Synopsis:

Ever felt anxious or alone? Like you don’t belong anywhere? Like you’re almost… invisible? Find your kindred spirits at The Sad Ghost Club.

This is the story of one of those days – a day so bad you can barely get out of bed, when it’s a struggle to leave the house, and when you do, you wish you hadn’t. But even the worst of days can surprise you. When one sad ghost, lost and alone at a crowded party, spies another sad ghost across the room, they decide to leave together. What happens next changes everything. Because that night they start the The Sad Ghost Club – a secret society for the anxious and alone, a club for people who think they don’t belong.

Review:

The Sad Ghost Club was a very endearing graphic novel, however, if I didn’t get it quite cheap, I probably would have been annoyed at the lack of story. There are a lot of ‘filler’ panels and pretty much no story, but I enjoyed the calming vibe.

Although the art style is very simple, it’s super cute. I actually think the simple style works well for this story. It’s also interesting that not everyone is a ghost. I actually found the human characters to be very jarring which is pretty funny. 

The black and white colour scheme works so well. It makes a lot of sense for a) a graphic novel about a ghost to be in black and white and b) a story about mental health struggles to have many shades of grey. I’m not sure how intentional this was but it makes sense to me. Maybe I’m reading into it too much. 

Not much really happens but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It seems to me that this series is character driven rather than plot. I did think a lot more would happen in a 250+ page graphic novel but the slow pace makes sense for the type of story this is.

Speaking of the characters, as someone with anxiety, they were very relatable but not in a way that feels negative. Often when characters are shown to be anxious or having a panic attack it instils a similar feeling in me but the whole atmosphere of this graphic novel was pretty calming. 

It would have been great to have SG and Socks to have more definitive designs as it was a little difficult to figure out who was talking sometimes. 

The cyclical format was really nice. I liked that the end frames were the same as the beginning ones. That’s not something you see very often and it was a nice touch. 

I already own the next two instalments in this series as I got them all pretty cheap. I’ll be continuing the series at some point as even though not a lot happened, this was a lovely read.

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