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Image juggernauts Todd McFarlane and Robert Kirkman join forces on Haunt.  Will Haunt be the next Spawn or the next Spawn knock-off?

Here’s the solicitation copy for Haunt #1 from Images website:

McFARLANE & KIRKMAN’S HAUNT HAS ARRIVED!
Daniel Kilgore is dragged into his estranged brother Kurt’s secret life of murder and espionage… by his ghost. With no training whatsoever, guided by the spirit of his secret-agent brother, Daniel must now solve his brother’s murder and save the world – or die trying! It all starts here, people: Witness the birth of HAUNT!

While filled with cliches (“solve his brother’s murder and save the world”- you can almost hear the heavily dramatic music playing underneath that,) this almost sounds like a halfway interesting book.  The solicit doesn’t even get into the fact that Daniel is a dissatisfied priest, going through the motions of his churchly duties between his Thursday quickies with an unnamed blonde woman.  Todd McFarlane and Robert Kirkman’s Haunt #1 could maybe have been a huge book 20 years ago, before we ever saw McFarlane’s Spawn, Kirkman’s Walking Dead or even Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher.

But that’s the problem; we have seen and enjoyed those books.  We’ve seen what McFarlane and Kirkman are capable of and what ground other books have already traveled in the last 20 years.  We’ve seen edgy and we’ve seen kewl and that’s what Haunt #1 tries to be but it’s too late.  Everything that they’re showing in those books, we’ve already seen countless times since the birth of Image and Spawn #1  So in trying to be all that, Haunt #1 comes off as tired, dull and, thanks to some bad storytelling, incomprehensible in the end.

There are two big problems with Haunt #1—1) it can’t quickly establish its identity and 2) the storytelling falls apart in the end.  The books starts out as a tale of two brothers who can’t or won’t try to understand the other’s world.  But then it goes into a long sequence about the secret agent brother, his high-tech mission that looks like something out of an old Marvel G.I. Joe comic.  Kirkman and McFarlane aren’t able to ground either story into one narrative base.  It feels like you’re reading two separate comics that have nothing to do with each other.  And then it becomes the movie Ghost, only with brothers instead of lovers as the secret agent is killed but visits his priestly brother and tries to send him on a mission to protect the people they love.  And we still haven’t gotten to the part where something snakes out of the priest, envelops him and gives him the power to cut off a couple of goons’ heads.

Kirkman’s scripts jumps from scene to scene with hardly any breathing room.  It wasn’t until my fourth reading of the book that I was able to figure out how scene A related to scene B which lead into scene C and so on and so forth.  Kirkman and McFarlane are in such a hurry to get to their final scene where we finally “witness the birth of HAUNT” that every other scene hangs off the plot in a haphazard fashion, trying to support some kind of forward momentum to the story but instead feeling like a patchworked plot, hammered together to get a soldier’s story mixed in with a priest’s story.  In the end, Haunt #1 feels like a number of separate stories forced to work together.  There are a couple of plots present in Haunt #1 but they never fully mesh together to create one successful story and leave each part of the issue feeling disjointed from those surrounding it.

Haunt #1
Written by: Robert Kirkman
Layouts by: Greg Capullo
Penciled by: Ryan Ottley
Inked by: Todd McFarlane
Colored by: Fco Plascencia
Lettered by: Richard Starkings

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