Kyle Lambert
Via Screen Rant, Dark Horse Comics have announced “Ghostbusters: Back in Town,” a four-issue prequel to the next film in the series, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. Written by David Booher (“Canto”), with art by Blue Delliquanti (“Across a Field of Starlight”), colors by Mildred Louis and Cris Peter, and lettering by Jimmy Betancourt, the book follows the Spengler family and Gary Grooberson after the events of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, as they relocate to Manhattan to take over the family business.
Frozen Empire writer/producer Jason Reitman, who helmed Afterlife, but handed over the directorial reins to co-writer Gil Kenan, states, “Our friends at Dark Horse have picked up the Spengler family and hand delivered them to Manhattan where they will begin their journey back into Ghostbusting! It has been a personal thrill to collaborate with this incredible group of artists and storytellers on new chapters in the proton jungle.”
Dark Horse are the latest of several publishers to hold the Ghostbusters comic book license. NOW Comics and Marvel UK both published comics based on the animated series The Real Ghostbusters from 1988 from 1993, two years after the show began. The shortlived Quebec-based company 88MPH Studios published the first comic based on the original film itself during its 20th anniversary in 2004, after which point the rights passed to IDW Publishing in 2008.
IDW published numerous comics based on the original films, animated series, and the 2016 remake, but all of them proved to be incompatible with what Reitman established in Afterlife (which revealed the late Harold Ramis’s character, Egon Spengler, was a father.) Their titles were delisted nearly a year before the film’s release in 2021; Reitman and Kenan then announced the license would be inherited by Dark Horse on Ghostbusters Day (June 8) the following year.
“Ghostbusters: Back in Town” #1 will be released on March 27, two days before Frozen Empire releases in theaters. It will have a main cover by Kyle Lambert (who is, incidentally, the main artist on Stranger Things, another Finn Wolfhard series licensed by Dark Horse), and a variant cover by Dark Horse Buffyverse veteran Steve Morris.
