Indie Comic ‘Ghost Box’ Is Bonkers
by DAVID AXE
Ghost Box is a new graphic novel about ghosts who box.
Well, that’s how it starts, at least.
It ends with an alien invasion of Earth, a cheerful thousand-year-old woman named Kelly launching a galaxy-wide attack with a giant weapon of mass destruction and a bunch of demons and angels eating ice cream while the immortal soul of a cyborg mad scientist laughs maniacally.
And here’s what’s remarkable. It all makes sense.
Written by Shigeharu Kobayashi and John Pading and drawn by Pading, the 200-page Ghost Box is set in the same universe as Kobayashi and Pading’s 2012 indie comic Princess Calabretta, which the creators have described as a “love letter to Disney princess movies.” But with mixed martial arts.
The ass-kicking Princess Calabretta from her eponymous comic has died and gone to Hell, where she’s continued her fighting career. A much-hyped title bout, attended by 100 billion souls and 20,000 angels and demons pits the princess against her also-deceased earthly arch-rival Shu Tong.
The fight’s just getting interesting when one of Shu’s arms and one of Calabretta’s legs up and disappears. Hobbled in their immortal forms, the two fighters must return to Earth as limbless ghosts in order to investigate their ectoplasmic amputations.
The setup is weird. What happens next is weirder. But what’s remarkable about Ghost Box is the authors’ willingness to follow a premise to its logical and most extreme conclusion. I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice it to say it makes perfect sense why Calabretta and Shu’s limbs disappear.
It also makes sense how the two ghostly fighters end up boxing the free-floating apparitions of a severed leg and arm — not their own severed leg and arm, mind you.
Likewise, it’s totally logical — in the universe of Ghost Box — that Calabretta and Shu find themselves battling the aforementioned mad scientist — and that the scientist, in his moment of victory, explodes a gigantic bomb targeting the DNA of the whole human race.
And that one consequence of that attack is a hilariously doomed alien invasion of Earth in the year 3018, and the subsequent cheerful human assault that ends with souls eating ice cream.
Seriously, it makes sense.
I really love this comic. Pading’s art is clean, colorful and — most importantly — clearly communications the action. Because there’s lots of action. Heavenly boxing matches. Fights on Earth with a lumbering Frankenstein’s monster. An alien attack in the form of hovering space-cubes.
Ghost Box is hilarious but there aren’t a lot of jokes. The humor is all situational. As the crazy logic of the story pulls the characters in increasingly absurd directions, every panel in Ghost Box becomes a study in gleeful outlandishness.
It helps that Kobayashi and Pading know next to nothing about boxing, and model their fighter’s moves on Nintendo’s classic Punch-Out!! game.
Prince Calabretta was self-published but earned praise from critics and from comics legend Bryan Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim series. At present, Ghost Box is self-published, too. Pading and Kobayashi printed a few copies, promptly sold them all at a North Carolina comics convention and are now accepting offers from publishers.
Some brave publisher should acquire this book. It’s fantastic.
