Ghost in the Machinery by Stefan Petrucha
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An odd thing this, but sort of madly appealing in a problematic sort of way; Ghost In The Machinery is an adventure “so big that it takes three graphic novels to tell the whole story”. Ghost In The Machinery is the first in the series and complete, after a fashion, though with several big over-arching gapes of plot that I presume lead into the next one.
It begins with Nancy, Bess and George camping out in the woods coincidentally on purpose to investigate strange lights in the woods. They investigate the lights and come across an old munitions factory which is due to be demolished the next day (explosives, naturally, we do need the dramatic here) and the lights lead inside. And so Nancy and her pals decide to investigate. As you do. I was mildly hysterical at this point, though I went on with it because it’s sort of hard not to. When a book, a comic, a play, whatever, starts with such headlong giddiness and sort of careens down the path of not giving one iota about it, you do tend to go along with it, even if it’s just out of a sense of delirious fascination as to where it goes next.
And so I did, and so it does go to places quite surprising and a bit quantum-leap(y) at points (and a few that were maybe more – wait, what, did I miss a page or two?), but it still managed to retain a certain sense of dynamism about it that kept me interested. A lot of that is due to the art, the ferocious vividness of Nancy; the smart panels which balanced out each other on the page (2:2, 3:3 etc, providing a sense of continuity and equality, but also warning you about the visual highlights yet to come, which will deviate from this rhythm).
So: to sum? There’s a lot at fault with this comic really but a lot that’s good with it as well; that sort of crazy adherence to the source text’s eccentricities, the character of Nancy herself remains an intense joy and she’s rendered here with brilliant and intense effect, and, you know, there’s a bit with a tank. Bits with a tank are always good.
Daisy May Johnson 