4 out of 5

Ben Catmull is self-admittedly non-prolific, and it’s a shame.  I’ve been waiting years for a follow-up to the quirky, weird, and affecting ‘Monster Parade’ one-shot and I near pooped my pants in anticipation of ‘Ghosts and Ruins.’  It’s exactly what I’d hoped it’d be, striking the same uneasy tone where you’re not quite sure how to take it, and thematically similar to ‘Parade’ in leaning toward the strange and then letting the imagination wander, but it’s structurally different and the subject and writing style are separate entities as well, making the book exist perfectly on its own.  ‘Monster’ was a lullaby-esque dreamer’s examination of monsters, and here we get a bit drier voice doing a similar tour of haunted houses.  Some are single pages, with a ‘name’ for the house and a few words, some stretch on for a few pages.  The looseness of it – there’s no guessing as to what will be one page or several – keeps you glued while flipping through, and also makes it nice to actually go from start to finish.  In Catmull’s mind, haunted doesn’t always result from the typical death and dismay we’ve come to associate with haunted houses (I… think, after one read-through, there’s only one murder mentioned in the book), but often due to obsessions, or toiling away into irrelevance – the sculptor who continued to tweak unfinished works until death, the old woman who filled her house up with doilies.  One moment will make you grin a little bit (say one ghost’s name wrong and you get hair in your food) and then some concepts and images will suddenly strike you in just the right off fashion, with a fittingly vague or clipped sentence to accompany the hauntingly scratchy picture.

The art is of course a highlight, this time working (it seems) from the negative, scratching the image in white out of black backgrounds.  The multitude of line work gives everything a pretty gorgeous flow, and though it’s easy to ‘read’, you’ll definitely be halted on some pages as you go around and around following the pen (pencil?  brush?  I don’t know how this stuff works) marks.  By the same token, since we’re dealing with houses, which have hard edges and corners, and some images are meant to be ramshackle boards and walls, Catmull’s style softens everything.  This works amazingly for interiors, where smoke flows over old chairs, where trash litters every corner, but some of the exteriors seem like they should feel ‘harsh’ and they simply can’t when drawn in this fashion.

Fantagraphics does their typically stellar job of presentation – rectangular shape, light-weight but sturdy hardcover binding, the images printed at a desirable size for examination but far enough from the spine that you can hold the thing open at a comfortable reading angle and see it all.  Ben’s grayscale works shows up wonderfully on the thick, white pages (which are just off-white enough to not contrast annoyingly with the images).

A brief blurb I read compared this to Gorey and Burton.  Sure.  Sketchy artwork of the macabre.  But those guys always feel relatively ‘friendly’ to me.  I know they’re not; I know they’re dark, and dealing with death and decay and having black hair and stuff, but there’s a layer of mystery to Catmull’s work that sets it aside from those.  I think you can give a Burton book to a kid, but ‘Ghosts and Ruins’ is definitely more for your mature friend of discerning tastes, meaning me, so buy me a copy.  Jerk.