So I picked this up for the hell of it.  IDW wowed me with GI Joe and I love Ghostbusters.  I figured I’d give it a shot.

To put it bluntly the entire book feels like Bill Murray’s performance in the second Ghostbusters movie, Forced.  It uses many of the tropes that a threequeal, I know this isn’t the third Ghostbusters anything but I’m using the analogy anyways, of going back to the beginning.  See we find out fairly quickly that Venkman has been sent to the past by Koza’Rai, Gozer’s Dad… at least it wasn’t Gozer’s kid, but just as bad.  Venkman is apparently in the Old West.

When he’s busting ghosts, we eventually meet up with a hip new female Ghostbuster who has traveled back in time to collect the original Ghostbusters. Oh also she somehow managed to fix the Ecto-1 to be a time machine and took care of that nasty problem the proton packs have with crossing the streams.  Did I forget to mention she was one Egon’s STUDENT, during a series of GUEST lectures at NYU?

Now there were neat things in this book.  Mostly there was something Venkman said here or there that came off as naturally witty, as Venkman should be.  Also the fact that he was a Ghostbuster version of the Man with No Name was pretty neat.  Lastly I did feel that the way they made him act like a dog around women was well done.

Now for the bad.  The art itself wasn’t terrible.  I was okay with it, but in certain areas the panel layout was out of control.  Tip for artists: panels are around for a reason, they are your friend.  Once you remove them you need to figure out a way to show the flow of the story.  Speech bubbles are not the way to do this, I’ll even take an arrow to point me in the right direction.

All in all this book was made for the one good reason.  To make money off of the 25th anniversary logo in the right hand corner.  I’m not saying Ghostbusters is the nerd equivalent of Schindler’s List or anything, (depending on the nerd we know it’s either Starwars or LOTR) but I would like to see a little bit better attention paid to the franchise.  I also would have liked to see IDW hit another grand slam, sadly this was barely a bunt.