Monday, April 29, 2024

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 506: THE GHOST OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

(Blue Bolt v1 007, 1940)

We have entered the era of Sergeant Spook battling villainous ghosts! It's not quite as low stakes as Sergeant Spook just manhandling mortal crooks while they have no ability to affect him but since the worst that ghosts can do to each other in this fictional milieu is to knock one another out it's still missing a bit of something.

Still, the setting of Ghost Town is a fun one and we're still getting lots of details about how it works and who exactly lives there. Firstly it seems that there is a suburb called Spirit Town and secondly Napoleon Bonaparte lives there and is attempting to conquer the entire ghostly realm for his own.

Any time something happens in Ghost Town, famous dead people crawl out of the woodwork to lend a hand. In this case, Sergeant Spook's army is first bolstered by the addition of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and then the Duke of Wellington himself decides to offer his expertise in beating up Napoleons.

Like I said, it's a bit low stakes since everyone's already dead and Sergeant Spook for example was only mildly inconveniencing his enemies rather than slaying them while he was laying about with a mace from ghost horseback (as always the rules of the Sergeant Spook afterlife elude me. Are these horses with unfinished business? Do all horses have restless spirits? Are they just accessories to human ghosts like clothing?). Napoleon himself is very chill about the whole thing and everyone is good friends by the end.

Still, for all that this battle had all the consequence of a Civil War reenactment at its heart this comic was about the ghost of Napoleon Bonaparte raising up an army of the dead in an attempt to conquer the afterlife and that's in fact a very sinister elevator pitch.

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