There is a subgenre in fiction that touches upon the afterlife, in which those who have died are left to wander as ghostly figures to witness what is going on in the living world. The most popular of these stories may be the 1990 film Ghost, where Patrick Swayze plays a restless soul who sets out to save his living girlfriend, played by Demi Moore. That film is specifically referenced in the new graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Spectators, in which one character refers to their current situation as pretty much the opposite of Ghost.
The book opens in our present day, where Val, who writes recaps for television shows, is stood up by her date as she hits a movie theater in New York. Even worse, she and other attendees are about to become victims of a mass shooting. Waking up to discover she is dead, she walks as a spirit through the world now presented in black and white. As hundreds of years go by, Val crosses paths with a fellow spectator named Sam, a mysterious gun-toting man from the distant past. Normally solo travelers, the two decide to travel around the world together, bearing witness to society’s forward march toward decay, whilst in search of a threesome.
Reuniting the two creators behind the Vertigo graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, expect something unconventional despite the rather well-worn premise. Even the monochrome presentation seems to be lifted from the cinematic likes of A Matter of Life and Death and Wings of Desire. Through the lens of Val, who is presented as our gateway into the world of Spectors, instead of showing how she learns the full understanding of her situation, the book’s time jump from early on allows for a more retrospective look at life and what humanity hasn’t really learned from history.
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Over the course of 300+ pages, Spectators serves mostly as a double-header between Val and Sam, each existing in a different time period from the other. Whatever life experiences and ideologies they have had individually before, it never comes into play as they become unlikely friends, sharing their most intimate thoughts from sexual awakenings to particular pop culture interests.
If you have read Brian K. Vaughan’s work, from Y: The Last Man to Saga, you know that no matter how sci-fi his storytelling is, the stories are very much rooted in the relatability of his characters where humor and tragedy come out of frank conversations about relationships and our animalistic urges as humans. While Val is the most relatable of the two leads thanks to her modern voice, Sam has his own journey with cinema, even going back to its origins and early evolution as a medium. For these two, movies are a distraction from their harsh reality, but since the future has gotten rid of cinema, the next big entertaining thing to watch is two people or so getting it on with each other.
Make no mistake, this is a very graphic book, starting with an opening sequence where Val is watching adult videos on her phone to get horny before being riddled with bullets in a spectacularly bloody fashion. The content serves as a response to the American censorship where bloody violence can be seen by the youngsters, but anything sexual that appears, the rating goes up, so artist Niko Henrichon leans hard on making this as adult orientated as possible. However, there is more than just sex and violence as the hand-painted art is lavish and beautiful, even when depicting the dystopian monochrome future – owing a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – that is contrasted with the colored Spectators themselves. After reading this, you can see why the comic was three years in the making.
Although Val and Sam themselves can never interact with the living and only observe, the closest to an ongoing conflict is a terrorist movement that seems to have grown over the decades, catching the attention of other Spectators. The most striking visual of those shooters is that they are wearing headgear that resembles fictional characters we know, like Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man, suggesting they are an anti-corporate entity. The book may not specifically say the names of pop culture icons, but it does suggest that Vaughan’s own distaste for these corporate IPs after years of working on them, to the point that the writer is currently in the realm of indie comics, creating wonders like Saga and Spectators.
Three years in the making, Spectators is worth the wait as a multi-faceted epic that ranges from sci-fi to the afterlife and an examination of humanity at its most self-destructive and raunchiest.
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