IDW Ghostbusters Con-Volution! Comic Book Preview & Review (UPDATED)

IDW has made available this five-page preview PDF (1.5 Mb) of the Ghostbusters: Con-Volution! comic book that comes out tomorrow, June 23rd. Unsurprisingly, there are not two covers - as writer Jim Beard and IDW's own solicitation had both said - but three covers! In addition to Covers A & B, there's a Retailer Incentive cover, which is simply Cover A without the titling. Such a cheap ploy to garner more sales from the collectors. Apparently IDW has no faith that their Ghostbusters books will sell well simply on the Ghostbusters name alone, otherwise they wouldn't need to pull this cheap trick. The least they could have done was come up with new artwork for the RI cover. The reused untitled artwork just adds insult to injury.

Anyway, as usual, you can buy all three covers of Con-Volution! from Graham Crackers Comics and Mile High Comics or your local comics shop, if you have one.

[UPDATE - 6/30/2010]
Now that my copies of the comic have arrived in the mail, and I've read the whole thing, I can give it a quick review. In short, it's very disappointing. It reads like fan fiction, not an official story. Although all of the other IDW comic stories weren't epic, they didn't feel as "fan fiction-ey" as Con-Volution! does.

The story is WAY too short, clocking in at a mere 22 pages long. It would barely be 10 minutes if made into an animated show. We should be getting stories that would be 22 minutes long if animated - you know, like a full-length Real Ghostbusters episode. This is one of the problems of doing one-shots instead of a mini-series or - better yet - an ongoing series.

Oh, and artist Josh Howard made Peter and Ray look near-exactly alike. They both look like "Peter" to me. I think Josh was aware of this because he provided a handy headshot guide on the third page: