This is An Illustrated History of Ghosts (2022), by Adam Allsuch Boardman. Mr. Boardman is also a fan of Usborne’s All About Ghosts (I know this because a little illustration of the book appears in the bibliography in the back). Obviously, he is a fan of many other ghost books, but opening this thing for the first time was accompanied by such a firm feeling of…camaraderie? I struggle to describe in a way that doesn’t invoke Tod Browning’s Freaks. One of us, one of us. It was strange, but not unpleasant.

This is a much better and more thought-out overview of the subject than the Usborne book, honestly. Of particular note is the connection Boardman makes between hauntings and the Spiritualism movement. Which should have been obvious, probably, but years of pursuing ghost stories for their own sake really muddies the matter in my brain, and made this book into a powerful revelation about why we seek and see ghosts. I’ll get into that more on Thursday though, because it is even stronger in Boardman’s follow-up.

Boardman’s art is straight-up fantastic. His style is fairly minimalist, concerned with flatness, color and design. He’s a graphic genius, really. The imagery is just, astoundingly rich, not just as entertaining images, but also as information delivery systems. As in comics, the art is just as important to the overall story here as the words. It’s very painstaking, I think, for his process, but makes for a light and insightful experience for the reader. You learn nearly through osmosis.