Like many of DC’s holiday anthology one-shots, Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun sets out not to tell groundbreaking stories or reinvent any languishing IP, but to deliver pat, pleasant little asides, more celebratory of the characters than the holiday itself.
Sure, the stories are mostly spooky-ish, and some even take place on Halloween, but we’re primarily dealing with the somewhat neglected and sometimes gruesome characters in the stable like Man-Bat, The Demon, and Gentleman Ghost. There are Green Lantern and Superman stories that get us into the A-List, but other than that we’re strictly in the fan-favorite but cameo-bound territory.
Anthologies like this – eight stories for ten bucks, in an 80-Page Giant format – provide the perfect spotlight for such characters, for both fans hungry for more Renee Montoya Question action and for creators to drop in on favorites they’ve always wanted to work on. The air of character and universe celebration arises from creators wanting to make tight, representative, and perhaps wholesome spotlights for their cast of characters.
Like the 80-Page Giants of old, Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun is a perfect drop-in comic, a quick chance for readers to engage with self-contained malarkey without having to worry too heavily about the long-convoluted and often baffling event continuity which might otherwise prevent them from committing to any single issue. There’s no need to know what’s going on in Superman’s own title, nor is there any reason to get yourself lost in the weeds of the many Knight Terrors stories; this is a book for dropping in. It might even inspire a new fascination in younger readers, making a new Robotman or Animal Girl fan in ten quick pages.
Even with a wide array of impressive creators – spooky superstar Tyler Crook and video game Nightwing Christopher Sean among them –Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun fails to justify its ten-dollar price tag, let alone mark itself as a must-have for even the most devoted readers of its spotlight characters. Still, it’s joyful, fun, and by no means a waste of time.
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