GH: GHOST RIDER #80

The last regular issue of GHOST RIDER I bought was #80,–literally just one issue away from the series’ cancellation with #81. So why did I jump off here, right before the end/ Well, the honest reason is that GHOST RIDER was never a book I was all that interested in. I bought it out of habit for a very long time, only really enjoying it infrequently across that period. I had the available funds, so why not? So when it came time to cull my pull list due to monetary woes, it was one of if not the first title that I thought of axing.

The first issue of GHOST RIDER that I ever bought was this one, #35. I picked it up on a trip to a supermarket as I recall–they had a small selection of comics there, including SHOGUN WARRIORS, and I brought this book home with me. It’s a fill-in issue but an excellent one, possibly the best issue in the entire run, with a terrific story by Jim Starlin in which Ghost Rider is forced to race three times against a personification of death. Even without telling you who the author was, would there have been any doubt? Anyway, it knocked me out–but not enough to get me to buy the next issue, which was by another creative team entirely. This was purely a one-off impulse purchase.

The first regular issue of GHOST RIDER that I bought was this one, #38, a few months later. And I couldn’t tell you why I made that decision. Quite possibly, it was because I had started my Pennysaver newspaper route by that point and had more disposable income to work with. In any case, I jumped on board the series regularly with this issue–and never truly liked it. Yet, I still kept buying it, possibly because it was a (quasi-)Marvel super hero title and I felt obligated to. I remember Michael Fleisher’s long run as writer being akin to an extended trek across the desert, with no water in sight. But still, I persisted–all the way up to #80. Why? Honestly, it beats me all these years later. I suppose I was an easy mark.

At the time, GHOST RIDER as a series was also looking up, and had been for a while. The creative team of J.M DeMatteis and my future boss Bob Budiansky had brought the series back around to its roots as a monster/horror title as much as a super hero one, beginning with an absolutely terrific retelling of the character’s origin in #68. But the one thing that they did in that–and I believe this was at the insistence of Editor in Chief Jim Shooter–was to eliminate all references to Satan. Having come out of the interest in supernatural horror in the early 1970s, Ghost Rider had literally sold his soul to Satan in order to get his powers. That was retconned here into Mephisto, Marvel’s more tame pet devil. And I didn’t like that revisionism. It may have been what kept me from enjoying this run more.

In making that change, DeMatteis and Budiansky also added in a significant element, one that would prove to become important in the revival years of the 1990s. Up until now, the Ghost Rider had simply been Johnny Blaze himself transformed, but they revealed that Johnny had actually been bonded to a malevolent demon, Zarathos, which styled itself the Spirit of Vengeance. So Ghost Rider was possessed, and Johnny had embarked on a quest to rid himself of his demonic passenger.

Looking at this issue now, what I really see is the influence Jim Shooter was having on the artwork. Having been trained by Mort Weisinger, whose comics were less about panel-to-panel storytelling and more akin to storybooks, Shooter liked mid-shots, and working in a strict grid format, and seeing full, complete figures. Under his influence, there were a lot more pages such as this one: nine panels, relatively copy heavy, relatively undramatic, as though you were watching the comic unfold from stadium seating. Shooter did a lot of improve the fundamental clarity of the Marvel books of this time, but in my opinion he tended to go too far on this singular point. As a reader, I was finding a lot of the Marvel titles dull to look at.

I mean, look at this fight sequence between Ghost Rider and Centurious, the Man Without A Soul (one of the new adversaries DeMatteis and Budiansky had introduced for ol’ skull-face.) Every shot is crystal clear, but it’s all shot from a distance, with tiny figures doing dramatic things in the quietest of ways. it isn’t bad per se, but it’s not visceral or engaging. It doesn’t get my blood pumping reading it. If anything, it feels perfunctory, like a necessary evil before getting back to the story at hand.

Tis issue ended with Johnny Blaze having sacrificed his soul to Centurious in order to save that of others, and he’s trapped in this mystic gem. I get the feeling that DeMatteis and Budiansky hadn’t been aware that the next issue would be their last when they plotted this. As I recall, they were given a double-sized issue to wrap up their plotlines, which may have been necessary given where they were in the story and the desire to bring Johnny’s story to a definitive conclusion.

Editor Tom DeFalco announced the cancellation on this issue’s Ghost Writers letters page, but assured readers that it would be worth their while to come back for the concluding issue. Sorry, Tom, but that didn’t work on me, and so I was done with this issue.

And GHOST RIDER was done as well. The character didn’t appear pretty much at all following the finale of his series for the rest of the 1980s. By the time this new reimagined relaunch came out, I was already ensconced on staff at Marvel So this would have been my first issue back. And it has to be said, the creative team of Howard Mackie, Javier Saltares and Mark Texiera did a dynamite job of reinventing the character for the times. He looked cooler, he had a younger human host in the person of Danny Ketch, who brought some Peter Parker energy to the strip, and he was cast as an urban vigilante rather than a guy who wandered around the midwest, and who fought horror-based super-villains such as Blackout and Deathwatch. It was a huge hit, especially for its first two years or so, and became something of an exemplar of how to dust off and invigorate a dormant Marvel property from the past. It also had a great logo, one that we’re still making use of today.