Space Ghost #3 // Review
Robo Corp is after Jan and Jace. They’ve got a powerful vigilante looking after them, but it may not be enough. Someone’s offering to help them out, but they might not like where it’s coming from in Space Ghost #3, Writer David Pepose and artist Jonathan Lau develop the next chapter in a pulpy space adventure. Color comes to the page courtesy of Andrew Dalhouse. The series continues to explore layers of darkness in a world that was created by Hanna-Barbera for the glossy, vapid world of Saturday morning animation in the 1960s. Pepose and company continue keep the darkness from overtaking the page while telling something far grittier than anything that would have been allowed on broadcast television.
Her name is The Widow. She’s nice enough to help Space Ghost, Jan and Jace out with a few lizards that had been attacking them. (Evidently all they needed. Was a small army of Venusian spider plants to come to the rescue.) The Widow has something that could help the heroes deal with Robo Corp. The catch? It’s dangerous and so is she. The Widow is a criminal. Her husband ran guns for the Black Tarantula Syndicate and everything. Can they trust her? Do they have a choice? Both of these are good questions.
Pepose brings the fun with a pulpy space adventure that transmutes concepts made for old TV and lends them a bit more menace and a bit more of a sense of danger. Space Ghost had been something of a hip, self-aware joke on Cartoon Network in the mid-to-late 1990s, but he’s always had potential as an action hero. Pepose continues to deliver on some of that potential with a simple action story that doesn’t try to reach for too much in the way off substance or depth.
Space Ghost and. His world were created for the starkly simplistic visual world of cel animation on a CRT TV over the airwaves. He’s never looked terribly compelling with a creat amount of detail, but Lau and Dalhousie try. Their best to pull the flat hero into something resembling a bit more grit and physical presence. It doesn’t really work, though. Space Ghost looks his best in bright, simple visuals that aren’t being weighed-down with so much in and detail. That being said, Dalhousie and company do manage to find some powerful moments of well-framed action.
Honestly...Dalhouse isn’t alone in trying to render too much detail in the story. While Dalhouse is clearly embracing the pulpy space superhero genre with his writing, there are far too many elements being thrown together in the script to keep the story interesting. Space Ghost would work a lot better with brutal, jarring action delivered with just a bit more primal simplicity. Space Ghost #3 could have been much more powerful with a bit less dialogue and a bit more clean, open rendering. The character design is there. The setting is there. There’s no reason to engage it any deeper than a slick, shiny, surface-level action story.
