If the measure of a brand new series is whether I’d want to read another volume, then Alyssa Wong, Haining, and company’s Spirit World succeeds. I’m pleased to know already that we’re due to see protagonist Xanthe Zhou in the DC Universe, and I’d be happy for more appearances after that.

The book’s setting and Xanthe’s power set — both steeped in mythology but fresh-feeling for the DCU — might have been enough to carry Spirit World alone, along with stellar work from Haining, colorist Sebastian Cheng, and letterers Janice Chiang and Steve Wands; with Wong, this is a creative team firing on all cylinders. But including here also Batgirl Cassandra Cain and John Constantine is inspired; on it’s own, teaming these multi-faceted DC stalwarts would be a draw, and doing so in the midst of a new series bolsters the whole thing further.

DC’s doing increasingly well keeping up with certain characters both in their annual DC Pride and DC Power anthologies and also across the crossover anthologies like we saw for Lazarus Planet and Titans: Beast World. “Spirit World” stories have already appeared in two such places, so that gives further hope Xanthe might stick around for a while.

[Review contains spoilers]

Again, a good amount of draw to Spirit World, from the included Lazarus Planet short on through, is the presence of Batgirl and John Constantine. Both get plenty of screen time, and Spirit World could easily be either character’s story primarily — it wouldn’t be the first time Constantine was our guide to a new supernatural realm, nor does battling through Asian mysticism seem off-brand for Cassandra Cain. Constantine is perhaps too altruistic here, watered down for the “all readers” set, but it’s a fun match-up — Constantine is a scoundrel, sometimes with a heart of gold but sometimes with a heart of coal; Cassandra is a good-willed hero but with a dark past that often haunts her. Sarcastic is Constantine’s baseline, while the taciturn Cassandra is often written with biting one-liners; Wong uses these attributes for good interplay throughout.

Spirit World introduces us to Xanthe, neither fully alive nor fully dead, serving as a “spirit envoy” between our world and the next. As Xanthe, who uses they/them pronouns, describes it, the dead can’t bring physical objects to the spirit world, so it’s Xanthe’s job to seek what the dead need and retrieve it. Wong has created something that might work just as well in an anthologized television series — think Quantum Leap with ghosts, or Touched by an Angel — as Xanthe completes different missions and runs into complications as they do. That might be as simple as bringing peace between a family and their departed loved one, though it also sometimes leads to fighting vampires or amalgam ghost monsters called Collectives.

Most notably, Xanthe’s superheroic shtick is the ability to fold joss paper into various forms for use — a gigantic sword, or stairs to get over a high fence, or a paper airplane to break a fall. This is in the genre of a Green Lantern ring, but something that on the face of it, paper, is nonviolent, not a weapon. I can’t recall origami as a superpower before, and it’s a fun other detail for Spirit World, making Xanthe one of those heroes whose ability is only limited by their imagination.

The “Spirit World” itself, unexpectedly, resembles a prototypical Asian neighborhood. As such, there’s a normalizing element that grounds the fantastical in the familiar — yes, it’s technically the underworld, and there’s demons and mutated spirits and a fraught pipeline to reincarnation, but also apartment buildings made up of families and sometimes-curmudgeonly elders — when they haven’t been transformed into rampaging ghost Collectives. I have a low tolerance for characters hanging out in dreamscapes and amorphous realms, but Wong makes the Spirit World feel immediately as livable as other DC locales like Skartaris or the 31st century or New Genesis.

No small credit for that surely goes to Haining, whose sprawling cityscapes and bulbous monsters alike are filled with innumerable tiny details. At the same time, while I do think Spirit World could be classified as at least horror-adjacent (certainly Vertigo-esque), there’s an appealing manga bent that nicely softens the whole thing. Sebastian Cheng’s colors are particularly vibrant, lots of magic in pale purples and greens that distinguish the scenes.

Though I’m happy to see Wong continue to write Spirit World, I thought it was a good sign that Jeremy Holt and Andrew Drilon’s included DC Pride “Spirit World” story also seemed tonally the same, teaming Xanthe this time with Batwoman. Should a writer or artist be too much associated with a character, particularly a new character, it can be harder for that character to appear elsewhere in stories that work; we know equally that Kelly Thompson will be writing Xanthe, so it’s good that we’re setting precedent now.

A curious dangling thread from Spirit World is the notion that Batgirl had been there before — that her mother Lady Shiva killed her and then resurrected her in a Lazarus Pit, and Cassandra was in the spirit world in between. I wondered at first if this was a reference to Andersen Gabrych’s Batgirl: Destruction’s Daughter, part of a controversial Infinite Crisis-era villain turn for the character, though the flashback that we see doesn’t completely line up. I’m curious whether there’s not more to tell or if this might be picked up in another title where Batgirl appears. (Speaking of Batgirl, it bears shouting out to Dustin Nguyen’s variant covers, which are nicely in the style of his previous depictions of the character, and lend to the feeling of this as Cassandra’s book as much as Xanthe’s).

In a way that comics haven’t in a while, Spirit World reminds me of a two-hour television pilot, detailing the politics of the spirit world, introducing Xanthe’s spirit friends Po Po and Bowen, and Alyssa Wong even manages to work in an appearance by Xanthe’s estranged “living” family. It’s a great debut — interesting, different, and fun — and I hope DC keeps using what’s set up here.

[Includes original and variant covers, character designs]