Inciting incident covered, complications of events escalating, and gruesome reality exposed, Ghostlore appears to be reaching the end of the first act.
In its fourth issue, our protagonists find themselves pointed firmly in their own directions as they set out on separate paths of discovery. Harmony, the volatile and troubled teen, has taken to her newfound ability to see and interact with ghosts with a beatific benevolence and finds it best to strike out from home to find answers (and, perhaps, to find the spirit of her mother).
Her father, a man of faith in crisis, has taken an opposing, violent stance; where his daughter helps ghosts pass with the grace of a saint, Lucas approaches the same task with violence. To be fair, up until this issue it seemed as if he didn’t have a choice: his bumbling interactions with spirits lead them to attack him.
The message is clear: the clergy, for all their generations of comforting the flock in the face of death, might be no more equipped to face its reality than a child.
With this framing narrative established, Ghostlore cleverly embeds ghost stories within ghost stories by giving voice to at least one member of the unquiet dead in every issue. Here, Lucas finds himself confronted with further illustration of God’s potential cruelty in the form of a puritanical girl cursed with the guilt of having condemned a witch.
That the girl seems to be correct in her intuitions – the witch in question appears to be a horrifying monster, not unlike those seen in the stories of previous ghosts – did nothing to justify her cruelty; it also does nothing to save her from Lucas’s faithless wrath.
These narrative asides subtly shift the word of the book not just in story but in visual – series artist Leomacs steps back and a spotlighted artist steps in. In the tale of the puritanical witch execution, Jonas Scharf lends his expressive, gloomy, and gruesome talents, striking a lovely chord of synergy with his last collaboration with writer Cullen Bunn, Basilisk.
As with previous issues, the spotlighted art provides an unreal contrast with Leomacs’ established reality. That reality, packed with defined characters and elegant background details, feels solid, true, so that the intrusion of spirits and horrors feels all the more alarming and wrong.
As with other recent gems (like Basilisk), Ghostlore ensures that Bunn’s presence on the comic racks is a delight each month, providing a grim highlight to your pull list; it also continues the expansion of BOOM! Studios’ lineup of new classics.
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