Luke Owen reviews Ghostbusters #7 from IDW…
While Egon Spengler and Roger Baugh are on their journey into the mind of Melnitz, we pick up with Venkman, Stantz, and Kylie Griffin off the eastern coast of Long Island, where they seek out a spectral ship that first sank sometime in the 1860s! And where is Winston in all this? VEGAS, BABY!
The main job of Ghostbusters #7 is to set up the new arcs that will be told over the next few issues. Venkman, Ray and Kylie are off to explore the pirate ship teased at the start of Ghostbusters #6, Winston and his fiancée are off to Las Vegas where he encounters some pesky ghosts and Egon is trying to find out why he feels 100% normal after walking through the mind of his not-really-but-sort-of love interest Janine.
All of this could appear to be mundane as the entire comic is people standing around talking to each other and setting up plot, but Erik Burnham’s writing is so strong and he encapsulates these characters so perfectly that becomes an incredibly enjoyable read.
In particular he gets the characters of Venkman and Stanz and how they bond together as friends and professionals, which is made all the more interesting by the addition of Ray’s protégé Kylie. Burnham’s scenes with Egon are fascinating and really develop him as a character more than most other comic/cartoon iterations ever have. However if there was a negative to be said about Burnham’s Ghostbusters Universe, it’s that the characterisation of Winston (the often forgotten Ghostbuster) is often a little bland. It could just be that Winston was never a defined character in any media form (The Real Ghostbusters notwithstanding), but Burnham doesn’t really get across any sort of emotion out of him or connect with him like he does the other core cast members. His relationship with his fiancée is interesting enough, but there is a certain spark missing from him as a character.
However the most interesting thing of note in this issue and what sets it apart from the ones that have come before it is the change in artist. Dan Schoening had a very unique style for the Ghostbusters that combined the real-life actors and their animated counterparts and turned that into a bright and colourful cartoony design. What Evan Shaner has done is take Schoening s designs and put a more adult/serious tone to them. It’s not as dark or gritty as that previous explanation may have sounded, but it creates a different tone to what Schoening used to produce. But even with this image tonal shift, it still works with Burnham’s light-hearted script. There are still elements to Schoening s work alive and well in Ghostbusters #7, like the effect work he puts round the ghosts, but this is very much a Shaner book.
As a set-up issue, Ghostbusters #7 was never going to match the fantastic single-issue storytelling of Ghostbusters #6, but somehow Burnham and Shaner have created another great comic. The real brilliance of the franchise has always been the characters interacting with each other and not the actual ghost busting action and Burnham perfectly replicates this month after month. The stories have now been set up and it’s exciting to see where they are heading.
