Review by Frank Plowright

In a scene-setting prelude Gabriel Navarro is featured as a young child learning he’s able to see and communicate with ghosts. By the time he’s reached middle school he’s known about his psychic abilities for some while, and via an incident on a school trip loose cannon Clem discovers what Gabe can do.

She’s enthusiastic about Gabe’s talents and persuades him to set up a psychic investigation business at the school. A video she makes of the first investigation goes viral, and soon Gabe is a sort of hero, but he’s not greatly happy about it.

There’s considerable energy to KT Healey’s art, but no great technique, which makes Psychic Investigators, Evil Exterminators a greater chore to read than it ought to be. Characters are jumbled into panels, and kids are shown with such manic energy prompting wonder about what they’re getting in their food, particularly Clem. It’s the type of exaggerated comedy artwork Peter Bagge once produced so well, yet falls flat here. Simple lumpy drawings of kids are supplied with very little background, the space often occupied by massive word balloons.

It’s a style that might just about work were the minimal plot not hyper-extended. The kids investigating anything takes planning and working around minor problems, and for a long time Healey shows far more of that than anything we really want to see. It’s almost halfway through the book before the a proper investigation, and that’s also the point where the characters really open up for the first time, Gabe talking about how he feels about his aunt dying to Mel, a girl who’s also lost someone close. It’s rather the relief, but also the path not taken.

Anyone with the patience to work their way through to the end will discover Healey’s plot threads about coping with loss come together very nicely and the final thirty pages carry some emotional weight. However, Psychic Investigators, Evil Exterminators could have been more effectively told in half the pages.