Living in the opening of a climate crisis, I’m watching for something good to happen—an uptick in renewable energy sources, fusion energy finally achieved, or another miracle.

Comics are bastions of fantastical thinking, right? Only in the pages of a comic could we see a tower that provides almost limitless energy by harvesting the personifications of our most common sources of said energy. When does a company not try to make something scarce for an economic edge? Now we get to see what happens when that tower comes down in Nick Dragotta, Caleb Goellner, and Rus Wooton’s Ghost Cage.

Ohm is the biggest corporation on Earth. After building the tower, Ohm would go on to influence nearly every facet of life through power outages and planned “maintenance.” But after an attack on the tower, the sources of power have escaped containment and are threatening to tear the tower apart from the inside.

Ohm has a back-up plan: Sam. If Ohm’s tower is powered by the imprisoned spirits of various energy sources, then Sam is the spirit of consumption—quite literally as he goes floor by floor to absorb each of those spirits. But while he makes this journey, he’s shepherded by Doyle, an Ohm tech drafted into helping check Sam’s diagnostic data to ensure he’s able to make it to the top. Doyle herself is brought into the fold because she’s one of hundreds in the tech support paddock—loyal enough to do whatever Ohm asks and trusting enough to never question any of it. 

There’s a certain degree of absurdity that comes with Ghost Cage’s concept that feels both ripped from the pages of popular battle manga and a not-completely-illogical leap from late capitalism. Sam literally fights and eats these spirits in the name of progress. But whose is that progress? All this energy Sam is absorbing is in service to the AI version of Ohm’s founder, Karloff.

The frantic density of Ghost Cage’s three issues speaks to the comic power of Dragotta, Goellner, and Wooton. We see a microcosm of the world that could be with a company like Ohm at the helm of Earth’s power supply, the limits of that power, and the world after their grip is gone. And the latter comes from the people who were trapped on the inside of it—the employees, daughters, and creations of a massive company—and shows us that it’s those people who always push the world forward. 

Get excited. Get powered.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.