Life for a retired anything in the underground is a hard hustle. Hit man, thief, brawler, hired muscle – whatever somebody once did to service the underbelly of society, it is always needed, one last time, by some rich nutjob with an offer that’s too good to resist. In Ghosted, the new series from writer Joshua Williamson, a rich collector of supernatural antiquities requires the services of a top notch thief. The thief he’s looking for is named Jackson T. Winters, and he’s been forcibly retired via life in prison.
How did Mr. Jackson end up incarcerated? Apparently, he botched his last job so badly that it got his entire crew killed. Jackson spends most of his time in prison avoiding rape and reading books with pages torn out of them. He dreams of the day he will die, the day he will be free of the prison life. One night, a heavily armed woman breaks into the prison, incites a riot, and uses it to sneak Jackson of jail. Why? Because her rich benefactor needs Jackson’s thievery services.
The crazy old man is looking to steal a ghost. Not just any ghost, but a spectral tenant of an old house owned by a family whose cult status became cemented by their ritualistic murder of over a hundred people. Naturally, Jackson, the tough guy thief, thinks the whole idea is off the reservation, but he doesn’t want to go back to prison. Accepting the deal, Jackson insists on only one thing, he be able to put together his crew. From there, we meet that crew – various outcast cultists, weirdo psychic charlatans, and ghost hunters. Accompanying Jackson and his supernatural version of Ocean’s Eleven is the woman who broke him out of prison.
Ghosted #1 does very little to separate itself from all the other last-job-is-the-killer type stories. It centers around ghosts? Who cares? Ghosted still stars a tough-talking thug down on his luck. We get the cold but beautiful girl with whom he exchanges sexual barbs. There’s the crazy old man, complete with glass of wine and velvet smoking jacket, looking for something only our protagonist can grab him. A motley crew of misfits organized to steal the item, whatever it is. By the end of Ghosted, we even discover that a member of the group is a traitor. Not really a “gasp” moment as much as it is a “right, of course” moment. As genre books go, Ghosted is decent. Williamson has a knack for this kind for dialogue, which helps mask the less interesting parts of the story.
Goran Sudzuka’s art is run-of-the-mill comic book art. His panels tell the story, but that’s about it. Nothing Sudzuka pencils is bad, it’s just not anything eye popping. This is work-horse art, the kind of drawings that turn the words into images, but never transcend the nuts-and-bolts of that. Facially, Sudzuka draws a bit too consistently. Each character shares a “look” that makes them blend together, and the backgrounds are largely uninteresting.
(2.5 Story, 2 Art)
