With ten successful releases in their dossier, the creators and characters of GHOST Agents have become an indie comics sensation. Cosmic Lion Productions has G.H.O.S.T. Agents: Crimson Apocalypse, a curated compilation of GHOST Agents stories. If you weren’t lucky enough to snag a copy of the previous ( and sold-out!) GHOST Agents comics, then Crimson Apocalypse is the place to course correct and start getting in on GHOST Agents. And what good comic doesn’t have an equally good back story? Like the spy-fi adventures it depicts, the stories behind GHOST Agents and the path towards Crimson Apocalypse are filled with twists and turns, colorful characters, and unexpected endings. It’s a story thats best told by those who lived it.
BEGINNINGS
In early 2020, when the COVID-19 epidemic was just really starting to fire up, a group of comic book fans found solace in each other by using social media to do one of their favorite things: talk about comics. As the world outside got more insane and terrifying, this group of folks decided to go from talking about comics to making one together. That was Image Grand Design, a book described by Rocko Jerome as “the greatest and most ambitious bootleg comic of all time, an anthology featuring the work of dozens of independent artists.”
ROCKO JEROME (Writer/Producer, GHOST Agents): In 2020, I found myself accidentally in the role of project manager for Image Grand Design. It was this huge, almost absurdly ambitious concept designed to make some sort of cohesive sense out of the early Image comics. I enjoyed advocating for and collaborating with cartoonists in that, and when it was over, I really wanted to keep going, but do stuff with longer legs than a bootleg comic ever could have. You know, the guys worked so hard on that, and when it was done, we had to be very careful not to just get sued into oblivion before it even got printed.
ELI SCHWAB (Publisher, Cosmic Lion Productions): It was a whirlwind of stuff. I kept asking some of the pros that I know for advice. People who have been in the business since, like, the eighties were telling us to be very careful and to reach out to people to let them know what we were doing. I actually did even reach out to Image at one point. Then people just above us were like, “Fuck it, just do your shit and ask questions later.” It was kinda wild.
ROCKO: I lost some sleep about it. These people worked on this book like it was their job, and the idea that no one might ever see it was distressing. And of course, no one was getting paid for this contraband. It was all for the love of comics.
ELI: I didn’t know what to think at first, and then I just went with my gut. There were too many people involved, and this was an indie tribute. We had to do it. Also, if we did end up getting sued by Image, that would have been an even better story and would have given us stories to tell for years!
ROCKO: The thing after that was, I didn’t really know if artists would want to keep working with me if it wasn’t what IGD was. Like, maybe this was just a one-off thing I got away with doing in my life, and I should leave well enough alone. The difference maker was a simple text from Chris Anderson, who has a nice career in comics going in addition to being a major force in IGD. He asked me, “What are you doing next?” I felt vindicated that he was interested, so I told him about this idea I had for a sixties spy-fi comic.
CHRIS ANDERSON (Spectral, Lost Angeles, Heavy Metal): I loved the concept of a retro Avengers-style book. The British TV show, not the Marvel thing. It was something that I hadn’t seen before and felt a little like our own version of G.I. Joe or something.
ROCKO: In the 2010s, I had this prose series I was writing about a character called Ben Venice, the conceit being that it was about what Nick Fury would be like if he were in a world just a smidge more realistic than the one depicted in Marvel comics. Venice was in charge of the Global Hierarchy Of Secret Tactics- GHOST. I didn’t really commit much to the series. Mostly because no one read it, which, you know, is always a buzzkill. But I had this idea that I could spin that off into comics, and I knew Eli would be game to give essential support. We were off to the races.
KICKSTART MY ART
After Chris suggested using crowdfunding, Eli and Rocko promoted and released the first and every subsequent GHOST Agents project via Kickstarter, with a total of ten successfully funded campaigns to date.
ELI: Crowdfunding is a pretty amazing resource. Kickstarter has the name and the infrastructure to help creators take in a lot of money and trust, and has been helping indie creators like us get things made for a while. We could do GHOST Agents without it, but it would be a lot harder, and now that we have built a reputation on there and people look to KS for GA, it’s the perfect pairing.
ROCKO: I don’t think Guiness cares, but we probably hold some record in indie comics for doing the most Kickstarters in quick succession. For a while there, it was every few months, using the release of one book to promote the Kickstarter for the one immediately following. It’s stressful because this is how we pay the artists for work they already did, but I’m an addict at this point. It’s just the fact that you create this sense of immediacy, where if people don’t support it, it dies, and they see it in real time. Plus, you can add a lot of things for people to buy into, like Sean Luke is the master of drawing readers into the book, which is a privilege they purchase.
SEAN LUKE (creator of Karate Ninja): Rocko had the fantastic idea for a tier in the Kickstarters to have “Be A GHOST Agent,” where he wanted those backers drawn into the books. He felt, I disagreed, that I was “the guy” to do it. Likenesses are super difficult, and the way he wanted to work them in is also challenging. But he said, “No, you’re the guy,” and I couldn’t argue with that! It’s been incredibly fun to do.
PUTTING THE BAND TOGETHER
Using well-known tropes and character archetypes as starting points, Rocko and the recruited artists went about conceiving of characters that could be recognizably drawn by anybody after. Ironclad instantly iconic figures like Donna Printiss, the Amazonian knockout lady agent. The dashing and debonair gentlemen of mystery, Cross and Oleg. Kung-fu master Li. Hard-nosed dame May Zero. Hippie wizard Jack Infinity. And the cruel femme fatale, Adelaide Von Volker, leader of GHOST’s opposite number, the diabolical organization known as Apocalyptico. The real stars of GHOST Agents, however, are the artists.
ROCKO: I call myself the Writer/Producer because I write the initial scripts, then let the artists serve as director, cinematographer, special effects, and central casting, and try to stay out of the way as much as possible until it’s time to put all the short stories together and promote them.
BEN PERKINS (Deathsligner, Heavy): I remember I was part of a book called Darkest Image, which had some people from Image Grand Design helping on that. I can’t remember how Rocko and I exactly connected, but I do remember him reaching out about the story Riders Howling In The Moonlight. I think that was the first one. And I knew immediately after that I wanted to work with him again. Mainly since he let me use this crazy layout to tell the story, and I think it worked well. I have done a lot for GHOST Agents, so I kinda lose track.
BARRY TAN (Stan Vs. Jack: How To Feud The Marvel Way!): (The GA story) Lost In The Nowhere Zone was the first collaboration between Rocko and myself, and was originally a short story set in Alan Moore’s 1963 universe that first saw print in the Darker Image anthology. Around that time, the first issue of GHOST Agents was being put together, and we agreed to include a reworked version of the story where the 1963 references were excised, and the scenes in the Nowhere Zone were given a more psychedelic 3D treatment so that it stood apart from the original version. We subsequently also did a really fun version of the story with the Nowhere zone sequences colored in a style inspired by Marvel’s old Blacklight posters.
ROCKO: What happened there with Barry that I always like to emphasize was that we took something that started as fan fiction, retooled three things, and suddenly, it’s our own intellectual property. That’s a lot of what GHOST Agents is. I don’t think I need to spell it out; you can see what we’re doing here. It’s never lost on me that George Lucas only began work on Star Wars when he couldn’t get the rights to Flash Gordon.
SAM J. ROYALE (Dishoom, Pariah): I was asked to do the cover art for the first issue of GHOST Agents, featuring Donna Printiss wielding a sword while riding a motorcycle. Maybe because of my background in graphic design, and maybe because I can be a control freak, I prefer to do cover art when I can also have some say in the layout, and—ideally—the title logo as well. I crossed my fingers and asked Rocko if there was already a logo in place for the book’s title, and luckily for me, I was able to expand my role on the project.
ROCKO: I was fucking thrilled Sam wanted to do a logo. I geek out whenever I see it.
SAM: The title logo was partially inspired by 1960s hand-cut movie poster lettering, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, designed by Saul Bass. I also wanted it to have a Hanna-Barbera-ish adventure cartoon feel, too. GHOST Agents has since expanded to be much broader, but at the time, it had a more specific retro spy-fi secret agent feel that the logo was meant to capture.
THE ATTITUDE OF LATTITUDE
GHOST Agents soon began to change and become about a lot of things besides the original concept. This was due to constant encouragement for cartoonists to go outside the lines.
JOHN BURKETT (Feral Star): Rocko recruited me after he saw the story I drew for Darkest Image 2. I agreed, and he asked me what I wanted to draw. I don’t think I knew what the premise was, so I said I wanted to draw a story that took place in a space station that was kind of a trailer park in space populated by the kind of people you’d see at the county fair. I think he was hesitant at first, but agreed and wrote The Dead End.
ROCKO: I immediately wanted to collaborate with John when I saw his work. My M.O. is always to get the artist to tell me what they want to do with the story, what they want to draw, and don’t want to draw, and then I get high and write that. Since John wasn’t actively aware of what GA was, he suggested something far different from my conception of what we were doing at the time, which was sexy sixties spy-fi. He’s talking about ugly people in a space station in the distant future, about as far from what I had in mind as I can imagine. Rather than try to bend him to my will, I elected to instead just take it as an opportunity to widen the premise of GHOST Agents. What if the sixties spy angle is just part of a complete timeline? Once we broke that barrier, a lot of things changed.
BEN: Rocko’s scripts are easy to read, give you all the information necessary, and then just let you do what you do. He’s open to suggestions. My Howling story, I saw immediately in my mind. I just dashed out a set of thumbnails and sent it for approval. The cool thing is that my story structure, inspired by the script, led me to this layout where the story reads across both pages instead of one and then the other. It was a HUGELY RISKY move, but Rocko trusted me enough, and I had to rise to the occasion to actually pull it off. I think, for me, it was pretty successful and a whole heck of a lot of fun. And that’s the main thing. These things are FUN!! FUN COMICS! Fun, easily accessible comics!
TODD FOX (Artist, Marvel Comics Presents, Aym Geronimo): I got a script from Rocko that detailed the first four pages with dialogue and descriptions. Rocko also described and dialogued the ending. The script then loosely described what he wanted in between and let me fill in the rest as I saw fit. During that process, Rocko messaged me a request for a certain action for Donna Printiss to be included somewhere. In the final story, any panel or page with dialogue was scripted by Rocko. Everything else was left up to me. I worked digitally on my iPad with Procreate. I learned a lot on that job and would change some things if I knew then what I know now. I have some slight regret that there are no original art pages, but I am pleased with how the job turned out.
ROCKO: A lot of my scripts will be like, PAGES 5-9: THEY FIGHT. The thing that I always think about with comics is that there are an infinite number of ways you can play with the narrative of the format. I don’t think that’s true of any other medium. I always want GHOST Agents to be experimental.
ANTON W. BLAKE (Zethia Space Witch): Rocko gave me a lot of freedom on the story I illustrated. I’d worked with him on Image Grand Design, so we already knew each other’s styles of working. I remember just telling him I wanted to do something strange that I could experiment with mixed media on, maybe something with a Lovecraftian monster. I think the first idea we talked about was a Jack Infinity in the Netherworld story, but it ultimately became The Coming of Krakkenggeddon. The script itself was very sparse, just simple descriptions of this eldritch creature arriving in our reality and drifting through the ocean over an indeterminate amount of time. From there, he just told me “go wild.” I’m somewhat known for my mixed media art now, but I had only introduced a little bit of it into my art before GHOST Agents. That story was my excuse to go all out with it, and Rocko was on board with everything I threw onto the page.
CASPAR SCHUMANS (First published in GHOST Agents): Rocko recruited me from a group drawing session over Zoom, from there it actually sounds a lot like what Anton described. Rocko asked what I would like to draw, and I jumped at the chance to do something with Jack Infinity and some Netherworld nasty. I was upfront about not wanting too many pages as I did not want to overpromise. From there, he got me a very short script which can be summarized as “Jack is old and burnt out, think fat Jim Morrison. One last stand against the Netherworld, and it kills him. Make it cool, make it weird.” There was a little bit of back and forth in regards to the title before we settled on The World On You Depends, tying nicely into the Jim Morrison reference.
ANTON: Rocko can correct me if I’m remembering this incorrectly, but I think the creature from that story is the same as mine.
ROCKO: One hundred percent! A lot of what fuels the way that narrative winds and weaves is based on what artists tell me they want to do with their pages. Like, I don’t know that I even wanted to do anything again with Jack Infinity until Caspar said that. And since we had established this weird, monstrous creature in Anton’s pages, it occurred to me that we could have it recur, and Jack could battle it in Caspar’s pages. That storyline would have gone differently if the cartoonists had other requests. We got really into having demons from Hell come to battle the Agents.
CASPAR: That is what it felt like to me when we were talking through what my pages would be, while also seeing what others were doing. A delicate balance of letting artists run wild but also reining it in just enough to have it all fit in the larger vision.
BARRY: In terms of how I approached the artwork for the three GHOST Agents stories I drew, there was a consistently clean, retro-looking style I wanted for the Lost In The Nowhere Zone and The Tijuana Affair Part 1 stories, and the monochrome scheme was obviously heavily influenced by Darwyn Cooke’s work on the Parker series. The Nowhere Zone story in particular was a joyous mash-up of some of my favorite artists: Wally Wood Space suits, Darwyn Cooke figures moving across Kirby and Ditko-inspired backgrounds, with a small hint of Druillet thrown in for good measure.
ROCKO: What I think you will find every artist I work with will tell you is that I grant a lot of latitude. I’m extremely proud of that. I feel like most comic book writers think of art as something you hire. I don’t. Comics are a visual art form first, a storytelling medium second, and I’m happy to be on the ride with killer cartoonists.
BEN: That’s what I like about not what he created but how Rocko lets the organic nature of working with a multitude of others blend itself into a narrative that deserved the treatment of what we were doing with the art. Everything kind of just became integrated, and it’s amazing to see how we all kinda look like we are pushing the comics storytelling medium to the limit. All I can say with any honesty is that I feel safe to be able to explore wild, weird shit with Rocko because he trusts me to be able to tell the story in the best way that helps the GA style. Which is already a cool smorgasborg of seething, smoking hot talent! I get out of breath trying to keep up with these guys! That’s why I love that he lets me get away with these crazy ideas.
GHOST Agents: Crimson Apocalypse
GHOST Agents has mostly been released in treasury formats on newsprint, but for the compilation GHOST Agents: Crimson Apocalypse, Rocko and Eli arrived at an oversized, prestige format presentation that places a selection of stories in a precise new reading order.
ROCKO: I get the sense that few, if any, people read the various GHOST Agents stories closely enough to catch this, but there is an overarching narrative. That’s ok, because this stuff works fine as art books for your coffee table. But it’s all there, reprinted from previous releases, in correct reading order as GHOST Agents: Crimson Apocalypse.
DAKOTA ALEXANDER (The Hunter, GHOST Agents: Crimson Apocalypse cover artist): I spammed Rocko while I was promoting this comic I did work on- The Masters. At this point, I had only done cover and pin-up work. I don’t know if it was just from all the countless pics I posted on Facebook or any of the actual commission work that brought me to Rocko’s attention, but he reached out to me on Messenger about the cover. I had the leeway of keeping the concept simple. With the cover and pin-up work I’ve done, in the beginning, it’s a lot of asking questions about characters, so I can get their general archetype sorted as well as the relationship to the antagonist in this case. After getting the reference imagery, it was just a case of figuring out how to break it down visually to fit within the themes of the book. I liked the spy aesthetic and the idea of personal tension between both characters, and I just thought “Octopussy”. Rocko was always there to answer any questions I had, but beyond that, he just let me run with it.
CHRIS: It was wild to see the world building carry on and to see the designs I did change with every artist who came after. I could absolutely have imagined it growing into the success it has become with Rocko’s go-get-em guidance and Eli at the publishing helm. So I’m not surprised in the least at what it has become or even where it will continue to go.
SEAN: I definitely gotta say, and I’ve told Rocko this a bunch of times, but it remains to be true. Since I tend to use my part as a break from working on my own stuff, every piece of work I’ve done for GA has made me better, and it’s wonderful because I fold it back into my own.
ELI: GA has the potential to reach so many people. Like Rocko says, “GA has a million fans out there, we just gotta find a way to reach them.” I think GA could also find new life in multimedia as well. It’s as potent an idea as Mission Impossible or James Bond. Actually, it’s way more potent, what with all the different agents and time periods. But for now, I am super excited about seeing all the amazing creators who have worked on GA go to amazing heights with their own projects, as well as excited to see what new talent we find and how far they soar!
BEN: I keep saying that GA is the best current indie comic being published today, and I’m convinced we are this generation’s Haight and Ashbury or Mirage. It’s a watershed moment in indie comics.
