I'm really sorry but this book never appeared in my netgalley app! I've been searching for it multiple times but it never popped up

That was a total disappointment. Wow am I sad, I read this purely because of the Brian K Von dang tag and expected the unique storytelling and in-depth character work that I have come to expect from Brian K Vawn because of his previous work that is excellent and several of his titles are in my top 10 so I didn’t even need to read the blurb and learn what this was about to know that I wanted to read it. I hit request without doing any sort of research about the story and when I was approved I read it immediately and while the beginning started out strong and showed promise, things quickly got weird and continued in that direction. This was super bizarre and it felt more like a teenagers weird horny comic book then the work of a talented and intelligent artist, it was full of gratuitous sex scenes that served absolutely no purpose, the dialogue was cheesy and the whole plot was nonsensical and not in a cute way. I was sorely disappointed by this!

Thanks to Image Comic and Net Galley for an ARC

Spectators is a wild ride from start to finish. A story one part shocking violence, one part graphic sex and one part social commentary the three make an interesting little ménage à trois of a a love story.

It was a nice length and managed to build tension even with our main characters being mostly out of harms way.

The art was a bit frantic but in a way that served the story. Energetic and full of movement.

I dont think this will be everyone’s cup of tea but it was mine !

3 ⭐️

I’ve read work of Brian Vaughan before and this one surely was different. I felt like there wasn’t much story and mostly focus on the explicit content. Their view of human nature is quite interesting, but doesn’t appeal to me at all.

If ghosts, graphic sex (among others: voyeurism and orgies) and violence don’t disturb you, this is the book for you!

The artwork is excellent!

Thanks Netgalley and Image Comics for letting me read this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Spectaors is a great graphic novel. It's an interesting story about what happens after you die in the ghost world in the future. The artwork is also good. I highly recommend it!

The black and white vs colour imagery was really neat. I really enjoyed the dynamic of the main characters. Very spicy scenes and had violence but the story wasn’t too focused on that part.

Thank you NetGalley and Image Comics for the ARC!

This was a very cool graphic novel. The way that it touched on life and death and your life AFTER death was very interesting. I enjoyed seeing Val and Sam learning how to navigate this sci-fi world they were in. The Leaderboard aspect of the story was WILD. I did not expect that to still be prevalent in the future for them. While the story was very violent, graphic, and dark, I did enjoy Sam and Val together. I thought they were really cute and I liked how they were able to bond and protect one another. It was an enjoyable read overall.

Let me preface this by saying that I didn’t hate this from a message standpoint, but I just don’t think it was for me. This caught my eye because Brian K. Vaughn was a writer on Lost and I had also read the first Saga comic, which I enjoyed. Unfortunately, this was a voyeuristic view into people’s obsession with sex and violence, and it was (no pun intended) graphic, especially with recent events in this country. I do think the art was cool, and the story had a full-circle ending. I'm just not sure if I would continue if there are more stories. Thanks to Netgalley and Image Comics for the arc!

Spectators
By Brian K. Vaughan
Illustrated by: Niko Henrichon
Image Comics
3.5⭐️
3 🌶️

🔘Thriller
🔘Erotica
🔘Sci Fi

This graphic novel/manga comic is very different from your average book. It was fun and very creatively laid out.

It begins with a single girl in a movie theater that gets murdered by an active shooter. She makes friends with another ghost. The story takes place as she floats around in what appears to be purgatory, “watching” the living.The world appears to be very violent with a lot of death occurring and very promiscuous as sexual acts occur throughout. The graphics make the story more intriguing and even comedic. I wish the ending had been solidified as it leaves you wanting more.

Thank you to Image Comics and Net Galley for providing me an advanced e-book copy in exchange for my honest review.

Tropes:
🔪 Violence
☠️ Death
🩸Dystopia
🪫Ghosts

The ghosts of a horny woman written by a man and a cowboy search for an threesome whilst incels perform mass shootings and the world ends

This is the first book of its kind that I have read, so I did not know what to expect.
The graphics were great and the designs made it easy to follow the story and gave it allot of dept. The description of a society that has lived accustomed with the idea of war and chaos and the fragility of human relations or the lack of meaningful feeling towards others are what I think is most relevant.

Imagine a sky filled with floating corpses who've decided NOT to "pass on" . . .

They're out there, watching you, even in your most "intimate" moments.

Two of them who REALLY like to watch are in the mood to see a threesome, and it basically takes them an entire book to find one. There are some other things going on as well: introspection, revealed memories, Teddy Roosevelt . . . but this is mostly about S-E-X.

The book gets four stars because it definitely held my interest. My review is of the physical hardback that was purchased for the library where I work. Believe me, the next person who dares to complain about Gender Queer: A Memoir is gonna get an eyeful when I cram this one in their faces with an, "Oh, yeah - take a gander at THIS one!"

Readers won't be able to look away as they watch with dark fascination how SPECTATORS explores the fine line between living and watching others live. Explicitly sexy and shockingly violent, this lavishly hand-painted epic is a thought-provoking, metaphysical masterpiece and the most ambitious collaboration yet between Pride of Baghdad artist Niko Henrichon and Saga writer Brian K. Vaughan.
This book was difficult for me to judge since the topic was entirely new and unlike anything I’ve read before. While the concept is unique and interesting, I couldn’t fully connect with it. I appreciate the idea, but overall, I don’t think this book was meant for me.

2.5

So… I knew this graphic novel was going to be explicit, and I was fine with that, I mean, I’ve read Saga and it also has those kinds of scenes. BUT, I didn’t expect it to be this much. And honestly, it does make sense given the plot and the dynamic between the main characters. Still, I felt like in several parts the conversations just went in circles and ended up… nowhere. It’s not that every dialogue between the main characters has to be super meaningful, but I was expecting more than just that.

The story clearly had a lot of potential, but instead of exploring it, it felt like the focus leaned too heavily on the explicit content. And while I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, it did feel like a missed opportunity to add more depth and substance to the narrative.

As for the ending, I don’t know... it felt kinda poetic, which I appreciated, but at the same time I wish they had given us more details about a subplot that was actually really important, because it basically sets up the whole finale. Overall, it was promising, but it just didn’t deliver as much as it could have. For me obvsly.

My final rating is 2.5. It honestly kinda hurts to give it this score because I had much higher hopes. The concept and the potential were there, but the execution just didn’t click for me.

This dystopian adult graphic novel offers a bold, unique experience.
Unlike Vaughan’s previous works that I have previously read (Saga, Paper Girls, Runaways), it features intense violence, nudity, and explicit scenes, which may not suit all readers.

The art is stunning, using color to distinguish the afterlife from the living world in black-and-white.
Two voyeuristic ghosts, Val and Sam, bond in the afterlife as they observe life’s chaos, sex, and societal collapse.

BKV’s writing is thought-provoking, highlighting how desensitization to violence and sex shapes our perception of the world.

I highly recommend this graphic novel for those seeking a provocative, visually striking dystopian story.

Thank you to Brian K. Vaughan, Image Comics, and NetGalley for this ARC.

✨ Review of Spectators ✨
I have so many thoughts about this graphic novel, but I’ll focus on the depth, themes, and symbolism that stood out most to me.

At its heart, Spectators follows Val and Sam. Val was at a theater during a mass shooting — a horrifying event that leads to her death. But instead of disappearing, she becomes a ghost. In this world, ghosts don’t move on until they uncover what’s keeping them tethered. For Val and Sam, that tether is voyeurism.

The title makes this so clear: Spectators. Both Val and Sam exist as watchers. Since Val’s death — spanning over 200 years — she has drifted through the world observing, particularly moments of intimacy and sex. The book makes voyeurism not just a personal trait but an existential condition of the afterlife. It raises unsettling but fascinating questions: what does it mean to watch when you no longer exist in a body? What does it mean to look at others when you yourself can never again be seen in the same way?

I found myself especially struck by the novel’s meditation on death and privacy. Vaughn suggests that the dead have no agency, no boundaries — they are stripped of privacy in the same way they are stripped of life. Val’s compulsion to watch the living becomes a kind of reclaiming: if she cannot be seen or remembered as fully alive, then she will at least witness others in their rawest moments.

The narrative also weaves in the chilling reality of mass shootings. In this universe, shootings have become gamified — reduced to a leaderboard system where killers compete for points. It’s such a disturbing metaphor for the culture of violence we live in, and it left me unsettled. That idea of turning something horrific and tragic into a game speaks to humanity’s endless obsession with conquest — chasing numbers, trophies, or status even at the expense of lives.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is the use of color and black-and-white in its artwork. The dead are rendered in full color, while the living appear only in black-and-white. This reversal is striking. Sam even mentions at one point that they can only see the living in monochrome, as if life itself has been stripped of vibrancy once viewed from the other side. At the end, when Val and Sam kiss and seem to meld into each other before moving on, the living are suddenly depicted in color. It’s an unsettling but powerful inversion — suggesting that death changes how existence itself is perceived, and that the boundary between living vibrancy and ghostly absence isn’t as clear-cut as we assume.

Beyond this, the artwork overall deserves praise. The drawings feel intentional, with symbolism tucked into details that reinforce the larger ideas: watching, absence, and the eerie intimacy between life and death. The images make the philosophical weight of the book hit harder, grounding its abstract themes in haunting visuals.

Overall, Spectators is a deeply layered, provocative read. It left me thinking about voyeurism, death, violence, and how we treat both the living and the dead. It’s not an easy book, but it is one that lingers long after you close it — unsettling, thought-provoking, and brilliant in its execution.

An interesting take on our voyeuristic culture - this had a lot to say and succeeded. I was definitely hooked and enjoyed the story.

There is a subgenre in fiction that touches upon the afterlife, in which those who have died are left to wander as ghostly figures to witness what is going on in the living world. The most popular of these stories may be the 1990 film Ghost, where Patrick Swayze plays a restless soul who sets out to save his living girlfriend, played by Demi Moore. That film is specifically referenced in the new graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Spectators, in which one character refers to their current situation as pretty much the opposite of Ghost.

The book opens in our present day, where Val, who writes recaps for television shows, is stood up by her date as she hits a movie theater in New York. Even worse, she and other attendees are about to become victims of a mass shooting. Waking up to discover she is dead, she walks as a spirit through the world now presented in black and white. As hundreds of years go by, Val crosses paths with a fellow spectator named Sam, a mysterious gun-toting man from the distant past. Normally solo travelers, the two decide to travel around the world together, bearing witness to society’s forward march toward decay, whilst in search of a threesome.

Reuniting the two creators behind the Vertigo graphic novel Pride of Baghdad, expect something unconventional despite the rather well-worn premise. Even the monochrome presentation seems to be lifted from the cinematic likes of A Matter of Life and Death and Wings of Desire. Through the lens of Val, who is presented as our gateway into the world of Spectors, instead of showing how she learns the full understanding of her situation, the book’s time jump from early on allows for a more retrospective look at life and what humanity hasn’t really learned from history.

Over the course of 300+ pages, Spectators serves mostly as a double-header between Val and Sam, each existing in a different time period from the other. Whatever life experiences and ideologies they have had individually before, it never comes into play as they become unlikely friends, sharing their most intimate thoughts from sexual awakenings to particular pop culture interests.

If you have read Brian K. Vaughan’s work, from Y: The Last Man to Saga, you know that no matter how sci-fi his storytelling is, the stories are very much rooted in the relatability of his characters where humor and tragedy come out of frank conversations about relationships and our animalistic urges as humans. While Val is the most relatable of the two leads thanks to her modern voice, Sam has his own journey with cinema, even going back to its origins and early evolution as a medium. For these two, movies are a distraction from their harsh reality, but since the future has gotten rid of cinema, the next big entertaining thing to watch is two people or so getting it on with each other.

Make no mistake, this is a very graphic book, starting with an opening sequence where Val is watching adult videos on her phone to get horny before being riddled with bullets in a spectacularly bloody fashion. The content serves as a response to the American censorship where bloody violence can be seen by the youngsters, but anything sexual that appears, the rating goes up, so artist Niko Henrichon leans hard on making this as adult orientated as possible. However, there is more than just sex and violence as the hand-painted art is lavish and beautiful, even when depicting the dystopian monochrome future – owing a debt to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – that is contrasted with the colored Spectators themselves. After reading this, you can see why the comic was three years in the making.

Although Val and Sam themselves can never interact with the living and only observe, the closest to an ongoing conflict is a terrorist movement that seems to have grown over the decades, catching the attention of other Spectators. The most striking visual of those shooters is that they are wearing headgear that resembles fictional characters we know, like Mickey Mouse and Spider-Man, suggesting they are an anti-corporate entity. The book may not specifically say the names of pop culture icons, but it does suggest that Vaughan’s own distaste for these corporate IPs after years of working on them, to the point that the writer is currently in the realm of indie comics, creating wonders like Saga and Spectators.

Three years in the making, Spectators is worth the wait as a multi-faceted epic that ranges from sci-fi to the afterlife and an examination of humanity at its most self-destructive and raunchiest.

So I get what Brian K. Vaughan tried to do here and I get it - our world lately seems to be only about violence and sex (or lack of it), but it did not have the depth I was looking for. Voyeurism seems to be a big theme in my reading lately and I'm a sucker for breaking the fourth wall.

Art was also not up my alley, it's not bad, just nothing special or new and art is a big part of my enjoyment of a graphic novel.

Hundreds of years in the future, New York City is haunted by many ghosts, including a voyeuristic woman who died in our present day and a mysterious gun-toting man from the distant past. Normally solo travelers, these two specters meet and travel around the world together, bearing witness to society's forward march toward decay.

Spectators take the graphic in graphic novels seriously. While the story was fascinating and very well written, I was not expecting basically porn. I'm not offended, but I'm just surprised. So I'd nudity and graphic sex is offensive to you, then skip this one entirely.   If a well written and beautifully drawn story is what you seek, then you'll up a chair.

Spectators definitely make you think.  If ghost do exist, are they always watching? Watching the sweet moments, the cruel ones, and the private ones? I'd rather not spend much time thinking about that.
As to how I would like to spend the last moments of existence if I could choose...Well Vaughan has a good idea here.  Why waste it crying and gnashing your teeth when one last moment of pleasure and closeness can be had.

Recommended. Expected publishing date 9/23/2025

Thanks to @netgalley and Image Comics for the opportunity to read this eArc in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion