Bob Hope made The Ghostbreakers in 1940 with Paulette Goddard. His comic book The Adventures of Bob Hope (that ran from February 1950 to February 1968) put Bob in every imaginable scenario from Westerns to Cavemen to court jester. Like his comedy films, the comic book writers could pop Bob into any story line and the jokes would fly. So it seems obvious that Hope should be a ghostbreaker, right.
Well, it took until issue #81 (June-July 1963) before it happened and being 23 years after his film about millionaire heiresses and voodoo, the movie has almost no effect on the comic story line. The author is not known but the art, both cover and story, were done by MAD Magazine legend, Mort Drucker.
Bob, who is unemployed and avoiding his landlady, answers an ad in the paper. He is to go to England with Professor Higby and his attractive daughter to clear an ancient castle of ghosts. Bob sees it as a free-rent situation and a chance to avoid bill collectors.
When the trio arrive in England, the locals refuse to take them to Castle Blight. Bob has to help pull the rental wagon to the castle. When they open the doors, bats fly out. Higby’s daughter notices that the castle rooms are free of dust. Bob has an encounter with haunted paintings.
Cliches begin to pile up with secret panels and encounters with ghosts. The Professor’s invisibility machine, one of his experiments, adds to the fun. The ghosts prove to be human criminals that hold Bob and Higby’s daughter at gun point. Enter Matilda Blight, femme fatale.
Bob discovers the million dollars that Matilda and her crooks have been looking for. Unfortunately, he also destroy the money. But it doesn’t matter because real ghosts kick everybody out of the castle.
Pretty stock stuff. I recall an episode of I Dream of Genie (episode #82: “My Master, the Ghostbreaker” February 20, 1968) that was pretty much the same. By the 1960s the whole ghostbreaker thing was pretty old hat. Scooby-Doo and other children’s fare like The Addams Family and The Munsters also marked this trend. That being said, Kolchak and the 1970s would bring it all back into vogue.
