There are two schools of thought when it comes to Space Ghost. One is that the character is a neat looking design, but that he's essentially a silly Saturday morning cartoon character who is best served as the jokey host of a fake TV interview show on Cartoon Network. The other can be seen in this misguided and overly dour comic that attempts to make Space Ghost a grim, gritty '90s style hero. An attempt to blend the corrupt cop story of Training Day with the larger-than-life space opera trappings of Space Ghost results in a joyless story that would be disappointing on its own but which really looks bad when you compare it to the same kind of story being told much better in Adam Strange. In attempting to take Space Ghost seriously, the creators lose all sense of wonder and fun, and the result is a spacefaring story that is far too down to Earth.
I try to be pretty open-minded about science-fiction, because I think the genre can encompass multitudes. Dark futures, post apocalypse, optimistic futurism, retro futurism, grand space opera, hard science fiction, I've liked stories in all corners of the genre. However, Space Ghost is attempting to straddle too many lines, and in so doing, it becomes kind of silly even as it is coming off as way too dark. In a way, Space Ghost is the reverse of what Diggle and Ferry did with the first issue of Adam Strange. Instead of starting out dark and lightening up with a sense of adventure, Kelly and Olivetti launch a story of a promising, driven and heroically moral cop and quickly throw him into the dump in brutal, ugly fashion. The resulting story isn't a whole lot of fun, but the silly trappings and predictable nature of it doesn't really earn the darkness and seriousness either.
There are some interesting ideas to be found in this exploration of Space Ghost. The notion of the "ghost" part of his name coming from an elite unit that is supposed to be vengeful and invisible is a pretty good way of rationalizing the goofy name, for example. But the overall style and structure is formulaic and predictable, the kind of thing you'd find in your average brainless Hollywood action flick. The dialogue, whether it's the overwrought introductory narration, the painful attempts at in-fight quips like "If you understand... blink twice. A grunt will work too" or the R. Lee Ermey knockoffs that Temple spouts, is also clunky and predictable. The script has its moments, such as the charmingly sweet accent of Elua Bach, but even the couple's happiness telegraphs the tragedy that lies in their path. It all reads very much like the kind of thing we got in the '90s, where the heroes had to really suffer and have feet of clay up to their knees, and they had to be just as bad as the villains to really survive.
The highlight of this first issue is the artwork by Ariel Olivetti. It is reminiscent of the work done by Adi Granov over on Marvel's Iron Man, which means that I find it a little too stiff and sterile in hitting its photo-realistic look, but I can't deny that it's shiny and beautiful. Olivetti also does some nice design work, whether it's on Bach's pre-Ghost cop uniform, the motley crew that becomes his back-up team for a short while or the high-tech cityscapes that are the backdrop for this part of the story. The whole thing plays out more like a modern cop drama than a science-fiction story, but Olivetti's artwork gives it a little touch of the visual flair of science-fiction.
Quite honestly, I don't have any particular attachment to Space Ghost. I'm no real fan of Coast to Coast, I don't have any nostalgic attachment to the character, and maybe that is part of why this series failed so utterly to connect with me. But I do have a soft spot for the space adventure genre, and I feel like Kelly went pretty wide of the mark in trying to hit it here, landing instead in a dark place where the very notion of a guy with tights and wrist blasters seems even sillier, rather than more worthy of being taken seriously. 3/10
