Review: Ghosted in LA #6

Brax

5 years ago

InÂ the earliest issues of GHOSTED IN LA (Boom! Box), the story at times felt like it was haunting itself. Daphne, a rising first-year college student, leaves her quiet town of Missoula, Montana to attend school in Los Angeles. Her bestie, Kristi sends her off with a terrible tongue lashing. She accuses Daphne of only going to LA in order to follow her boyfriend Ronnie. Soon after Daphne follows Ronnie to LA, Ronnie shares with her that he is gay. Ronnie“s story is backgrounded early on, but at times in the first few issues it feels like his is the more important or significant story of GHOSTED IN LA. At the start of this series it seems like Ronnie is a plot device to get Daphne out to LA and to ghost her there. But by the time we arrive at issue #6 it is clear that Ronnie is also a protagonist of the story and his life in LA is just as important to this series as Daphne“s is.

The only way that Daphne is able to cope with her standoffish roommate and the fact that her boyfriend is not really her boyfriend anymore is to make new friends. And as luck would have it, she happens upon a classic LA housing complex inhabited by the ghostly undead. Sina Grace“s script is more complex than it seems. And Siobhan Keenan“s artwork is similarly fun and breezy until it is dark and gothic. Somehow GHOSTED IN LA captures the sunny brightness of southern California and the grimy darkness of a seedy LA on a smoggy night. The tensions between the light and the dark are always taut in this series. The contrast reflects the tensions in the relationships of the story. Daphne and Kristi, Daphne and Ronnie, or Daphne and her college roommate. None of these relationships are working. In each relationship the clash or the conflict dominates each interaction.

But GHOSTED IN LA #6 has a different feel from the first few issues. The human relationships are starting to take a backseat and a more compelling view of this series is emerging in the developing relationships between humans and specters/ghosts. The ghosts were already more interesting characters than the humans in this story. They have back stories that reach back into history and wrestle with issues of intimate relationships in different eras and with different sets of rules. They also pose an impossible question: what if our most compelling intimate relationships are with ephemeral memories of a bygone past? Maybe we all need to be ghosted.

The relationship between Daphne and Zola ”“ a rock star who Daphne idolized before she became a ghost ”“ is far more interesting and intimate than any other relationship that Daphne has had up to this point. The same might be said for Ronnie“s relationship with Bernard, a ghost who live a closeted life and now sees some of his missed aspirations in (and through) the life of Ronnie. Somehow the human relationships in GHOSTED IN LA are better when the humans are relating to ghosts. In this world, human intimacy is stymied by humans. But at least there are a few ghosts hanging around to make life more intimate and more interesting.

SCORE: 4/5

(W) Sina Grace (A/CA) Siobhan Keenan