Wine Ghost Goes to Hell

This spunky yet truncated graphic novel by Coffey (I Am Not a Wolf) reads as if Walter Scott’s Wendy died and went to an afterlife drawn up like Lisa Hanawalt’s Tuca & Bertie. Wine Ghost, a bed sheet with pink legs and high heels, drinks wine in a rent-free grave in hell and has “a depression that just won’t quit.” When Sebastian, a newly deceased friend, arrives at her doorstep in the form of an anthropomorphic green canine, he cajoles her into an apartment search in hell’s “inner circle” (“I wanna be where the action is!” he pleads). The task lightly parodies the soul-crushing drudgery of house-hunting as they tour rentals, including the ever-expanding void of a large hotel room and a “weird old sex palace.” A run-in at a bar with Wine Ghost’s crush, a cute fish girl named Pepper, sends the specter into a booze-induced spiral (and conflict with an oddly snappish Sebastian that’s awkwardly shoehorned into the script). Neon colors amplify surreal and hilarious happenings in the Beetlejuician afterlife even as dialogue flags occasionally into cliché. It’s an abbreviated peek into a promising conceit that will leave readers hoping for more in a sequel. (Sept.)