Fritz Babbles about Ghostbusters: Infestation #1

“I hate zombies. They have lousy teeth”
–Buster the Ghost

First, a note that I have not read any of the other Infestation books. So consider this pretty much a review of the work on it's own merits as a Ghostbusters story.

The Good:

Great interplay between the Ghostbusters. I especially enjoyed the banter between Ray and Venkman about the former's mathmatical…quirks. It wasn't something touched on in the cartoons or GB2, but Ray does make a couple of number flubs in the first movie (the wrong chapter of Revelations, the wrong year of the Tunguska Blast) so yeah, having the guy be a math klutz and leaving the numbers to Egon is a fun little quirk to the character. Well done for bringing that out.

The artwork is well done and fits the story well. Maybe it's just me, but there's almost a little bit of a classic EC horror comic feel to it; considering that EC also founded Mad Magazine, a mix of EC horror and Mad Magazine is just about perfect for the Ghostbusters dealing with a zombie invasion.

The Proton Pistol is a nice nod (whether intentional or not) to Extreme Ghostbusters and other places that used a version of that concept (A pistol-sized proton gun is seen in Now's RGB#7, but it's insinuated it doesn't have much payload because of it's size). More such nods, please–push the envelope of what Sony will let you get away with.

Janine is one of my favorite characters in the property, and seeing as how she was so badly abused by it in the post-JMS RGB and in GB2, I'm a little sensative to seeing how she's going to be used. She barely appeared in IDW's earliest stuff (two pages in “The Other Side” and a side story in “Displaced Aggression”) but between last falls Samhain special and this story, I'm pleased to see her come out of the woodwork a little bit. Yeah, she's not a Ghostbuster. But she's also the most visible employee of the company who isn't a Ghostbuster, and has a strong connection to one of the four Ghostbusters (meaning Egon), so a little face time every once in a while is more than justified. She gets to banter with Venkman, do some cool stuff that helps shed some light on the zombie situation, and I loved how Egon didn't pry himself away from his own experiments until she started screaming at him, compared to his dismissive tone at Venkman's attempts to do so.

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man escapes from the Containment Unit. “Ghosts escaping the ECU” is a story idea that has to be handled gingerly to be effective–since ghosts not getting out is pretty much the point of the thing–but still…it was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man escaping the Containment Unit. Meaning that he somehow got put in there in the first place. The cartoon never explained how they had Stay Puft in their ECU either–all the fan theories are just that, theories–but at the end of the day, it's both a neat call-back to the cartoon a lot of us loved a lot (honestly, I probably wouldn't be in the fandom without it) and brings this beloved iconic character back into play (which is, I'm sure, the whole reason the cartoon did the same thing). The only thing missing was Slimer hanging around the firehouse and pissing off Venkman, and the cover for #2 gives me a smidgen of hope in that direction (lol).

Ray kept his ecto-goggles on most of the story. It minimized the usual artistic bugaboo of “Which one is that, Ray or Venkman?” which seems to be a struggle. I won't go into the rest of that rant right now, you've all heard it before, but at least it didn't happen much this issue.

The Bad:

The Proton Pistol didn't really have any effect on the story. I suppose it could be putting a Chekhov's gun on the wall for Part 2, though. And actually, considering that Winston is the biggest, strongest Ghostbuster, he's probably the one who have the least need for a smaller weapon. You give the little gun to a wimp like Egon (lol).

I'm gonna admit, some of the stuff about the zombies “processing” PKE and poltergeists that couldn't be contained didn't quite gel for me, but it's probably because I think too hard about such things. It led to some cool/gross/funny stuff, though, and I guess that's what's important.

Janine is one of my favorite characters in the property, and seeing as how she was so badly abused by it in the post-JMS RGB and in GB2, I'm a little sensative to seeing how she's going to be used. I guess it's part of my own amateur writer bias, but having her call Venkman by his first name grates on my nerves. She tended to call him “Dr. Venkman” in the first movie and scripts written or supervised by J. Micheal Straczynski. Gad, that's such a tiny nitpick, but I can't help myself. Especially when it could be another intentional nod to the cartoons (mostly post-JMS).

The Ugly:

Zombies, with their lousy teeth, blowing up all over the place. Them things is fugly. And I really could have done without the mental image of Peter Venkman going commando. (lol)

Well, I finally got around to reading Infestation No.2. My main question is:

What happened to the trapped essence of Gozer? I kept waiting for it to come up because I thought Britt took it back to help strengthen the Undermind, but I never saw it.

Kingpin suggested that they might be saving it for the next Infestation Mini-series. I just wanted to see what y'all thought.

Well, there wasn't a way to edit my last post, and I think this deserves a bump to the thread anyway.

I finally found an RI-B cover!

Nice score… I believe that so far, this is the first one to be posted.

Thanks. It was the first one I've seen available and I bought it immediately. I wonder why it's taking so long for any of these to surface.

That is a very nice find. How did you happen to come across it?

I just got lucky and found it online. At midtowncomics.com. I ordered it a week and a half ago and it was taking a while to process, so I was worried they had sold it in the store before they got to my online order, so I didn't want to say anything here until I actually got it in hand.

And the picture doesn't really show it, but in the top left IDW logo, it does say “RIB” cover. I just thought that was neat because originally I thought they had just let Dan hand draw on RIA covers, but they actually did print out “B” covers for it.

Infestation hardcover listed on Amazon for a January 10th release. That will be nice to have all the volumes together.

http://www.amazon.com/Infestation-Dan-Abnett/dp/1613771061/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314073694&sr=1-5

I'm not much of a comic book guy but I do enjoy reading them from time to time, is this worth a purchase or just should I just get it from the library?