Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel

Wonderful! This is another BoB Reading Challenge choice (I assume it’s from the Great Graphic Novels Top Ten list.)  A very fast read and passed along to me by Megan, who also liked it.

Garth is a young boy who happens to be terminally ill. We see some mopey sad scenes of him and his mom.  We also see scenes of a man at work, whose job is to go into houses where there are rogue ghosts and send them back to the ghost world. He’s an INS agent-for ghosts! The first capture we see is of Benedict Arnold, who apparently often escapes the afterlife and keeps popping up throughout the story in a very funny way.  Anyway, Frank the agent is after an escaped ghost horse (seen as a skeleton) and accidentally sends it, and Garth, off to the afterlife.  He then heads there with his an ex-girlfriend, Claire Voyant, (heh heh), to find Garth and bring him back.  When they get there, though, they find a bigger battle than they expected.  This was not at all spooky-it was wonderfully imaginative, a little bit funny, and also kind of touching (I had a couple tears and a lump in my throat at the end.)

Sort of like when I read the My Boyfriend is a Monster book, I thought that the backstory was so wonderful that I wondered if there were prequels, or anticipated spinoffs, or if the author had just done a tremendous job creating a very fully imagined world and characters.  I really enjoyed this and will definitely look for other things by this author.

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