Spectators HC Vol 1 Review

 

Writer: Brian K Vaughan

Artist: Niko Henrichon

Publisher: Image Comics

Price: $29.99

Release Date: September 10, 2025

 

Life during COVID-19 was tough. Along with all the business closures, cinemas shut their doors. So, when the restrictions lift, Val heads to New York City's Village VIII to watch a movie. She grabs a seat in the back row and puts her jacket on the recliner beside her. Val has met someone she wants to get to know better. But when Val texts her date, she learns he's not coming. Will Val enjoy the movie anyway? And might her return to the cinema change her life? Let’s grab our sodas and popcorn, leap into Spectators HC Vol 1, and see!

 

Story

Pandemic restrictions prevented people from attending community events. Fears of contracting the deadly virus inhibited people from coming into physical contact with others. Amid this era of isolation, Val attempts to banish her disappointment by inserting her earbuds and watching porn on her phone.

 

Distant booms prompt Val to pause the woman giving her boyfriend a charley horse during sex. The people scattered across the cinema wonder about the loud reports. Then, a man enters clad in body armor and a Mickey Mouse hat. He shoots everyone in the first few rows. Then, he climbs the stairs and showers Val with bullets from his rifle.

 

Despite appearances, this isn’t the end of Val’s life in Spectators HC Vol 1. Yet as she looks down on her bullet-riddled corpse, it feels like it is. When Val floats outside the cinema, she meets another hovering woman. Lita couldn't bear to watch the shooting. Still, she asks what it was like. Lita explains that she and her true crime friends have been following the shooter. Cody was obsessed with mass shootings and meme culture. He wrote a manifesto this morning. Then, Lita watched as Cody went out to see how many people he could kill.

 

In Brian K Vaughan's story, Val is one of the few who don't immediately travel to their eventual destination. Unlike Patrick Swayze in Ghost, spirits like Val and Lita don't contact their former lovers. Nor do they communicate through mediums like Whoopi Goldberg. Instead, they experience the most entertaining show of all. Val grew up with a love of cinema. She wrote summaries of TV shows for a living. Val enjoyed watching people's most intimate moments on her phone. Now, no doors are closed to her. Val cannot pick up a phone. But she can watch anyone doing anything, anywhere they live, at any time.

 

Art

Val entered the cinema as a 43-year-old woman. She adorned her straight, pale blonde hair with a pink streak and wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans. Val leaves wearing a flannel shirt over a T-shirt, boots, and shorts with rolled-up cuffs over black leggings. Val has robust strawberry blonde hair and an unruly ponytail. Lita explains that each ghost’s appearance represents the midpoint of their lives. Despite erasing the signs of age from her features, Val isn’t happy about reclaiming her youth. Still, she could be like Lita, who wears jewelry, one fishnet stocking, and nothing else.

 

After the cinema filled with red upholstered seats, Val sees the world around her in black and white. As the decades pass in Spectators HC Vol 1, Val’s ghostly friends appear in living color. Each ghost radiates a colored aura. But the people she watches appear as shades of gray. The only exception is when people die. Most vanish in a streak of colored light. The remainder regain color and linger, like Lita and Val.

 

Niko Henrichon’s detailed art shows people traveling through Manhattan in floating cubes. Spaceships fill the skies above New York City. Soldiers wearing jetpacks surround giant flying robots. While many of her ghostly contemporaries seek out violence, Val's hunger for intimacy remains. She grows frustrated with those addicted to the illusion of interpersonal fulfillment through technological means. Instead, Val seeks out people engaged in pleasuring others. Then, after two centuries in the afterlife, Val finds someone to watch the show with in Spectators HC Vol 1. Thanks to Image Comics for providing a review copy.

 

Final Thoughts

Why do parents buy their children shooter games but shield them from "inappropriate" depictions of intimacy? And why has Hollywood "cleaned up its act" by deluging cinemas with symphonies of violence? Spectators HC Vol 1 ponders our competitive natures, yearning for intimacy, infatuation with social media, and how current trends may influence our future.

 

Rating 9.8/10

 

To look inside see my review at Comic Book Dispatch. 

May Reading Roundup Part 1

May was a good month for reading, if a bad month for other reasons. Although we returned feeling healthy and rested from Hawaii, we soon got sick. Whatever we caught, the illness lingered. But, while this limited how much we accomplished in other aspects of our lives, it was good for my reading. Here's a rundown of the books I read last month.

Wychnor House, in the English Midlands,
one of many former manor houses
that have since been turned into hotels.

1. Ravenshoe by Henry Kingsley. This was a nineteenth century English novel about a young man raised as a protestant in a Catholic household. Eventually, the Catholic priest reveals that the Protestant son is actually a bastard, and the son of an estate worker is actually an heir to the family fortune. The Protestant son leaves his family's manor house, goes to serve as a groom to a rich man, and eventually joins the army. He goes abroad to fight in the Crimean War, and even takes part in the Charge of the Light Brigade. This is a long, epic-style novel. It's less fun than The Pickwick Papers, but like Charles Dickens' novel, it paints a compelling portrait of life among the various social classes in another age.

2. Y: The Last Man: Book One by Brian K. Vaughan. This is a graphic novel I picked up in Hawaii, but finished after I returned home. It collects the first ten issues of the sixty-issue series. In the first issue, an unexplained event occurs, and every male Human and animal dies. This event crashes governments, the financial markets, and industries that supply basic needs like power, water, and food. As the title suggests, one man survives, along with his pet male monkey. The new female president assigns him a bodyguard, who travels with him to find a genetics research scientist who they hope may determine why he lived, while all the other males died. Of course, as he faces dangers at every turn, including from a group of militant Amazon warriors who ascribe all the evils of the world to man. The tension is increased by the knowledge that if he dies, all humanity will follow him.

3. Soulless by Gail Carriger. This recent novel is set in the nineteenth century. It focuses on a heroine who lacks a soul. This makes her immune to the bite of werewolves and vampires, who are created by possessing an "excess" of soul. While Victorian Britain is ruled by the monarch, power blocks of werewolves and vampires act as the Queen's advisors. As for our heroine, she is courted by a scientist who seeks a cure for an "excess" of soul, which would wipe out vampires and werewolves. At the same time, she is courted by a werewolf who oversees a powerful domestic force that guards ordinary citizens against supernatural dangers. For our heroine needs no outside assistance. With her cunning, and her silver-tipped umbrella, and her soulless status, she can defend herself against most every danger that threatens her. If only she had lighter skin, and possessed the features that London society defines as "beautiful." Then she could find a wealthy suitor, and get married!

4. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Is anyone in the world unfamiliar with Sherlock Holmes? This collection of short stories needs little introduction or summary. These are the cases that made Holmes into a household world in Victorian England. I read these stories on my Kindle, a few pages or so each night, until my wife drifted off to sleep. Then reluctantly, I switched over to another novel, such as Ravenshoe, which I also read on my Kindle. 

5. WildCATs Compendium by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi. This graphic novel collects the first four issues of this series. The WildCATS is a team of superheroes, overseen by a dwarf (not a mythical being, but a person of short stature) who has gone from homeless to billionaire in a few years. He has accomplished this feat with the aid of a spectral being who can see into the future. Thus, he has raised a team of superheroes, as he knows that there is an evil force, a member of the Daemonite race, who is raising an army of superheroes to control the war. It's all part of a centuries-long war between the Kerubim and the Daemonites, two races who arrived on Earth long ago, and now seek to control the world. If these characters bear some similarities with more recognizable characters from Marvel, they're still fun, and the artwork is particularly striking.

It's kind of an interesting mix so far, comprising an English family novel, a collection of mysteries, a post apocalyptic tale, a clash of superheroes, and a Jane Austen style fantasy mashup. I'll cover the remaining six books in Part 2.

Dragon Dave