It’s a very rich and interesting anthology, too: Moorman has assembled a great variety of contributors, encompassing both big names and unknowns, as well as various different artistic and stylistic approaches. Unsurprisingly, these artists have all taken different approaches to the anthology’s subject. A few chose to tell whimsical autobiographical stories of mysterious phenomena attributed to ghosts, while others offer up more fantastic tales, and still others treat the idea of the “ghost” as a metaphor, often for the lingering of memories, of characters “haunted” by the past.

As with most anthologies, Ghost Comics is a bit of a mixed bag, but its strong subject provides a coherence that keeps it moving along smoothly over the weaker stories. The central conceit isn’t so narrow that the stories ever become repetitive – there’s plenty of leeway for differing interpretations of what a ghost is or could be – but it does lend a series of recurring motifs for the contributing artists to play with.

The best two stories aren’t surprising ones: by getting Warren Craghead III and John Hankiewicz to contribute substantial new pieces here, Moorman is able to showcase two of modern comics’ most interesting and original experimentalists. Craghead’s piece, entitled “This is a Ghost,” is a poetic and enigmatic work in the artist’s usual style, with detached objects and body parts floating in white space, connected by lines and chains of letters that can be assembled, with some difficulty, into words and phrases. Everything about his comics seems unfinished, waiting for the reader to do the work to connect the lines, to decode the words, to mentally fill in the blank spots in the drawings. Robed, headless figures dominate here, and Craghead finds visual echoes for these “ghosts” in a pulled-aside shower curtain, a free-floating mirror and a domed fragment of architecture (appropriate since his approach to page construction itself seems architectural). At the piece’s climax, his usual precision and minimalism erupts into a page of childlike scribbles, images of ghosts and phantoms as imagined in childhood, naïve images that drive home the piece’s theme of finding ghosts in memories, in the pages of books, in mirrors, in childhood itself.

Hankiewicz’s piece, “The Offering,” is also interesting. Unlike Craghead’s contribution, this silent story isn’t one of Hankiewicz’s strongest works, but it’s an excellent example of his ability to probe mysterious emotions through simple, repetitive arrangements. In this case, a man pulls up to a place called “Highway Church of Christ,” walks up to a window and looks in. Inside (one presumes, anyway) he sees a series of scenes in which two women, one large and one small, take turns placing a coin in a jar. The framing story is depicted in Hankiewicz’s dense, heavily crosshatched “realistic” style, while the interior scenes (the ghosts?) are drawn with the more abstracted, stylized rendering of his “Dance” stories. The tension between the two styles, between realism and cartoony stylization, creates the story’s sense of two different realities colliding together, of a man getting a glimpse of something so strange and puzzling that he winds up staying at the window all night long.

Hankiewicz and Craghead might be the standouts here, but there are plenty of other worthy contributions scattered throughout the anthology. Hob opens the book with a piece about a brontosaurus ghost who wanders throughout history; other ghosts come and go, able to find closure with loved ones and hated enemies, to move on to the next plane, but the dinosaur continues to wander the Earth, a silent observer to all these dramas. Corinne Mucha, whose work is new to me, contributes a funny, clever Lynda Barry-influenced piece about her years at art school, and the ghost legends swirling around her college dorm. It’s a fun piece, not only because Mucha has a deadpan wit, but because she allows the story’s form to bend and dance with the shifts in the writing, creating playful rhythms and interactions between text and image. At one point, the captions above a series of panels tell the story of a glass window shattering, while word bubbles within the panels themselves – some of which even emanate from the window itself! – play with language and deliver punning quips.

Other stories provide small but real pleasures: the bold line of Evan Palmer’s hackneyed adventure story “The Trials of Sir Goodknight,” the lovely Asian-influenced brush style, with its heavy blacks, of Sean Lynch, the lowkey whimsy of Allison Cole and Jessica McLeod, the latter of whom delivers one of the book’s best laugh-out-loud moments in the form of a swarm of ghostly, marauding tomatoes. Editor Moorman’s own contribution is a heartfelt “letter” to a dead relative, a piece whose best moment is the silent four-panel sequence that establishes, with minimal and enigmatic imagery, the story of this lost cousin’s death. Aidan Koch stitches together fragments of stiff, amateurish phototracing into a compelling abstract poem, like a rough first draft for Craghead’s work.

There are other delights to be found here, of course, but also some missteps. Jenny Tondera delivers a ten-page sequence that’s mostly white space with a single degenerating computer graphic and some minimal text at its center; the ultimate in aesthetic laziness. Jillian Schroeder’s badly drawn bit of faux-naïve nonsense is equally frustrating, especially since Schroeder seems to have taken the obvious inspiration of C.F. as a cue for her own scrawlings, proving that C.F.’s seemingly simple style is deceptive. Jeffrey Brown, as usual, has nothing to say here; or at least says more with his one-pager’s “in memory of” line than he does in the comic itself. Will Dinski has an interesting idea – about how a man with a photographic memory is especially haunted by the “ghosts” of his perfectly remembered past – but can’t find a way to convey the idea visually, and the piece drowns in text and generic graphics. Lucy Knisley contributes a pleasantly drawn slice-of-life piece, and like many autobiographical artists, she needs to be reminded that most autobiography isn’t really interesting to anyone besides the artist herself.

The anthology’s other main disappointment is that several of its most prominent names contributed insignificant one-page entries: a half-assed frontispiece full of ghosts by the usually worthwhile David Heatley, a single panel with a puzzling punchline by Zak Sally, a minor one-page strip by John Porcellino. Fortunately, there is enough quality material in this book that even with a few big draws not delivering the goods, Ghost Comics is a very satisfying and varied read.