Story by Chris Warner
Pencils by Christian Zanier
Inks by Steve Moncuse
*Ghost: No World So Dark* is a story that takes its own premise and turns every last detail on its ear. What we know when we begin is far different from what we think we know when we end. The only constant is the hero, and even she's on shaky ground.
There are visions Hollywood has yet to deliver, visions that remain the realm of the graphic novel alone. In comics, heroes can float and dip and fly, move through walls and kick their way through dimensional barriers, and all that is required is a drawn image. The imagination of the reader makes it work, of course. And these same visions, such as Spider-Man hanging upside down or Elisa Cameron of *Ghost* coming up through the pavement, would work less well in a novel: for genuine flights of fancy we need the imagination of the visual storyteller to put the images in our heads, and we the readers make them move. Our minds provide just the right physics, the right weight, the right fluid motion, so that ever stunt and work of magic is believable. In movies, so far, this is rarely the case. Even when the wires are painted away and the models are super-imposed with backgrounds perfectly, the viewer too often catches the minute oddities that cause him or her to forget believing for a moment. It's hard to animate a stunt just right so that it translates correctly in our heads. *Blade* succeeded spectacularly; so did *The Matrix,* and these examples stand alone. *X-Men* will be hear soon; we'll see where it lands.
The Dark Horse series *Ghost* is a purveyor of visions that would make the finest Hollywood movie I never hope to see. The titular hero is Elisa Cameron, a woman who believes herself to be dead and has found little evidence to break this suspicion. She lacks a memory of her prior life, save the occasional flash of familiarity and what she has learned from the photographs she has saved. She does remember her sister, Margo, and she watches the woman zealously. Apparently Elisa was an investigative journalist and the job got her killed. Apparently.
Now, Elisa floats above her city in a costume that only the imagination and comics can make right: a white teddy, white leggings, white gloves, a white hooded cape, and a pair of black .45's. Like *X-Men's* Kitty Pryde, she can phase ("ghost") through solid objects, but she can do herself physical harm if she makes a mistake and stops phasing inside a solid substance, such as earth. The creators of *Ghost* use this technique for effects that would look silly on film unless done absolutely perfectly: at one point in *No World So Dark,* Elisa comes through a metal wall with both guns pointed and firing, an image straight out of Hong Kong, but even supernatural master Tsui Hark has never made such a vision look real.
Elisa herself is a Hong Kong derivative, too, as if the Shadow crossed with Mike Hammer, dipped in a John Woo vat and given a sex change. For a woman with no memory, she's certainly blasé about killing people that might come in handy. Batman threatens people and hangs them upside down from bridges; Elisa blows their brains out.
The city of *Ghost* is yet another world sprung full-grown from comic book foreheads, Arcadia, a Gotham-like town full of rotting spires and rotten politicians, and super-villains. In a movie, Elisa would exist in New York, or an Arcadia that looks like New York, but this is a comic, and there's no need for her situation to be unique.
*Ghost: No World So Dark* tells the story of how Elisa comes to understand a little more and a little less than she thought she did. Technically, this is a reprint of the first six issues of the second *Ghost* series, so in a sense the story is a brazen relaunch that dares to throw out as much as the powers that be see fit. Elisa knows she's in for it when, after a leisurely assassination of a minor bad guy, she visits her boyfriend and he sends her away in disgust. No sooner does Elisa huff home to her jade-floored crypt (she can't fall through jade) than she's attacked by a team of high-tech ghost hunters sent by her old nemesis, the evil genius Trouvaille. But Trouvaille knows she's not going to come easily, so he's stacked the deck by sending a tape telling her she's already kidnapped her sister.
So far, a fairly typical adventure. But then it gets weird. A psychic named Concordia stops her first, telling Elisa that, ghost or no ghost, "you're not dead." And Trouvaille may have the answers about how a not-dead woman became a ghost, but those answers might not involve truths Elisa wishes to learn. It would be villainous for any reviewer to reveal more than the setup, but by the time Elisa's done, she winds her way through nearly every character she's met since becoming a ghost, and her perception of each one changes fundamentally. It's like a paranoid dream.
To some extent I was less than thrilled by the new direction of the book, because the science fiction-ish elements, I thought, detracted from what made *Ghost* memorable, the heroism of the supernatural. But writer Mike Warner has his own ideas, and they involve spinning comic book visions of heroes and villains and magic and pseudo-science, all taken as seriously as the most cynical Raymond Chandler book.
And that's just as well. Comics are the place those visions are best spun.