Writers: Nick Dragotta, Caleb Goellner / Penciller: Dragotta / Letterer: Rus Wooton / Colour Artist (Original Series Covers): Frank Martin, Jr. / Editor: David Brothers / Collects: Ghost Cage #1-#3 / TP / Image Comics
Buy the original series issues here.
Article by: Paul Dunne
16th October 2024 (Released: 27th July 2022)
The Pitch: When his megacorp power plant falls under attack by terrorists, the super-scientist who revolutionized and controls all energy on Earth sends his ultimate creation (and an adequate employee) in to destroy his most monstrous secrets. Bestselling artist NICK DRAGOTTA (EAST OF WEST) and Eisner Award-winning writer CALEB GOELLNER (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: New Animated Adventures) combine their energies for a visceral thrill ride of pure comics power!
Mortiplasm Levels at 31%…
If you’re new to Nick Dragotta’s work and are still reeling from Absolute Batman #1, then I have to be straight up with you now: You are really not prepared for Ghost Cage. Published back in 2022, Ghost Cage feels like a summation of everything we experienced as a culture up through the 21st Century up ‘till then. The dying Earth, the onslaught of late-stage intrusive capitalism, the peak of surveillance culture and the swing away from American-influenced influenced pop imperialism to an Eastern and Far-Eastern one. It is, in short, a book I didn’t ‘get’ at the time.
Fast-forward to now and my mind felt ready so into the woods I went once more. I’m glad I went back. Ghost Cage is a hymn to clinging to hope when the nihilism is inbound and creeping across every surface, surprising for a book that, on its own surface, seems like just another weird sci-fi piece that could have abandoned its convictions at any point and normalised. Thankfully, it just does not do that. It’s here to be mad. Set in a future where one energy company essentially runs the planet via a homogenised but no less harmful coalition of various fossil fuel types. Its leader has given form to various energy types and locked them away in a tower that powers the world, creating conflict where needed for profit and maybe just for fun. The company, you see, is run by Karloff, an A.I. hologram that represents the CEO. Represents… or maybe… replaces? And when destruction and meltdown threaten, allegedly initiated by terrorism, Karloff sends a Tech Support officer in to guide his newest creation, Sam, to destroy the beings that have manifested inside the tower. Meet Doyle. Doyle is… well, imagine if someone took Velma from Scooby Doo, stripped her of her agency and said to her “God, get a job…” And she complied. That’s Doyle. An office drone, whose whole existence seems to be about compliance, but who has talents and skills that others don’t. No wonder her colleague Morgan is in love with her. Doyle, after all, mostly fixes the printers.
I say all this as if it could possibly encapsulate what Dragotta and Goellner have created with this. At the time, I knew it was a beautiful work, but couldn’t get my head around it. Now, I realise that was stupid since it’s actually quite straightforward as a piece of storytelling. But as for its antecedents? It’s fast and loose. Sure, we can all point to Akira, Ghost In The Shell and the more obvious Manga influences. But Dragotta and Goellner are taking in the European fairy tales and fables of The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, Pinocchio… and all that’s just underneath the surface-level rain-slicked, neon-reflecting sheen of Otomo and Shirow. Into the woods indeed. Not to say the manga influence isn’t front and center. We even get a lovelorn salaryman, confessing his feelings to an answering service in the rain. And that feels none-more Manga even to someone like me with a limited knowledge of the game. And yet, you feel like you’re being reminded that although the European modes of storytelling might look like the past and Asian modes like the future, those things exist at once, happening all at once, on a quantum level. You get all this… and maybe even a little Kirby, too! Who else would fill panels with giant eyes, or make one of his lead characters’ heads an eyeball, unblinking, staring out in wide-eyed innocence and inquisitiveness? Who else would make giants stretch the limits of the panel?
There’s a lot of innocence in Ghost Cage. Actually, it’s more like naivete. Doyle bleeds for her company, a good office drone. But her latest support ticket is a wake-up call, strangely not to individualism, but to a more human-first conscientiousness that has her thinking back to her formative years on a farm. Nature calls. Fresh air beckons. A familiar cry of ‘go outside’ may be heard as you flip the pages. But this is not a soft, cuddly book, nor will you be coddled. The Tower is Dante’s Inferno and as we know, long is the way hard that out of hell leads up to light. There’s a multi-level, final boss feel to this that could be speaking to us from a place of fine literature or a love of video games or… why not both? We contain multitudes. So must our stories. This is fusion comics, where new flavours are produced by using techniques from multiple sources. No recipe. This has to be felt. And what’s the conveying mechanism for that feeling? Just some of the best art you’ll ever see in American comic books. Dragotta takes the foundation of his and Goellner’s script and builds a glittering cityscape of ideas on it.
You wonder for a moment why Dragotta wanted a co-writer on this, and then you realise that his head must have been screaming with ideas and he may have needed another brain to download those ideas to, and have filtered by. And kudos to Goellner for his work in making it make sense, because often in comics, it doesn’t. And yes, I’m saying this as a person who just didn’t get it the first time around, but hey, I’m here now. Dragotta’s black and white pencils and inks show the stunning grain and capture the large-scale, epic-mode quality of the story. You may find it hard to breathe whilst you read this because every page is here to show you how to do comics now! Every page is a monster. I can’t think of anything that more deserved an oversized treasury format treatment and just didn’t get one. In Europe, this would be some kind of crime. Ghost Cage may just be the best comic you’ve never read.
Go rectify!
