Today’s second pick in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a bundle of all three treasury-sized issues of G.H.O.S.T. Agents. This is the perfect gift for the lover of Silver Age comics, treasury editions and spy fiction on your holiday shopping list.

I met Rocko Jerome, the writer/producer of GHOST Agents at Kentuckiana a couple of years ago, and I was knocked out by his cool comic book project.  This is an original creation that harkens back to the golden age of spy adventures while also mining nostalgia for the tabloid-sized treasury comics of the 1970s.  It does all this with excellent art and is just loads of fun.

As the PR says, “Published by Cosmic Lion Productions, GHOST Agents is an art-forward anthology series made up of short, self-contained pieces; where every story exists in the same world, and characters reoccur throughout the centuries spanning narrative. If you read it all, a rich overarching storyline will emerge, but you aren’t required to do that, and readers are encouraged to dip in as they please.”

It’s got terrific art, great shorter-length stories and it’s printed on newsprint in an oversized format, which is near and dear to my heart.

Allow me to quote from the website:

A showcase of up and coming artists pushing against the boundaries of the comic book paradigm, this art-forward collection stands as a set of objects, at home on any coffee table. It both harkens back to an era of sharp edged countercultural comix and looks ahead to new ideas.

“There was this stretch of time where certain comics and readers were wired into the sex, drugs, and rock & roll paradigm,” says GHOST Agents Writer/Producer Rocko Jerome. “This book is intended to recapture that energy that some comics had in the mid-sixties and throughout the seventies. There was an element of danger there that I want to tap into: the vibe of Heavy Metal, Steranko, Spain Rodriguez, Guy Peellaert… and the headier, more whacked-out kinds of Marvel Comics that ended up getting sold in headshops. As much as I’m sure it would have rattled Ditko, I have it on good authority that some people bought Strange Tales at the same places they bought their rolling papers. That’s the space these books occupy.”

Across time and space, the clandestine organization called G.H.O.S.T. (Global Hierarchy Of Secret Tactics) sends its agents to combat threats with bad intentions- lycanthropic drug addicts, demons from the netherworld tearing into the space/time continuum, and the nihilistic, fashion obsessed terrorists collectively known as APOCALYPTICO.   These are collections of episodic, standalone stories all set in the same world and featuring a cast of new characters. It’s the wildly imaginative work of a faction of up and coming artists, including Chris Anderson, Ben Perkins, Barry Tan, Chris Fason, Christian J. Meesey (Meesimo), Adam Lemnah, John Burkett, Shawn Coots, Chris Humphreys, Dave Grom, Rick Lopez, Danny Nicholas, Dave Praetorius, Miguel Galindo, Jason Foster, Peter Hensel, Tony Fero, Sean Luke, Dave Grom, Todd Fox, Caspar Schumans, Miguel Galindo, Nathan Grixti, Colin Shaw, Jamie Jones,  Harry Hickle, Caspar Schumans, Sam J. Royale,  Jerome Cabanatan, Robert Norton, Eli Schwab, Renel Roque, Michael Fitzgerald Troy, Jamie H Lee, Dave Praetorius, Ben Perkins, Dave Howlett, Raymar Brunson, Danny Nicholas, Sean McMillan, Groucho P. Trout, Timothy Aymar, Edmund Kearsley, Gilbert Leiker, Christopher Nolen, Anton William Blake,and Noufaux, along with Mark Maddox and the legendary Ken Landgraf, all from stories written by Rocko Jerome.  “No one was making the comics I wanted,” says Rocko. “I got my friends to make them with me.”

This is one killer comic book project, and the bundle of three issues is a great jumping-on point for any comics fan.

Between the three volumes you get over 330 oversized pages of spectacular comic art with really cool stories. You can order the bundle directly from the CLP Comics Shop.  You get all three issues for sixty bucks plus nine dollars shipping (in the US).