New York has embraced the New Ghostbusters, and PCOC liaison Jack Hardemeyer sees an opportunity: he wants the replacement team to scale back their search for the missing original Ghostbusters and instead devote their time to the public goodwill they are generating. Janine Melnitz is not pleased with that arrangement. The team is soon pulled away from politics entirely when a Geat ghost arrives at the firehouse seeking Janine by name. Its dialogue, which translates to "I am looking for Janine Melnitz," delivers a warning: Grendel is coming. The ghost itself appears to be visually modeled on Beowulf, the famous Geatish hero from Old English epic poetry, and the monster it warns of corresponds to the creature that Beowulf killed in the poem. Grendel manifests in Times Square at 6 p.m. local time, an apparent timezone miscommunication: the ghost apparently meant midnight Central European Summer Time (CEST), not midnight Eastern Standard Time, since the Netherlands runs six hours ahead of New York.
Kylie Griffin deploys the Extreme Ghostbusters-era PKE Meter and an Ecto-Visor to track the situation, while Ron Alexander reintroduces an upgraded Compact Pack not seen since Issue #1 and dons his Boson Pack from the first arc of the ongoing series. Janine Melnitz leads the field response, and the issue follows the team through a Times Square rendered in dense detail, including storefronts and advertisements drawn from episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and Extreme Ghostbusters. A brief scene at Parkview Psychiatric Hospital shows Janosz Poha in his room attended by an orderly recognizable from the opening cut scene of Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime.
Meanwhile, in the Collectors' limbo dimension, Egon Spengler and Ray Stantz believe they have identified a possible means of escape from their extradimensional prison. The walls of Egon's area in limbo are covered in Gozerian letters that, as noted in the trivia, spell out the names of the four original Ghostbusters. The issue ends with story threads seeded for the subsequent arc: Erik Burnham later confirmed that many elements introduced here return in Issues #5 and #6.
The issue also places the villain Idulnas in the background of events and gives Peter Venkman a scene in limbo alongside the other trapped Ghostbusters: Winston Zeddemore, Ray Stantz, and Egon Spengler.
The backup story continues inside the Containment Unit, featuring the Icon Ghost, Ralph, and Samhain, who appeared in the backup chapters of the previous two issues.
The issue was published with three regular covers. Cover A was previewed by Erik Burnham on December 19, 2012; it features Janine Melnitz in a standard flight suit holding the severed head of an entity. The retailer incentive (Cover RI) was drawn by Danny Cruz as separate 8x11 images. Cruz noted that the Ghostbusters figures and skulls took approximately three very long days to draw, the entity on the left took about a day, and the remaining two entities on the right took a few hours each. Proton Charging previewed Cover RI on January 18, 2013, sourced from Cruz's deviantArt account, and Cruz posted the original black and white version the following day. A regular cover with a "work in progress" companion version was posted by Chris Ryall on April 15, 2013, and a preview of the credits page and the first seven interior pages was released on April 16, 2013.
Development notes documented for this issue are notably dense given Erik Burnham's active social media presence during production.
The issue continues the series' tradition of embedding references to the wider Ghostbusters multimedia universe throughout its backgrounds and incidental details. Key items include:
