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What if Lois Lane was a drunken train-wreck and decided to become Batman? That could’ve been an elevator pitch for ‘Black Ghost’, the comic series by Alex Segura, Monica Gallagher, and George Kambadais.
Issue #1 kicks off with protagonist Lara Dominguez showing off some killer moves as she fights off the thugs attacking one of her students. We quickly learn that she teaches GED classes part-time and works as a reporter for the Creighton Courier, often receiving tips from a mysterious digital informant, only known as Lone. Although Lara’s full-time obsession is the city’s masked vigilante, the Black Ghost, whom she dubs “Robin Hood meets James Bond.” But before Lara can uncover his identity, he’s murdered, and she ends up becoming his successor. Sort of.
Across the five issues of Black Ghost, the main mystery revolves around whether Lara can gather enough evidence to expose the criminal ring controlling the city, solve the original Black Ghost’s murder, and get her floundering journalism career back on track. The problem? Lara spends much of her time as a drunken mess, frequenting her local pub, getting sloshed, and rarely filing a story. The fact that she gets fired… isn’t even a spoiler.
Even though the premise sounds entertaining, you know, a drunken reporter who’s always too hungover to turn in a story, even when it’s about the Black Ghost, Lara is almost never likable. Apart from the opening pages, where she comes across as genuinely cool for standing up for her student and beating the crap out of a bunch of local thugs, the story doesn’t do much to establish her as either a hero or even an anti-hero.
“I just can’t keep enabling your bad behavior. Not as a friend, and not as a boss.”
Lara’s editor tells her this towards the end of Issue 2, and honestly, any reader would agree with the boss. Lara is shown to carry a lot of baggage from the past, including the unresolved murder of her brother, which fuels her drinking problem. But as a reporter. she is so sloppy, you wonder how she even got the job in the first place.
With two murders to solve, issues 3-4 of ‘Black Ghost’ follows Lara as she flounders around the city, mostly drinking and reeling from hangovers, and sometimes trying to work. None of the other characters stick or are memorable, which is largely because they barely get any space through the comic book series. Besides, in the climactic issue, when Lara finally faces off with the big bad guys, someone else conveniently helps her out (a completely new random character BTW).
The artwork in ‘Black Ghost’ won’t blow you away, but the creators use colors and make the panels expressive enough to make things engaging. The artwork combines a classic superhero-comic look with modern digital artwork, making the pages easy to fly through. Honestly, the visuals are probably the comic’s biggest selling point. Although I wasn’t a big fan of the character illustrations and one of the new characters introduced later looks like Lara with blonde hair. For a second, I genuinely thought they might be cousins. The creators should’ve used more variations in the character designs, especially since they didn’t go out of their way to serve detailed background either.
Anyway, if you’re in the mood for a chaotic, low-stakes comic-book series about a hard-drinking reporter trying to tackle crime in her town (and mostly failing), go ahead and give it a try.
Black Ghost is also available on Kindle Unlimited.
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