Ghostbusters: The Other Side #1

The original Ghostbusters movie was always a huge favorite of mine, as it combined humor, mild horror and science fiction with some eccentric characters and funny lines, and mixed it all together into an entertaining film.

It's great to see the franchise enjoying something of a resurgence, with a new videogame on the horizon and renewed talk of the long-delayed third film (which we can only hope will be more like the original and less like the mixed bag that was Ghostbusters 2).

Now IDW has started up a new series starring the team - or is it a mini-series? At any rate, Venkman, Egon, Ray and Winston are back in action, tracking down ghosts and trapping them with their high-tech gear. The story seems to pick up shortly after the events in the second film.

Sadly, IDW apparently doesn't have the rights to the actual likenesses of the original actors, so the characters depicted here only sorta kinda resemble the originals.

I really wanted to like this title, and the idea of delivering new stories with these characters sounds like a lot of fun - but unfortunately, the story kind of sputters and never really takes off. Writer Keith Champagne makes the mistake of almost immediately taking Venkman out of the mix - which eliminates virtually all the comic relief - and there's no real snap to the dialogue. The lines of the characters are pretty much interchangeable.

The art, like the writing, is just ok. Tom Nguyen provides serviceable work here, but the fight scenes are jumbled and difficult to follow.

The story does take an interesting and unexpected twist at the end, and it's just barely enough to bring me back for the next issue - but that's about the only reason.

So far, the comic is shaping up as more like a Viggo and less like a Gozer. (To translate: it's more like the second movie than the first.) Bummer.

Grade: C-