Review: Tobin’s Spirit Guide, Official Ghostbusters Edition
Tobin’s Spirit Guide (Official Ghostbusters Edition)
Written by Erik Burnham
Illustrated by Kyle Hotz
Insight Editions, 96pp
June 21, 2016
Cover price $19.99
As part of the media and marketing blitz concurrent with the rebooting of the Ghostbusters franchise comes the usual set of movie tie-in books. These include novelizations, picture books for the kids and so on. One interesting standout in the crowd is a new “Official Ghostbusters Edition” of Tobin’s Spirit Guide. The guide, of course, has been known as one of the “standard works” since its name-check in the original movie. Erik Burnham, who has written extensively for the various comic book series under the franchise, has created this tie-in with the help of illustrator Kyle Hotz.
The conceit of the book is that the “real” Tobin is inconveniently large and not really geared toward the layman. Therefore, Drs Spengler & Stantz have created a sort of Paranormal Home Companion. This is essentially a catalog of various entities that the ‘busters have encountered in their different film, animated series, video game, and comic book incarnations.
The book is organized into several sections, each tackling a different category of spooks. The first, Ghosts of New York, covers manifestations only found in the five boroughs. Here can be found the library ghost, the Scoleri brothers, and of course Slimer. Other sections cover what might be called “generic” apparitions (sprites, possessed items, etc). There are also sections on powerful individual entities (the Sandman, Samhain, Cthulhu), gods and demons, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the entities of the Gozer pantheon get a section all to themselves.
At just under one hundred pages, the book is somewhat lightweight, especially since Hotz’s illustrations easily take up at least half of it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. His ink line drawings are uniformly excellent and richly detailed. Admittedly, this reader would have liked more descriptive text. It could also have benefited from rather more in the way of entities outside the Ghostbusters canon. One had expected something closer to a reproduction of the “original” 19th-century text, with oodles of world creation mixed in with references to the various stories. It’s still a good idea, really.
Nevertheless, the “Spirit Guide” is an entertaining (if somewhat light) read, and the illustrations really make the book. It makes a pleasant addition to any fan’s library, but is by no means a necessary one.
(Kelly Luck reckons it’s not a proper spirit guide unless you have to chain the book shut between readings. Her other SciFi4Me work can be read here.)
