MegaGhost Vol. 1 | Review

MegaGhost Vol. 1
Writer: Gabe Soria
Artist: Gideon Kendall
Dark Horse Books; $19.99
Publisher’s age rating: 10+

The back cover copy of MegaGhost Vol. 1, which collects the first five issues of Gabe Soria and Gideon Kendall’s all-ages adventure comic, says that it “mixes Saturday morning cartoon thrills with supernatural chills!”

That particular comparison may be lost on young readers, who have grown up with constant access to cartoons thanks to streaming and dedicated channels rather than having to wait until Saturday morning to see ’em, but it’s an apt one. There’s more than a little of a cartoon show in MegaGhost‘s premise and spirit, particularly of the old-school variety of cartoon. Even its several Lovecraft allusions are filtered for the Scooby-Doo set.

It stars Martin Magus, a young occultist who always dresses in a suit and tie and calls the spooky city of Dunwich Heights home. One night he visits Darkgable Manor on a dare and ends up exploring the haunted house, discovering a severed hand wearing a magical ring and, once he puts the ring on, a trio of ghosts.

When the local gang of occult-curious troublemakers use the “Necronalmanac” to summon giant fish god Dagon to flatten the city, Magus discovers the ring’s unusual ability. With it, he’s able to combine the manor’s three ghosts into a giant ghost robot, the titular MegaGhost, which he can then coach in its battles against giant monsters. These seem to appear fairly frequently in Dunwich Heights, at the rate of about once an issue.

With this pattern established, Soria and Kendall then commence riffing on it over and over again, with the mysterious villain Ultraghoul and his Real Kool Kultists coming up with various plots to destroy the city with supernatural giants that Martin and MegaGhost must foil.

While this does lead to a certain degree of repetitiveness—like an old cartoon show, MegaGhost has a formula it adheres to, as well as a tendency toward self-contained narratives—the creators do tend to be fairly imaginative in their conception of the monsters and the way the battles are staged.

They also do an admirable job of on-the-fly world-building, with various background characters, concepts and locations coming to the fore as the story progresses, making Dunwich Heights feel rather fully realized (to the extent that I was reminded somewhat of another old and long-running cartoon show, The Simpsons, and its Springfield setting, which so gradually became populated by unique and striking characters).

Despite the cartoon show inspiration, MegaGhost doesn’t look anything like your average television cartoon, neither in the book’s character designs (perhaps, that is, aside from those of MegaGhost, the three ghosts that compose it and the giant monsters) nor in the rendering of those designs.

Kendall’s art instead seems equally inspired by classic Mad magazine art (especially that of the great Jack Davis) and 1970s horror comics, with a high degree of realism leveled with a sort of exaggeration that evokes caricature. Ultraghoul, for example, looks like he could be the retired host of an old Tales from the Crypt-like horror anthology comic, or, at least, a parody of such a comic.

Martin and the other human characters—including his big sister and his rich kid rival Fausto Fitzwinkle—meanwhile seem to hail from a comedy comic, though they are composed in far greater detail than one might find in any sort of animation.

This all obviously makes for quite a unique-looking comic. Coupled with the book’s big, crazy (and somewhat silly) premise, quirky characters and Soria’s fun use of language, MegaGhost is a pretty unusual comic. That is, of course, exactly what makes it so much fun.

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