Monday Memories #33 - Ghost/Batgirl #3

Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.

The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!

GHOST/BATGIRL #3 - November 2000

Ghost and Batgirl, along with Oracle, team up to find out why a string of girls have been going missing from both Gotham City and Arcadia. Their investigation leads them eventually to Malcolm Greymater, a near immortal veteran of the American Civil War who has been resurrecting the recently dead with varying results. Those who are still usable he keeps, those who are not he sells into slavery. Once he realises Ghost and the others are on his trail, he sends his enforcers to bring Ghost to him; she goes but not without a struggle:

That's not a badly drawn head, by the way - that's Towering Chris, a giant of a woman.

Along with dealing with Ghost and her friends, Greymater has a turf war problem as Two-Face resents Greymater taking Harvey's recently killed henchmen, resurrecting them and giving them jobs.

Back at his lair, Greymater confronts Ghost over her returning one of the women he resurrected to her family:

Greymater's convinced he's doing the right thing and doesn't see anything wrong with his actions, a view that neither Ghost, Batgirl nor Oracle share and they're determined to stop him.

The mini-series is a little woolly on plot details but while nothing fantastic, it's not terrible either. The art, however, leaves a little to be desired - all of Ryan Benjamin's women look stick thin with bolted on balloon boobs, the same problem he had when he drew the main Ghost title for a while.

The best thing about the story is the seamless merging of the two worlds; there's no heavy handed exposition about why Gotham and Arcadia are now relatively close neighbours, nor how Ghost and Batgirl come to interact. It's simply taken as read that they've always been like this. To all intents and purposes, Arcadia could be part of the DCU for this story.

One of the better cross company crossovers from that point of view but there's little else to really hold the interest.