Why read comic books when there is so much else to read? This is a question I constantly ask myself. When an answer is forthcoming it is not always the same. But the short and simple version is that reading comic books is a form of palliative care. Life is stressful and reading a comic book on a Saturday afternoon is a form of re-creation.
When you go to a gallery or a museum of art you stand in front of a painting. Sometimes something happens. You feel something. You are not quite in your body. It is as if you are occupying a perceptual space that is outside yourself; you have, however momentarily, escaped the self.
This is what happens when I read comic books. A few weekends back I finished the last issue of Ghost Racers -- part of Marvel's Battleworld reboot, written by Felipe Smith, with art by Juan Gedeon -- and I found myself pleasantly dislocated. The story is a threadbare version of the threadbare Jason Statham film, Death Race (2008). Somehow I was transported by Gedeon's drawing and Tamra Bonvillain's colors.
Below are 15 scans from Ghost Racers #4.
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