Dynamite Comics are resurrecting a ghost — Space Ghost — with David Pepose and Jonathan Lau guiding him back to this reality. If you’re not familiar, Saturday mornings in the 1960s offered up a bunch of exciting adventure cartoons. After riding a wave of funny animals, Hanna-Barbera presented varied and bizarre concepts that covered past, present, and future with superpowers. They may have had the Mighty Mightor but none was mightier than Space Ghost. Who he was was a mystery. Kids watching just took him for granted.
Though he’s come back in a few different forms including late-night talk-show host, Space Ghost keeps disappearing. But with Warner Bros. Discovery licensing several properties to Dynamite Entertainment, we have a chance at him sticking around for a while. Pepose and Lau will be giving us an origin for his sidekicks/wards on the Ghost Planet, Jan and Jace. You might also notice the space monkey Blip, who definitely served as the forerunner for the Wonder Twins’ monkey Gleek.
It looks like Pepose might be leaving Space Ghost’s origins shrouded in mystery, but from those preview pages, that’s fine with me. From the press release:
“His true origins and motivations are unknown to many. Some claim he is a policeman who abandoned the rigidity of the law. Others contend he must be the sole survivor of a war-torn planet. Or a phantom with no story. Those who have survived his wrath live to tell he is a force of nature, able to bend the very elements of creation to deal with his foes.”
While Pepose might be right in another comment that the animated series had little time to develop characters beyond their powers, it’s also kind of okay if we don’t know where Space Ghost himself came from. There have been attempts elsewhere in comics; both Gold Key/Whitman and DC provided some background, though both told different stories. DC has tackled him a couple of times, most recently with the DC/Hanna-Barbera crossover Future Quest.
It is interesting that Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products have licensed this away to Dynamite when, of course, they own a comic book company of their own. According to Bleeding Cool, Dynamite will follow up with The Flintstones, The Powerpuff Girls, Jonny Quest, The Wizard of Oz, and We Bare Bears. Somehow, Dynamite has become the Gold Key Comics of the 2020s, while another company has started reviving Gold Key itself. The entertainment world will never not be strange and, thanks to the concept of IP strategy, complex.
Space Ghost will hit comics shops in April 2024.
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