1 out of 5

How woefully incompetent.

I’m generally hesitant of any book that frontloads plot points in an inside-cover text blurb – like Spook telling us that the CIA and other government agencies have been trying to “capture and use ghosts for espionage” for years – but I can still be roped in if the pitch is good and the content seems to roll with it, as in using that pre-loaded info dump as opposed to rolling it out again in some format in-story, as though someone somewhere didn’t think we’d get it so decided to spoiler us right away.

Spook seems to get off to a good start regarding this, with a spectral assassin popping into the UN and doing its assassining duty, then cutaway to a shadow figure saying something akin to “the operation is under way.”  Artist Lisandro Estherren’s style is incredibly messy, but for the most part, the direction is clean so you understand who’s doing / saying what, and the mess adds a certain seat-of-the-pants flair to things, which works to the issue’s favor when our government gathers some folks to try to figure out the source of the Spook.

There’s a horrid paneling order flub that makes one page incomprehensible, and the closing remarks from the editor feel like a reach (bridging the pitch from a ghost story to a spy story to a human story, when what we just read doesn’t register as any of those things), but we wind up with another spook on the roster and ready to go into issue two.

After which point things quickly descend into nigh-unreadable, unfollowable, and at times artistically baffling pap.  Which is harsh, I understand.  But the problems are big ones.

Externally, you have some horrible edits – constant typos, and sentences that seem wrong and so probably are – and confusing lettering, with bubble placement switching from left-right to right-left to clockwise to counter-clockwise without any visual indicators.  Did what character A said seem out of left field?  Probably because you were supposed to read the panel below it first, but good luck figuring that out.

Then to the actual content, Starnes spends exactly zero time establishing any rules for his spooks – whether or not we can see them; how they can interact with us – before introducing a chortling bad guy whom delivers a vague speech about his reasons for being bad that come off as the half-assed justifications they are.  Meaning we have no real grasp of why the events that are occurring matter.  Add to this the semi-frequent use of un-subtitled foreign dialogue – which worked during the assassination in issue one as part of the frenzy of that book, but begins to grate, as its too extensive to simply work contextually, so it becomes another reason to stop caring.  And then once or twice an issue Starnes will remember he promised a “human” story, so someone will rattle off a one-line wisdom statement.  We love those so, don’t we?

Art.  As the cast increases, Estherren proves incapable of effectively managing the action, and with a script that occasionally asks for scenes in different locations that parallel one another, characters and backgrounds are so fudged looking that you can read through these bits without realizing it’s two different characters, or settings.  (A nod back to the lettering / writing inconsistency where you start to swallow non-sensical stuff without second guessing it.)  Most frustrating, though, is the same inconsistent treatment of the spooks: I can understand “showing” us the hero spook, but Estherren continues to switch back and forth between drawing these characters in, then drawing them as wraiths, them drawing them with crazy Frighteners morphing abilities.

Ghost assassin: cool idea.  But it too often felt like writer and artist were working on completely separate books, not to mention the story itself feeling like it had no sense of identity.

Another strike for the “inside cover summary” method.