Monday Memories #7 - Ghost #18

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 #18 - February 2000

This is towards the end of the second Ghost series and is a stand alone story though it does have ties to earlier issues where secrets had been revealed and status quos had been upset and turning points had been . . . errr . . . turned. While starting out in the original series as a reporter who'd been killed for poking her nose where it wasn't wanted, by the time this tale gets told, Elisa Cameron is an ex-member of a government espionage squad who has only recently come to terms with who she had been and what she'd done.

And she wasn't the only one to go her own way, either, as this issue introduces us to Travis, a rogue operative who's left the agency and uses his own ghosting powers to rob banks and set himself up for a comfortable life. Unlike Elisa, though, his powers are artificial; he imbibes them through the use of cigarettes lit with a lighter that contains the ghosting juice as fuel.

Ghost is unable to stop him at first and he manages to beat her up, matching her powers which catches her off guard. Eventually, though, she gets the drop on him:

Ghost drags him down, under the streets, into a tunnel or cave system below the city with each time he ghosts using up his fuel until he can ghost no longer. Of course, that's no real problem for him as all he needs is another cigarette sparked up with his special lighter. Trouble is . . .

Ghost makes him an offer to take him back to the surface if he turns himself in. When he refuses, she strands him under the ground, effectively leaving him to his death.

This series only had a few more issues to go by this point and, for me at least, the whole government agency / espionage thing didn't really work, but it was still serviceable. Ryan Benjamin's art wasn't bad on the whole, though all his females were stick thin and had legs that were about eight feet long - a symptom of the 90's I guess.

It was still something of a shame when the series ended with #22, but here we are, twelve years later, enjoying the latest Ghost series. At least I am.