Way back in 2006 at the San Diego ComiCon during a Q & A session, Robert Kirkman threw down the gauntlet by asking Todd McFarlane to do some new comic book work. History was written when both artists then and there decided to team up on a project. When I first read about this I was very excited. However, after I saw McFarlane’s cover for Haunt #1, I became very skeptical. It seemed too reminiscent of his work on Spawn and further down the line, Spiderman. It’s beginning to make me think ol’ Toddy really is a one trick pony and probably should stay away from making new comics.
It reminded of the prospecting mid 90s era of gimmicky covers, bagged comics, special editions, and trading cards inside! Everyone and their mom were buying five copies of this, five copies of that. I did it. Everyone did it. It was an exciting time for creators and I fully supported what Lee, McFarlane, Liefeld, Silvestri, Larson and all those cats were trying to do. It is a shame that such good work is considered worthless in the back-issue department. Luckily, I had caught on to the gimmick by the time image was started so I didn’t end up with numerous copies of everything, just every #1-5 across the board. I do have 5 copies of each cover including the gatefold for X-MEN #1 and 5 copies for each different X-Force card still bagged, and 5 copies of every color cover of Spiderman #1. Woopidydoo! Those first issues of X-Force are so bad I wouldn’t stuff a mattress with them!
I was a little suspicious of image and that first wave of creator books. Most of the characters that these now “indy” creators introduced to us were very similar if not exactly similar to the characters that they became famous for while working for marvel. It was easy to say things like, “Oh, there’s Psylocke, Cyclops, and that’s Wolverine, and that’s just Spiderman in a black costume with chains, and that’s obviously all of X-Force, hey look! a silver Deadpool!” My interest in image took a nose dive after issue 5 of most of their titles. I believe most people felt the same way and I was worried about their longevity. Valiant had disappeared even though there was a lot of good storytelling. Malibu had come and gone. I really wanted image to succeed but I didn’t want to buy garbage just to help them out.
One day I went to my local comic shop, Gallop’s Comics and Games in Statesboro, GA, now called Galactic Comics and Games, to pick up my weekly dose of comics. I know that’s an obvious plug but it is a really great store and if you are ever down there for some crazy reason go check it out. I picked up “Invincible #1” thinking it was an issue of ”the Fly” by impact comics, which I was collecting at the time. I stood there and read the first few pages of Invincible and I have been hooked ever since. I am now and have been a HUGE Robert Kirkman fan. He has single handedly revitalized my interest in image comics. I own EVERY issue of Invincible and EVERY issue of The Walking Dead. If you haven’t read these titles you should start picking up the trades because these are what comics should be. Just about everything he’s done in recent years is a damn good read from Irredeemable Ant-Man to his run on Ultimate X-men to The Destroyer. I’m not even a fan of the “ultimate” universe but somehow his treatment of the characters took me back to what I consider the glory days of the X-Men, the John Byrne to Jim Lee era. He knows his characters!
Now that you know my life’s comic history I can get back on the topic at hand which is the recent collaboration of Todd McFarlane, Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Greg Capullo. Here is a brief synopsis I pulled from Kirkman’s website:
LITTLE GHOST
Daniel Kilgore is dragged into his estranged brother Kurt's secret life of murder and espionage... by his ghost. With no training whatsoever, guided by the spirit of his secret-agent brother, Daniel must now solve his brother's murder and save the world - or die trying!
Sounds interesting. What drew me to this book was not Todd McFarlane but the team of Kirkman and Ottley. I have been enjoying their collaboration on Invincible for some time now and as I stated above the cover McFarlane provided nearly killed it for me. I honestly think if he provided the interior art I might have let this one slide by me. McFarlane does provide inks on top of Ryan Ottley pencils to make a very very interesting product but I would’ve loved it all the same if it was just Ottley at the helm.
On to the comic itself...
Daniel Kilgore and Kurt Kilgore are brothers. Daniel is a priest and his brother Kurt is some kind of special forces or mercenary type. The story opens with Daniel Kilgore (the priest) saying a cold farewell to his weekly prostitute. So we start out knowing there is something more to this priest character, maybe he’s not so holy.
Kurt comes to confession at Daniel’s church and the hypocritical resentment of Dan to Kurt's lifestyle is painfully obvious. Kurt begins his confession while we get a flash back of what went down on his latest “mercenary” type job.
It seems like Kurt’s conscience gets the better of him when he realizes the scientist he was sent to extract from some unnamed and heavily guarded compound has been testing on children. Against his own orders, Kurt pops the scientist in the head and saves the test subjects. It seems like Kurt is trying to tell Daniel that he has some good in him yet but because of some past, unknown bitterness, Daniel hardly listens and shrugs off his brother’s story. Hardly priestly of him and this shows an underlying complexity that will hopefully be revealed to us later on down the line. In the next few pages Kurt is kidnapped, tortured, and killed over the events of his last job. While Daniel is attending Kurt’s funeral, Kurt appears to Daniel, dead but looking quite normal in a “LOST” kind of way.
Kurt speaks to Daniel, urging him to protect his wife because he thinks the people who killed him will go after her next. Daniel thinks he is going crazy but does his duty anyway and contacts his deceased brother’s wife. While sleeping on the couch some thugs break in and open fire on Daniel. Kurt’s spirit is there and out of what could be called instinct moves to protect his brother from the thugs, inadvertently merging with him and creating “Haunt” a combination of the living Daniel Kilgore and the deceased Kurt Kilgore. He blocks the bullets with what I think is supposed to be gooey ectoplasm and then tears the heads off of both thugs in one (Spiderman-like) lunge.
The Pros:
All of the characters, their feelings and their lives are very well introduced by master-writer Kirkman. Sequentially the art tells the story with ease, the placing of panels and borders and with the correct use of dynamics, dark, light and holding on to the real climax till the last sequence is very nice. I enjoyed this first issue and will pick up the second. McFarlane inks over Ottley’s pencils is very interesting and pleasing. This is a great introductory issue.
The Cons:
The McFarlane cover blows. Like I said before, it makes him seem like a one trick pony. Why is he posed like that? Is he Spiderman? Is he Spawn? That cover makes Haunt seem like a mixture of the two which is not good at all. It makes sense for Spiderman to be contorted in mid-air, he’s an acrobat that spends his days and nights flipping through the air from roof top to roof top. Haunt is an amalgamation of a priest and a dead mercenary. Sure, a mercenary probably has some moves but I’m sure his feet don’t end up near his head on a daily basis and a priest usually has a pretty sedate lifestyle mostly consisting of standing, sitting and talking. Well, this one also has sex with prostitutes so there has got to be more to him. Another thing is his costume. Why does he have one? In the emergency conception of the title character did he have a subconscious design for a costume ready? Or are we supposed to believe it was created instinctually? His costume, in my opinion, should have been more of a beasty/super undead kind of thing without a symbol on his chest.
Aside from the problems I had with this book I really did enjoy it. What bothers me is that the problems I do have probably stem from Todd McFarlane’s influence. I believe it would have been better had he not been involved at all. He should have stuck with inking only. It is interesting to see Ottley’s normally clean drawing style look a little scratchy and gritty. Unfortunately, knowing how pushy and jackassy McFarlane is there is no way he would take such a back seat.
I would like to end by saying I hope the book does well and I will enjoy seeing where it goes and I can’t wait for Toddy to get bored and go do something else.
Special shout out to FCO, the colorist on this book and numerous others including Invincible. Amazing colorist!! They never get their props.