I loved Saga and was thrilled to have the opportunity to read something new from Brian K. Vaughan. Spectators is a graphic novel that showcases a dystopian future filled with violence and sex. We follow two voyeuristic ghosts as they explore the world and themselves through discussions. It's a beautiful and honest depiction of human nature. I absolutely love the gorgeous artwork. Some scenes were quite uncomfortable, but also added something to the plot.

Thanks to Image Comics and NetGalley for this eARC. I went in without knowing anything about the story and I was pleasantly surprised by the originally of it! PS: At 70% (sorry no page number), a page is duplicated except the sound of the cat.

I was drawn in by the unique and ambitious story of two specters traveling through a decaying society. The book does an excellent job of exploring difficult themes, but at times the pacing felt a bit slow and the constant depictions of intimacy and violence are overwhelming. The overall narrative didn't resonate with me as much as I'd hoped. It's a solid and thought-provoking read, but it didn't quite live up to its full potential for me.

Spectators were interesting.

I know a lot of us are here from Saga. This is just different. I am willing to read anything Vaughan writes because of his previous work. This was not my cup of tea. The social commentary in this outshone the story for me. Which may be the point, but I wanted to like our main characters, but a lot was going on that stopped that from happening.

Our main character dies from gun violence and I was immediately hooked. Mass shootings are not talked about enough, in any way, in our media. I was interested in how Vaughan would take this explosive and controversial opening to a storyline. I think he just missed the mark for me.

Purchased for review ahead of purchasing for the library-- It might be a bit too graphic for our patrons. But I kind of want it nonetheless.

This gives all the vibes of the Saga series but in a more contemporary setting. We find ourselves plunked into the future but nothing is overly futuristic, if that makes sense, but it has the graphic content that you would expect to see in, especially, the early volumes of Saga. It is interesting how this tackles society's obsession with violence and sex and how that can often intertwine and entangle. However, this did feel relatively surface level in that exploration. The very end had a great twist, I will say, even though breaking the fourth wall never really works for me no matter how well it is done and pulled off. It was certainly a unique way to end the story though!

Really interesting and intense read, not for the faint of heart, both when it comes to violence and sex but raises fascinating questions about both and how we think about and approach these topics in our society today. A very compelling and though provoking work. Thank you to NetGalley and Image Comics for the ARC!

This was a fun ride! Only a basic plot is given away in the blurb, so the story is quite unexpected.

It took me a little while to get into and grasp what was happening, but I really liked the characters, their backstory, and friendship (albeit a bit odd).

I do wish it was a bit longer to flesh out the panels and the story a bit more. Some panels felt too full of text, so it may have been easier to digest if the conversations were spread out. I also feel that there wasn't much of a plot. The sex and gore scenes obviously did add a bit of a buffer to stretch it out, but there wasn't much else to it.

Overall, I did enjoy the graphic novel! The artwork was fantastic, the characters were messy and fun, and the plot was interesting.

This was a wild and chaotic read! I went in absolutely blind and genuinely did not expect what I dove into.

Spectators follows the unlikely friendship that is formed between two individuals who have died, from two different times in history, as they float around observing people as the world is ending.

This graphic novel is filled with nothing but pure violence and sex, in the best of ways. A lot of voyeurism and orgies, if that tickles your fancy. I was pleasantly surprised with how enjoyable these panels were.

I did however, find it very dialogue heavy and I often became bored with the long text filled panels. Between the sex and violence, there was an awful lot of dialogue which lost me.

Overall, an enjoyably wild read, that was very wholesome and comforting as we followed along as our two protagonists grew closer together. The panels were beautifully illustrated, especially the selective colouring throughout.

Thank you so much to Netgalley for this arc in exchange for a review that is entirely my own opinion.

The artwork in this is amazing, and the premise is awesome—a lot of really cool details within the art and the plot. However, there isn't much to the plot, and some of the sex/violence feels a little gratuitous to the story. If you just appreciate it as an erotic/horror work of art, it hits the mark.

Brian K. Vaughan is a major concept mind in comics, and this story did not disappoint. Well-crafted art meets inventive writing — Vaughan is a consistent hitter.

This was really filthy but strangely charming.

I don't think I could recommend it for my library though!

Spectators, written by Brian K Vaughan and illustrated by Niko Henrichon, is a fascinating and definitely NSFW graphic novel that interrogates our glorification of and fascinating with violence, particularly in contrast with our greater censorship of and concern over sexuality. It’s definitely not a story for everyone, scenes of violence and sex are uber graphic and quite frequent, but neither is present simply to titillate or shock. One may quibble over how substantive Vaughan’s exploration is, but he is trying to say interesting things about big, important concepts here.

The novel opens up with our protagonist, a 40-some-year-old woman named Val, sitting in a movie theater, popcorn in hand, staring straight at the reader, immediately introducing one of the major themes in the story — voyeurism. The theme is further emphasized, and connected to a second one, when Val’s date texts he can’t make the movie, and she pulls up some amateur porn to watch as she waits for the movie to start. Unfortunately for Val, her porn watching is interrupted by the arrival of a third theme — violence — in the form of a mass shooter who kills (graphically) everyone in the theater, including Val. He narrates his body count as he kills, his goal to top the number killed by the Las Vegas shooter in 2017.

Val’s ghost separates from her body as the world turns from color to black and white (the dead continue to be shown in color). Soon she’s getting an “orientation” speech from another ghost (Lita), who explains that while most “move on” quickly, some choose not to, though “None of our kind has ever haunted, possessed, in any other manner interacted with anyone from the living world … The living can’t see us, can’t hear us, can’t nothing us … [we] will never be anything more than sweet nothings, passive observers of those we left behind.” When Val asks how long those who “aren’t ready” can stick around, Lita simply says hang out and see, after which we shift to roughly a century later, with Val basically channel-surfing through the living: “Another evening, another ten million new episodes” (both the language and her voyeurism mesh well with her job or possibly her hobby, which was writing online recaps of TV shows).

The twin themes of sex and violence continue, with Val joining a group of ghosts to watch a brutal fight club. After the winner accidentally kills his opponent, Val trails him and his girlfriend home, where the girlfriend tries to convince the remorseful boyfriend the death wasn’t his fault, and then the two start to have sex (did I mention there’s lots of sex?). Val’s voyeurism is interrupted with the arrival of the ghost of the man who once owned the house they’re in, a Black cowboy named Sam. Their conversation is disturbed by a news flash of a nuclear bomb going off in California, and it soon appears the world may be heading toward Armageddon. And so, as one does in that situation, they head out on a quest to observe a threesome. Along the way they have conversations about the fascination with violence, its glorification on screen, violent spectator sports like boxing and football, and the different ways we treat sex and violence. Val remains mystified, especially considering her own death, how “as a viewer, even now, few things are as satisfying as watching some deserving douche-bag go down in a hail of hot lead, but as a human being, I just think about how much it hurt.” And in one of my favorite scenes, she recalls her father introducing her to The Terminator, and twice censoring scenes — once when Arnie’s naked body arrives and again when Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor have sex — but having no compunctions at all about letting his young daughter watching all the bloody carnage. As she tells Sam:

My father had zero problem letting me watch dozens of innocent people get slaughtered. But a single, tasteful scene of two consenting adults making love — an act that, spoiler alert, is the catalyst for the entire goddamn story — was, what, forbidden? You don’t think there’s something completely twisted about that?

I can’t say the question is highly original, but that doesn’t make it any less worthy of asking. Nor does the fact that we keep asking it year after year after year (and apparently, will keep doing so decade after decade and century after century).

Beyond the themes of violence, sexuality, voyeurism, humanity’s bend toward self-destruction, the isolating impact of technology, and the mechanization of sexuality (we see people using a sex device Val compares to a Roomba), which alone make the novel worth reading, there’s a lot to like here. Val is an engaging an interesting character, one who feels wholly individualized. Sam is a bit less fully developed, but his different experiences (he died roughly around the turn to the 20th Century — he was child when the Civil War ended) and different tone/voicing, still add to the story. And we do get a tease into something deeper in him via how he spent years drifting out to Pluto and back and plans, if the human race wipes itself out, to travel even further to see what he finds.

The world building is relatively minimal but more than adequate to the story and fascinating in its dropping of little tidbits, such as the ongoing “Taiwan War”, a second Covid epidemic, the existence of a “West Korea.” And as far as plotting, it’s compulsively readable; I zipped through it in a single sitting and happily reread it several times before writing this review.

Meanwhile, visually, it’s a beautifully rendered graphic novel. The futuristic world is a nice mix of the familiar and unfamiliar in terms of its futuristic architecture, dress, etc. I loved the use of color for the dead and black and white for the world of the living, both in terms of the visuals and how it plays against type. The use of recollection from Val and Sam (done in color as they’re amongst the living in their respective time periods) and the different eras represented by all the dead (we don’t see them but Val met a Neanderthal while Sam met a medieval knight) allows for different images and palettes and also some visually striking juxtapositions, as when we see two small children in 17th or 18th century garb standing atop some sort of orbital station/space cruiser, or when a shoeshine boy, a man in a powdered wig, and someone wearing what looks like a space corps uniform float by against the background of the futuristic city.

Outside of the general look, there’s a lot of clever use of visuals as well. As already noted, for instance, there’s the way we open with a nod to observation/voyeurism, with Val in the theater. Later on, in the fight club scene, when a character is bent over the dead fighter, he looks up and yells at the spectators, “The fuck are you all looking at?” A line that could just as easily be delivered to the watching dead, but also, adding another layer, to the reader. There are several more such moves, but I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of coming across them.

Spectators is not an easy story to look at. It’s not a comforting read. But it’s a compelling one, an engaging one, and it asks some important questions even if, as noted, they aren’t particularly new ones. It’s an excellent melding of story, art, and theme and one that I heartily recommend.

★★★ Bold and thought-provoking, but not for everyone

Spectators is definitely one of the more unusual graphic novels I’ve read. The concept—ghosts watching the living in a future New York—is intriguing, and Vaughan doesn’t shy away from taboo topics like sex, violence, and trauma. The art by Niko Henrichon is stunning and adds a lot of emotional weight to the story.

An odd meditation on voyeurism, mass murder, and the goofy double standard of Americans when it comes to our attitudes toward the depiction of sex and violence in the media.

Of course the book is filled with graphic sex and violence, with the sex sure to outrage someone at some point while the violence will go unremarked. So in many ways, its a stunt, an attempt to prove a point.

Big picture aside, this is mostly the story of two people forming a bond as they carry on a conversation over a couple of days. They come to like each other, just as I came to like both of them.


Disclosure: I received access to a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com.

A very violent and very sexual book that puts a mirror in front of our face to show us clearly our doble standards. Despite having multiple graphic depictions of murder the pages that made me more umcomfortable were the sexual ones. Just like Val said, why can we watch a bunch of people be massacred without problem but squirm at consensual sex between adults?

It's not a subtle read regarding it's message but it does leave the reader thinking.

Gorgeously illustrated and a wonderful, horrible mix of violence and erotica - I read it in one sitting and couldn't look away. The characters, the setup, the world, the brutality and sexuality, all of it swirls beautifully together, with an ending that I can't stop thinking about. I loved it and definitely recommend; it's a very compelling read that will stay with you.

Thank you to Netgalley and Image Comics for the ARC.

Spectators follows Val and Sam, two individuals who have died, and now spend their days watching other humans live their lives. Val’s death is more recent and occurred during a mass shooting. Years later, she meets Sam, a cowboy-esque man who passed away a much longer time ago. Together, they explore relevant stories of their past lives while they observe people navigating the end of the world. It is raunchy, provocative, and an unexpected love story.

I love Brian Vaughan’s stories. I’ve been reading Saga for a while now, so I was excited to read his latest work. I found the plot intriguing, and I found it particularly interesting to see how sex or intimacy are almost treated as more taboo, or as taboo, as violence/murder. Brian definitely captures the way that humans are often drawn to the things that we are most discouraged to engage with. We all end up being voyeurs on some level.

I think the art is very well done. I love when artists play with colour to represent shifts in time or to capture different environments. Graphic novelists can sometimes neglect the art over the story, but this is very much not the case with Spectators. The art and use of colour is so good that I often was focused on the details of the main characters, despite the absolute chaos happening behind them.

It's definitely not for everyone, it puts the graphic in graphic novel, but if you’re into Vaughan’s stories, this will likely be right up your ally.

A fascinating story about why we are drawn to sex and violence like moths to a flame. The story follows two ghosts as they observe events in a futuristic New York City. The humor was sly and at times dark. The Leaderboard players offered a way too plausible motive for mass shooters.

Big thanks you Netgalley and Brian K Vaughan for the eARC in exchange for a review.



This was not for me. The storyline just went wide and there was no plot.

The art was nice.