Grim Ghost 0/Phoenix 0

The Grim Ghost 0 by Joshu Ortega, JM DeMatteis (story) Brendan Deneen (writers), Qing Ping Mui (art);

The Phoenix 0 by Peter Hogan, JM DeMatteis (story), Brendan Deneen, Jim Krueger (writers), Ian Dorian (art);

Both Atlas Comics.

Atlas Comics? I remember them the first time around. They were third rate imitators of Marvel and DC comics and it was a company that appeared and disappeared within a matter of months. These days they’re a curio, recalled with the odd sort of nostalgia that you reserve for the sort of object that you know wasn’t very good but which evokes pleasurable memories anyway.

Nothing dies in the world of comics though, so here’s the latest revival: two titles from the original Atlas line.

The Grim Ghost was one of the better Atlas comics, an ex-highwayman pressganged into the services of Satan. In this incarnation he makes the briefest of appearances, towards the end of the comic, presumably as a taster for the launch proper in March next year.

I’m trying of think of some way to be charitable about this, but am failing miserably. So: fuck me, this is one awful comic.

The plot in a nutshell. Michael, an amnesiac, is wandering the city streets. No one can see him. He encounters a dying man and what’s presumably an angel figure there to aid his transition from life to death. A gang of demonic figures comes along, and there’s a brief battle between them and the Grim Ghost. The Grim Ghost reveals that (gasp, we’d never have guessed!) Michael is in fact dead.

The script here is hackneyed, but the art is simply terrible. I don’t quite know how it’s been created – airbrushed? Pen and ink? Some sort of computer software?  However it’s been produced, it’s really quite terrible. The backgrounds are photoreal, but with perspectives that don’t quite add up. In the foreground, you have figures that resemble plasticine figures that have been mishandled so that their features are squashed and distorted. If you were to ignore these atrocious lapses you’d probably end up with art bearing a fairly strong resemblance to the type of work Pablo Marcos used to produce for Marvel in the 1970s. As it is, the clarity of the layouts is about the only thing I can bring myself to praise about this.

To be frank, I don’t think anything on display here is at a professional, publishable level, and I certainly wouldn’t persuade you to part with any of your hard earned (or even ill-gotten) money for it.

If the Grim Ghost is a throwback to 1970s supernatural horror, then The Phoenix has echoes of another 1970s staple, the cosmic superhero.

So how is it? It’s better than The Grim Ghost at least. It’s a story of two halves. The first section tells the story of two old friends meeting up in the bar in a hick, Midwestern town after several years This section aims to depict the sort of  camaraderie that Ennis evokes in the likes of The Preacher, and…it doesn’t quite succeed. It’s serviceable, though. Then, abruptly, it flips to a science fiction setting as the entire town is abducted and appears to be subjected to a medical experiment by a group of aliens.

There are problems here, and many of them: the characters are too briefly introduced in the first part of the story to care about what happens to them in the second section. The art is sub Neal Adams (and there are a couple of panels that are prime candidates for swipe files). There’s a strong sense that you’ve seen it all before. Ignore all that though, and there’s the germ of a decent comic in here. It has a good sense of timing, at least a semblance of characterisation, and enough of a narrative pull to keep me at least intrigued as to where it’s heading.

Neither of these comics are great adverts for the forthcoming Atlas line though. I’d suggest avoiding The Grim Ghost at all costs, and to check out The Phoenix half a dozen issues down the line, at which point it may have evolved into something worth reading.