Ghost Tree #1 - IDW Publishing

GHOST TREE No. 1, April 2019

Having been informed even before its April 2019 on-sale date that this "first chapter in an ethereal four-issue journey through the dark forests of Japan” had “sold out at the distributor level”, fans of Bobby Curnow’s penmanship were probably quite rightly anticipating an emotionally enchanting reading experience with this twenty-two page periodical. Yet whilst the comic’s creative team were apparently “thrilled that we’re doing a second print” of Issue One of “Ghost Tree”, it is hard to imagine many in this book’s audience were satisfied by a narrative that disconcertingly lives up to its unambitious author’s rather lack-lustre aspiration to just provide “a quiet character-based drama” which lacks any life whatsoever, and simply relies upon a monotonous carousel of sedentary, dialogue-driven conversational pieces.

Indeed, despite showing some considerable potential in its early scenes, when an elderly Ojii-Chan takes his six-year old grandchild into the nearby, seemingly haunted woods, and gets him to promise the elderly bespectacled man that he’ll return to the exact same spot ten years after the geriatric has died, the “IDW Publishing” Group Editor subsequently fails to build upon the supernatural intrigue generated, and instead resorts to telling a woefully listless tale of a young man desperately attempting to recapture his imaginative childhood whilst fleeing a failed marriage in America. To make matters worse though, the unhappily bland Brandt doesn’t even bat an eye when he does meet the living corpse of his long-dead relative, and astonishingly just nonchalantly accepts the numerous ancestral spectres who later surround him so as to hear the phantoms’ tales; “If you will not leave, well… now you listen to the ghosts. If you are inclined to hear their stories.”

Adding to this book’s all-pervading lethargy is Simon Gane’s artwork, which whilst competent enough in a cartoony-sort of way, predominantly fails to imbue any of this script's cast with some much-needed energy or dynamism, with perhaps the notable exception of the infant Brandt as he playfully evades the machinations of the Mind Melders. Curnow has already gone on record as saying he didn’t want “something with big marketing hooks or flashy cover plans”, but his desire to “see some cool and creepy ghosts” is never fully realised within the storyboards of an illustrator whose style seems far more suited to humorous sketches for Burning Sky Brewery’s “newly opened shop” than a mysteriously fearful exploration of “the conflict between past and present…”

Written by: Bobby Curnow, Art by: Simon Gane, and Consultant: Takuma Okada