One Eight Hundred Ghosts
One Eight Hundred Ghosts is a graphic novella about the internal and external conflicts of a team of art thieves.
One Eight Hundred Ghosts is a graphic novella about time travel, astral projection, Michael Jackson, the New York City art world as it existed in the 1980’s and Telecommunication Towers.
A team of socialite scenesters moonlight as astral-projecting, art-thieving, time-travelers based in 1980 and concoct a heist to steal… Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
Using otherworldly technology to enter the future and repurpose the intellectual property of a popular yet evil artist in order to change its cultural trajectory, Cedric and his team realize that society will face a conundrum that only they can rectify: accept the work of a sonic genius despite any abusive behavior, or release the work themselves, stripping the artist of the pivotal success that would later enable horrible crimes. Ultimately, the team decides to save the decade’s defining cultural touchstone before it ever happens: Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
One Eight Hundred Ghosts feels and reads like one of the most wholly original and fully-realized authorial and artistic statements in this medium in a good long while … The act of looking at it and reading it is pure comics joy. — Four Color Apocalypse
Project Delivery
Cathcart launched his thesis during the pandemic. In order to get it into the world, he created a process that he calls the “Comic Shop Drop”, as seen in the video below.
His mentor Dilraj Mann was also instrumental in helping Cathcart find the best visual direction to better fit the story.
One Eight Hundred Ghosts is a slim but oversized hardcover, a graphic novella rather than a graphic novel, but with greater weight and narrative density than many books at double the page count, with a killer compacted plot and an artistic vision to match.
Fantagraphics published the finished project in 2022.
G. Davis Cathcart has just a few publications to his name, but he’s already got a fully formed, unique aesthetic and a finely balanced sense of how to use it. It’s a pleasure to behold. – The Comics Journal
Tools & Techniques
Davis used Photoshop and drew the illustrations on his Cintiq.
