(courtesy Image Comics)
If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, you will know a thing or two, cinematically firsthand, about what it feels like for someone to narratively put the pedal to the metal and never once depress it.
It’s a blockbuster pellmell ride into action excess and bombastic bastardry and it works not only because it’s incredibly thrilling to watch, but because somewhere in all the frenzy of accelerated acrobatics, shooting, killing and good triumphing dramatically over evil, you get some pretty intense humanity doing its fairly vulnerable thing.
You wonder how it can get noticed with so much else going on but you do and it makes all the action feel a little more grounded and that makes against all odds, for a fantastically grounded story.
All of that, and a whole lot more is at work in The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing by Cates/Johnson/Affe, which bristles and pulses and moves frenetically with a supernaturally suffused take on the classic blockbuster action flicks of old.
And it works a freaking treat.
Working on the premise that there’s been a ghost fleet operating in America ever since General Andrew Jackson made a deal with private Jean Lafitte to save him and his men from certain doom, The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing is full of brilliantly alive and intensely action-y artwork, dialogue that bounces between snarkily funny, aggressively intense and rawly human, and characters that make the preposterous feel like entirely real and possible (though once you know where it’s all leading, and at whose hands, you might be glad it’s likely not possible at all; but shhhh, this is an epic story that exists in an imagination where anything and everything happens and it all seems to work fantastically well).
(courtesy Dark Horse Comics)
The making of The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing in many ways is the artwork which makes you feel like you have been plunged into the story for real.
It’s vivaciously fully formed, illustratively evocative and pulsing with fury, sadness, rivalry and some very dark conspiracy laden sh*t indeed, the kind that propels a story such as this faster and faster and faster, but, and this matters a great deal, not without some really intensely, painfully beautiful moments between characters who betray each other, are there for each other and who become a weird twisted found family who might just end the world.
And maybe save it all over again.
Nuanced in a way you may not be expecting and with a finish line which will happily blow your mind because you will NOT see it coming (and that’s such a rare gift these days), The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing leaves you feeling like someone has thrown you in an impregnable big rig, floored it and hasn’t stopped until all kinds of fervent weirdness and grounded humanity has winningly take you to some very strange but emotionally resonant places.
This is a BIG story writ small when it needs to be, and thanks to artwork which goes large and stays there until it needs to go small, and colours that pop and explode and carpet the action, this is a graphic novel that doesn’t apologise sucking all the air out of the room and leaving you with nothing but itself.
The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing is a hugely thrilling ride, full of adrenaline and pain, betrayal and hope and some super imaginative plotting which will leave you gobsmacked and shellshocked but strangely and profoundly affected by how we can grievously hurt each other as a species and yet be there when it counts in ways that could just change everything.
And if it doesn’t, will stick around anyway to clean up the mess as inventively and originally as possible, and be glad you got to watch it all happen.
The Ghost Fleet: The Whole Goddamned Thing TP is out from Image Comics.
(courtesy Dark Horse Comics)