On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws.