Reading Review: Ghosts #1

Since I have enjoyed the past adventures of The Dead Boy Detectives, characters created by Neil Gaiman, I picked up this Vertigo comics anthology containing a new adventure of theirs.

What a disappointment!

The new Dead Boy Detectives tale is all of 8 none too great pages before one hits the phrase "to be continued in the next Vertigo anthology", which apparently will be Time Warp #1, coming in March 2013.

Time Warp is a science fiction anthology, so I'm not quite sure why the Dead Boy Detectives, who fit perfectly in a horror anthology called Ghosts since they're, um, dead, will be in a sci-fi comic.  Maybe they're blasting off into space or something.  I could see them appearing in a mystery anthology since they're, um, detectives, but why a sci-fi anthology?  It just looks like the story is something that's been in the files for some time, and Vertigo is dumping it out in drips across various anthologies just to get rid of it.

Since the rest of Ghosts was underwhelming as well (Hey, wasn't that creepy, vaguely misogynistic cover great?  Let's run it twice more on the inside to waste pages!), I won't be there to do the Time Warp.  When Vertigo debuted in 1993, I read most of its titles, which were very good.  Over the years, the quality seemed to drop and I read less and less of their output.  I continued to read Hellblazer, but few of the newer titles seemed interesting.  With Hellblazer ending, I suppose I won't read any Vertigo titles, but, if Ghosts is any indication, it doesn't look like I'll be missing much.