“‘Cause all they saw was ruling it all, the scent of blood was in the air”
Titan Comics, through their Statix Press imprint, brings us The Three Ghosts of Tesla, which was originally released in France in three volumes but is now in English in a nice fancy hardcover. This is written and colored by Richard Marazano and drawn by Guilhem, while the translation is by Marc Bourbon-Crook and the lettering is by Lauren Bowes. Let’s have a look!
As you might recall, I’m a bit burned out on Tesla in popular culture, because it’s become such a cliché, with Tesla the unappreciated genius and Thomas Edison the con man who stole everything as his nemesis. 
There is some truth to the latter assumption, of course, but it’s not like Edison wasn’t a smart dude and there’s not a lot of evidence that he was an evil mastermind and there is some indication that Tesla shot himself in the foot quite a lot, so the clichés are lazy and not the whole story (which is, of course, the nature of clichés), so a story with Tesla becomes lazy by association. Yet, here I am, reading The Three Ghosts of Tesla. What the heck is wrong with me?
Well, I mean, I’m not completely immune to the allure of the mad yet visionary scientist fighting against the mad yet completely evil scientist, am I? This sounded interesting and the art looked wonderful, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Marazano sets the story during World War II (the dates are a bit wonky; it’s late in 1942/early in 1943, but newspaper clippings sprinkled into the book are dated September 1943, which has to be a simple mistake), and our POV character is Travis Cooley, who moves with his mother to New York so she can begin working in a factory, which she’s forced to do because her husband is MIA in the Pacific. The neighborhood kids challenge Travis to deliver a message to the old man who lives down the hall from him – they were charged with it by a mysterious dude, but they’re all scared of the old dude, and Travis claims he isn’t. 
He begins following the old man and quickly realizes something is weird about him, and then he discovers he’s actually Nikola Tesla. Unfortunately, Tesla dies (he’s 86 years old, after all), but he figured out a way for his spirit to walk the earth, but he needs Travis to help him because he’s, you know, a ghost (Tesla died in January 1943, which helps peg the time, although it does seem like it’s still autumn of 1942). So Travis gets involved in a search for the companions of Tesla, a group of like-minded creative people who can thwart the big-time EVIL that’s coming … which is Edison, naturally, allied with J. Edgar Hoover and Rudolf Hess. I mean, why not? Meanwhile, in Japan, Yasutaro Mitsui has invented giant robotic war machines that will swing the balance of the war, and only one man can stop them … but who could it be?!?!?
There’s a lot going on in this book, obviously, but it’s just a big-time, slightly alternate history adventure (I mean, yes, it’s alternate history, but nothing really becomes public and the one big event could be waved away by the government, so if you squint you could convince yourself that this happened in “our world” but there was a massive cover-up) with mad scientists and Nazis. Marazano brings in even more historical figures than those I’ve already mentioned, but what makes the book work is the Cooley family, who ground the story. Travis is a typical 1940s kid, full of piss and vinegar but someone who loves his mother and wants to help her out even though he’s a young kid because he’s the “man” of the family now. He doesn’t completely trust Tesla, even though he realizes that they need to fight against Edison (I should point out that Edison died in 1931, which the book acknowledges, but if Tesla’s ghost can still hang around, Edison being dead for a decade presents no obstacle for Marazano!). Marazano gives us a familiar character that we’ve seen many, many times before, but he does a good job humanizing Travis nevertheless, and he carries the story along. His mother is interesting, as well, as she’s trying to raise her kid and provide for him in an atmosphere that is not exactly welcoming. She works in a steel factory with other women, and unlike a lot of other fiction of this kind, Marazano spends some time with the feminist aspects of the “homefront story” of World War II … although he does end it with a more utopian resolution than what actually happened when all the men came home. 
There’s also a Communist reporter who becomes important, as he’s the only one willing to write about the abuses of the government. Marazano does a good job showing these people – including an FBI agent who’s a bit sweet on Travis’s mother – as three-dimensional, as they’re often unsure what path to take and how to react to the things happening around them. They’re not just heroic figures, and that makes the plot work a bit better, as they struggle with their own prejudices and fears as they attempt to do the right thing. Tesla and his compatriots and Edison and his cronies are the sizzle in the story, but Travis, his mother, and the other “regular” people are the steak.
Guilhem’s art is wonderful, evoking the actual time period while also doing justice to the “sci-fi” design sense of the 1930s, with his steampunk aesthetic of Edison’s spider monsters to the “Iron Giant” vibe of Mitsui’s creations. The weirdness of the inventions is definitely mitigated by how well Guilhem draws them – they look bolted together, so it’s not like something that couldn’t be done in the 1930s, with the more limited technology they were working with. Meanwhile, he does a marvelous job with the more mundane aspects of the world – New York isn’t a fanciful, gorgeous city, but a typical 1930s city, with ghettos and filth and rickety tenements, which makes the gleaming Empire State Building or the weird creations of Edison and Tesla stand out a bit more. Guilhem does a nice job incorporating some ornate architecture into even some of the quieter moments – the banister in Travis’s building is a baroque masterpiece – which helps transition from the run-down aspect of the “real world” of the comic to the more Art Deco designs of the “fantastical” elements. 
There are a lot of characters, and Guilhem does a good job making them unique, so it’s not hard to figure out what’s going on and who’s doing what, and while Edison is somewhat grotesque to match his personality, Guilhem doesn’t make all the “good” people attractive and the “bad” people ugly – much like the story, the art reflects the contradictions inherent in humanity. The coloring is excellent, too – Marazano uses a lot of soft colors to give it a “historical” feeling (not a ton of sepia tones, which is nice, but “softness” can make the art look “historical” as well), and he uses nice, weirdly bright colors to turn Tesla into a ghost, because he’s electrical impulses more than anything. There’s a burnished look to the comic, which works quite well when we see the clanky technology employed in the book. It’s really a beautiful comic.
A lot of this book feels familiar, but it’s still a well-constructed, old-fashioned adventure, and those are always fun to read if they’re done well. It probably won’t be the greatest thing you read, but it’s a lot neater and more exciting than a lot of what you’re going to read! Ain’t nothing wrong with that!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
