On the first 450 pages of Marvel's second Ghost Rider (via 2023's Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Epic Collection: Vengeance Reborn)

As I noted after reading 2005's Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1, many of the things I associated with Marvel's Ghost Rider character were absent from his earliest adventures, and I assumed they must have either been introduced later in the title, which ran for a total of 81 issues between 1973 and 1983, or have been innovations that accompanied the introduction of the second of Marvel's flaming-skulled, motorcycle riding Ghost Rider, the Danny Ketch version from the 1990s.

Beyond curiosity about when the character started swinging chains or driving foes mad with his "Penance Stare," after spending so much time with the Satan-powered Johnny Blaze of the 1970s, I was also curious to see how the character might have been updated for a new readership a generation or so later. 

Luckily, my library had a copy of 2023's Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Epic Collection: Vengeance Reborn, which collects the first 12 issues of the1990 Ghost Rider series, a series that would ultimately run 93 issues and not be cancelled until 1998. It also collects an eight-issue run of the character and Wolverine from Marvel Comics Presents and his guest-appearances in an issue apiece of Marc Spector: Moon Knight and Doctor Strange. (As well as some backmatter of some interest, like some pin-ups and covers, a Fred Hembeck comic strip and a 1991 prose piece from writer Howard Mackie about his reinvention of the character.)

My curiosity was sated. 

It was indeed this series that introduced such aspects of the character like the chain, the flaming-wheeled motorcycle and the Penance Stare (While the two live-action films featured the Johnny Blaze secret identity, it's now abundantly clear that the Ghost Rider in them was actually the later, Ketch version). 

And, somewhat surprising to me, the character was very, very different from the original, the connections between the two Ghost Riders apparently not being made until later than Mackie's initial resurrection of the character (somewhat frustratingly, this Ghost Rider's origins don't start to be spoken of at all until the last few issues collected, about the same time that a mysterious, red-haired motorcyclist who would turn out to be Blaze starts making brief appearances; in fact, the last issue of Ghost Rider collected herein ends with a next issue box reading, "Next Month...Johnny Blaze arrive[s] in Manhattan!")

Here are some random thoughts on these comics, in the same bullet-pointed random thought format as my previous posts on Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1 and Champions Classic Vol. 1...

•First, I was struck by how extremely different the two Ghost Riders are, despite visual details in common, like the flaming skulls for heads, the leather jackets, the motorcycles. 

Their powers, for example, are quite different. Both are tougher and stronger than mere mortals, of course, but the second Ghost Rider seems more-or-less invulnerable, able to survive most punishment, even reconstituting himself when he's blown up, as well as super-strong, bending a gun with one hand. 

And while Johnny's "super-powers" were limited to projecting "hellfire" from his hands (and occasionally summoning a motorcycle made of pure hellfire), Danny fights instead with a magical chain, which he usually uses to entangle opponents, but which can also stiffen into a spear or separate its links into projectiles. He also possesses his "Penance Stare," which Mackie describes thusly upon its first use, upon a low-level hood:

Eldon Lambert peers into eyes which reflect every transgression from his past--

--he experiences all the pain that he has inflicted on others.

His mind burns with the mental anguish of his victims.

Eldon wishes that the Ghost Rider had dropped him and allowed him to escape this misery.

Oddly, everyone seems to know about this ability and call it "The Penance Stare"; maybe Eldon Lambert spread the word around? 

This Ghost Rider's goal seems to be to deliver this stare to his foes, as though he calls himself "The Spirit of Vengeance" and to more-or-less talk about vengeance constantly. And perhaps this is something of a contradiction, but he also completely eschews killing, even stopping others, like The Punisher, from taking human lives.

Of course, Ghost Rider seems to avoid killing people similar to the way Batman does: It's mainly a matter of luck that those he fights don't ever end up dying in the process of him brutalizing them. For example, in one panel he punches a guy in the face with spiked knuckles. Throughout these early issues, he will also run people over with his motorcycle.

Oh, and apparently this Ghost Rider can also explode at his enemies...? 

At least, he does so in one panel of the not-very-good Marvel Comics Presents story. 

•Their rides are also pretty different. Johnny went from riding regular motorcycles, to being able to summon motorcycles, to his signature "skull cycle"...and/or red skull cycles conjured from hellfire. 

Danny's motorcycle looks like a regular motorcycle, but when he transforms into Ghost Rider, it transforms as well, into a futuristic-looking, high-tech bike with wheels seemingly made of the same flame as that emanating from G.R.'s ever burning skull. It also gets a vaguely skull-like metal shield where a windshield might be; this can be lowered into battering-ram. 

Additionally, this motorcycle seems to have a variety of super-powers of its own. It can be controlled mentally, it too can be reconstituted when destroyed, and it can drive up the sides of buildings, on the surface of water and when this Ghost Rider jumps off of something, he seems to almost be able to fly. 

•Their origins also differ. Johnny's transformations into Ghost Rider were presented as a curse that befell him as part of his doing a deal with Satan (eventually retconned in 1983's Ghost Rider #77 to the devil Mephisto having bonded the demon Zarathos to Johnny, kinda like Etrigan was bonded to Jason Blood in Jack Kirby's The Demon, I guess); other than his head changing and his gaining access to his hellfire powers, he remained himself and in control of his own body and actions (At least in the earlier issues; in later ones, Ghost Rider seems like he was more and more of a distinct entity, at least in the few comics I read in this collection).

Danny, meanwhile, became Ghost Rider after finding a magic motorcycle in a junkyard. When its gas cap starts to glow, usually in response to an innocent person being in danger or someone needing avenged, Danny touches it and becomes the Ghost Rider, a completely different entity, the Danny/Ghost Rider relationship being akin to that of the Billy Batson/Captain Marvel one (Danny retains memories of what Ghost Rider does, but they're otherwise completely different individuals in these stories, only able to communicate in dreams...and/or in the dream realm of Doctor Strange villain Nightmare). 

Finally, Johnny and Danny seem completely unrelated at this early point in the narrative; it's not as if Johnny curse or powers or the demon Zarathos were somehow transferred from Johnny to Danny. 

No one seems to acknowledge that there even was another Ghost Rider prior to this one throughout the book. Not until issue #11, anyway, when Nightmare visits Ghost Rider (The cover features the very 1991 "Hex, Lies & Inner Escape!" echoing the title of the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape), when the villain refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos", and an asterisk refers readers back to a 1983 issue from the end of the first Ghost Rider run. 

Then in a two-part story stretching from #12 to an issue of Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme seems familiar with the earlier Ghost Rider, and also assumes that this one is a demon of some sort, but that proves not to be the case.

As for his part, Ghost Rider doesn't seem to know anything about his own nature, aside from the fact that he's the spirit of vengeance and he must avenge the innocent via chain lashings and Penance Stare. 

Like I said, a relationship between the Ghost Riders will eventually be revealed (I've read and re-read Wikipedia pages and Internet summaries; they all seem as long, dumb and complex as most superhero histories do when decades of stories are so summarized into paragraphs of prose), but not in these issues. 

I see the cover of issue #14 features the title "Johnny Blaze Vs. Ghost Rider," and shows a '90s version of Johnny in a trench coat and sunglasses pointing a gun at G.R., but the next batch of issues doesn't seem to have been put into an Epic Collection, yet (The only other Danny Ketch Epic Collection, Siege of Darkness, seems to include a few issues from much later in the run, and a lot of other Marvel titles featuring the character).

•In addition to writing these first 12 issues of the series, Howard Mackie also writes the Marvel Comics Presents serial. As for the art, Javier Saltares pencils 11 of the first 12 issues, each of which was inked by Mark Texeira. The only issue Saltares doesn't draw, #7, is penciled and inked by Texeria. Texeria also pencils the Marvel Comics Presents story. 

All in all, then, the character had a very stable creative team at his outset, far more so than Johnny Blaze had in the 1970s, and these early adventures have a fairly consistent look and aesthetic. The Saltares and Texeria art team provide a quite realistic look to the book, one that only accentuates the overall strangeness of the inhuman lead character, whose empty eye sockets and expressionless mouth full of teeth are always inscrutable. 

•I'm not sure why we call the character Danny Ketch "Danny Ketch," but that is how Marvel always refers to him in the titles of various comics starring him, including this collection. The character always refers to himself as Dan Ketch, as do his friend and girlfriend. His mother calls him Daniel. The only characters who regularly call him Danny in this volume are villains attempting to mock him.

•The comic is markedly more violent than the first chunk of the original Ghost Rider comic, although never gory, as much of the actual killing seems to happen off-panel. Still, there's a lot of blood splatter and chalk outlines, and talk of people being killed, even children and babies. 

•In the first story arc, which spans the first three issues, teenager Dan Ketch (said to be 18 at one point, and 19 later in these issues) is in a cemetery with his older sister Barb...and a local gang of younger kids, who call themselves "The Cypress Pool Jokers." They all more or less end up stumbling into a meet between various criminals, and one of the Jokers makes off with a mysterious briefcase full of more mysterious yet cannisters that was meant to be exchanged; meanwhile, Barb is badly wounded by an arrow (some of the criminals are ninjas, you see) and Dan finds the magic motorcycle, transforming into Ghost Rider for the first time.

The main villain of the piece is Deathwatch, a businessman/supervillain in the mode of the Kingpin or perhaps the John Byrne version of Lex Luthor. When not in his business suit in a skyscraper office, he wears a dumb mask. He seems to have the power to psychically see what those he touches sees, putting his fingers into their heads in the manner that Cassandra Nova does in Deadpool & Wolverine, and he enjoys doing so in order to vicariously watch their kills (Hence the name).

In addition to an army of ninjas, he also employs a villain named Blackout, who seems to be a vampire (although at one point his fangs are referred to as "mechanical") with a rather cinematic superpower: He's accompanied by some sort of blackout field that snuffs out any lights in his proximity, both electrical or, in one case, an actual flame from a match (Ghost Rider's head and tires seem immune, though). Thus, when he closes in on his victims, his presence is often presaged by the lights going out.

The plot of the first story arc involves a lot of running around as various factions seek to gain control of those cannisters, which apparently hold a plague capable of wiping out all life in the city. G.R. eventually kills it and melts the cannisters with hellfire, but Deathwatch and Blackout escape to threaten the hero and city in the future.

•The book is pretty heavily tied into the Marvel Universe from the get-go. Not only does Fisk himself appear in the first arc, seeking to get his hands on the cannisters so that they can't be used to wipe out the city, but the fourth issue features Ghost Rider versus his first Marvel supervillain, Mr. Hyde (although he will spend most of the issue in his powerless, but ridiculously dressed, Dr. Calvin Zabo form). He manhandles a waitress at a biker bar, and when she punches him, he strangles her and then spends the rest of the issue evading the bar's bouncer and other patrons. G.R. is able to Penance Stare Hyde back into Zabo.

And then, by the fifth and sixth issues, it's time for a Punisher team-up, what with this being 1990 and all. (Note the above cover for Ghost Rider #5, drawn by some kid named Jim Lee.)

In this story, New York City is suffering a rash of active shootings by carloads of teens with military hardware, and both Frank Castle and Dan Ketch/Ghost Rider are on the case. When the two meet up on the roof of the warehouse where the weapons are being distributed, the pair each assume the other is responsible (Although I'm a little surprised at Frank, seeing a guy with a flaming skull for a head drive his flaming motorcycle up the side of a wall and thinking to himself, "This guy sure looks like your typical arms dealer!")

The misunderstanding is, of course, part of the storied Marvel team-up ritual, and so the two briefly fight, Mackie making it clear that the unkillable, super-strong Ghost Rider could crush Frank as soon as he got his hands on him, although Frank talks, er, thinks, a big game.

"Four direct hits and he's still coming," Castle says, after pumping bullets into G.R. "Gun's gone. I've been in tougher spots." 

Later, when Ghost Rider throws him across the roof, Punisher thinks, "He's not human...I've been up against not human before."

Eventually Ghost Rider runs him over on his magic motorcycle, and the pair fall through a skylight and land at the feet of the story's supervillain: Flag-Smasher!

Okay, so I've maybe only seen him show up in a Marvel comic once or twice, but I love this guy. I love his dumb costume (particularly the wrestling championship-like belt with the globe on it), I love his dumb name, and I love his mission of...smashing flags...? No, of destroying all governments everywhere! The dude doesn't just want to topple the United States government, which is a big enough doing for a single guy with no discernable powers or charisma, but he wants to destroy all government!

His dumb plan here is to pass out machine guns to kids, inspire them to become active shooters and then sic them on Wall Street as a distraction, while he and his goons (who dress in goggles, face masks and berets and look like they could be Cobra action figures) attack the banking system or something.

Our dark heroes obviously foil Flag-Smasher's plan once they team up in the second part of the story and, at the end, Punisher points a gun at Flag-Smasher while the villain is still reeling from the effects of the Penance Stare.

"This is the only thing that's going to put an end to his violence," Punisher says, but Ghost Rider breaks his gun in his super-strong fist with a "KRAK" and then has words with The Punisher: "My cause is vengeance--not death. What cause do you serve?"

Then the police show up, and so Frank climbs onto the back of G.R.'s motorcycle and they speed off, across the surface of the water in New York Harbor.

This particular issue, incidentally, reveals that Dan has a job: He's apparently a bike messenger.

•Ghost Rider #7 is the one in which Texeria fills in for Saltares, apparently inking his own work (He's simply credited as "artist"). This one features The Scarecrow, a character I've long been curious about, based on how much I like DC's Scarecrow character, although I think the only time I've ever actually seen him in a comic book might have been in the few panels in which the two publishers' Scarecrows team-up to kidnap Lois Lane in DC Versus Marvel. 

His design, seen above, isn't necessarily a great one for a character with that name, and his modus operandi isn't nearly as interesting as that of his DC Comics counterpart. 

This Scarecrow, Ebeneezer Laughton is a contortionist, which doesn't really come up in this issue except for a scene in which he apparently disappears into a sewer grate. He's also a homicidal maniac who disembowels his victims. Oh, and crows seem to visit him at the asylum he's in, leaving trinkets for him on the sill of the window of his padded room, trinkets like a mask and a razor blade.

He runs around murdering people and ranting to Captain America to come and stop him but has to settle for Ghost Rider. When our hero has him by the collar, Scarecrow kicks away from him, impaling himself on his own pitchfork, which just so happens to have fallen upright against a crate during their fight.

In this issue, Dan's sister Barb, who has been in a coma throughout the series, is murdered by Blackout, who remains at large.

•In Ghost Rider #8, we see the Rider naked when he and Dan talk to one another in a dream. It's not just his head that is a flaming skull; his whole body is apparently that of a burning skeleton.

•A team of sexy lady mercenaries called H.E.A.R.T. Corps (Humans Engaging All Racial Terrorism) are hired by a community group to capture Ghost Rider. 

While one of them wears a top with a neckline that plunges to her belly, their costuming is otherwise pretty tame, particularly for the decade. 

Actually, this volume of Ghost Rider lacks the prominent cheesecake of the 1970s book, in which Rocky Simpson, Linda Littletree and Karen Page were often rather scantily clad, Rocky being dressed in revealing sacrificial garb in two consecutive stories.

The few female characters in these issues, like Dan's girlfriend Stacy, are always dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and jackets 

The most provocative image in this handful of issues is probably a panel in #5, where in Texeria seems to have gotten away with putting little ink crescents on Stacy's breasts to suggest her nipples through her top. 

•Dan is, by the way, a terrible boyfriend. 

Stacy is nothing but supportive about his sister being attacked, being in a coma and ultimately being murdered, understandingly giving Dan plenty of space when he asks for it, but still trying to date him and spend time with him.

Dan, meanwhile, constantly lies to her and even ditches her in the middle of dates to go do Ghost Rider stuff.

She's attempting to join the city police force, like her father, who is actively trying to catch Ghost Rider, and one assumes that she and Dan's alter ego will eventually come into conflict. 

Even compared to other guys whose desire to keep their secret identities make them seem like real jerks, like Peter Parker, Dan comes off as a particularly bad boyfriend, though.

•Ghost Rider #9 guest-stars what the Internet tells me is the original iteration of X-Factor, who are apparently based in a spaceship in Manhattan (?), and are raising a baby (?!). 

Curious about what they were doing with a kid, I asked Bluesky if that was supposed to be Cable, as my limited knowledge of X-Men lore (i.e. what I saw on the original cartoon) seemed to suggest that Scott and Jean's kids all came from nightmarish alternate futures, and I was told this was indeed baby Cable, in a one-sentence summary that seemed to perfectly encapsulate the sort of lives lived by X-Men characters from the 1990s. 

H.E.A.R.T., X-Factor and Ghost Rider all get involved with a plot involving missing human children and some Morlocks hiding out under the cemetery; despite what is suggested by the cover of the issues (above), G.R. doesn't come into conflict with the X-people (And Archangel Warren Worthington isn't actually even in the issue, although he, like Iceman Bobby Drake, should recognize the character, given that they were both on west coast super-team The Champions with the earlier, Johnny Blaze version).

•Next comes the Marvel Comics Presents story. Despite being written by Mackie and drawn by Texeria, it's no damn good, reading quite clunkily, probably because it comes in eight-page installments, naturally leading to rather frequent narrative stops and starts.

Wolverine in in Madripoor, where his narration tells us he goes by "Patch" (although he's not wearing an eyepatch here...?). He's attacked by some red-clad ninjas. 

Meanwhile, in NYC, Dan's friend's sensei is also attacked by similar ninjas. 

It is all part of an elaborate plot by one of Deathwatch's lieutenants to get Wolverine, Ghost Rider and a third character, a presumably new one named Brass, to kill one another. 

There's a lot of fighting, and ninjas and gunsels end up in literal piles. 

The Wolverine vs. Ghost Rider fight is kind of fun, as, at one point, Wolverine says, "--Eat this!" and stabs Ghost Rider in the face with his claws, which creates a gigantic explosion ("WHOOM") that sends them both flying in opposite directions and temporarily knocks them both out.

This is also the story in which Ghost Rider seems to demonstrate his just plain blowing up power, referenced above.

My favorite panel, however, is probably this one, which is actually the last panel in one of the installments, and thus meant to be a cliffhanger. Ghost Rider is told Dan's injured friend has been kidnapped, and Ghost Rider just silently makes this face, like some kind of Pez dispenser:

While Texeria's art was quite good in the issue of Ghost Rider he drew, it's fairly weak here, the pages positively packed with panels, many of them long, thin horizontal rectangles and most lacking anything at all like a background. They feel rather unfinished, a bit like layouts that somehow got inked and colored before the rest of the pencils were done. 

I'm not sure if this is the fault of Texeria or his inker here, a Harry Candelario, or perhaps just a matter of drawing a whole lot of pages in relatively little time (I guess the book was a bi-weekly one?). 

The covers for these issues of Marvel Comics Presents come from plenty of familiar names, including Jim Valentino, Paul Gulacy, John Byrne and one Rob Liefeld. (And look, I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned it before or not, but this Liefeld fellow? I personally don't think his art is all that good. This is for Marvel in 1991, too; isn't that when and where he first blew up?)

•The MCP story is followed by an issue of Marc Spector: Moon Knight, which is also written by Mackie, and features art from Mark Bagley and Tom Palmer, credited as "Breakdown artist" and "Finisher", respectively. 

The art is really quite great, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to see Bagley's art at this particular point, about a decade or so before I started regularly seeing it in the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man. It's fairly different, which may be because he was still refining his style and it may be because of Palmer's work here, but one can still see some of the later Bagley in it. 

In this issue, Ghost Rider joins Moon Knight in breaking up a terrorist attacks at first the Statue of Liberty and then Grand Central Terminal. 

Moon Knight fights the terrorists with what look like moon-a-rangs and a pair of nunchucks. So this is a comic book featuring both a flaming skeleton who rides a motorcycle and a guy with nunchucks. I guess it's easy to see why Marvel comics were popular with boys in the early 1990s.

•The remainder of the collection consists of three more issues of Ghost Rider and one of Doctor Strange. Mackie writes those Ghost Rider issues, one of which is penciled by fill-in artist Larry Stroman but still inked by Texeria, while the Doctor Strange issue is by writers Roy and Dann Thomas and the art team of Chris Marrinan and Mark McKenna. 

In the story of these comics, NYC is visited by a new serial killer going by the name "Zodiak," the "k" differentiating him from the real-life Zodiac killer and Marvel's Zodiac villain group from the 1970s, one of whom, Aquarius, ended up being empowered by one of Satan's minions to become "the one-man Zodiac" and then tangle with Johnny Blaze in the original Ghost Rider comics. 

I can't be sure, but I think this one might be slightly less dumb than the previous Marvel Zodiac/s. Like I said, he's a serial killer, but one who has a bunch of high-tech equipment, up to and including robot duplicates good enough to fool Ghost Rider. In actuality, Zodiak works as an assassin for a group of otherworldly demons...? He also uses Zodiac-themed weaponry, like a Scorpio sting and a pair of Taurus horns and a Leo lion claw and so on.

It is in this stretch of issues that Dan and Ghost Rider are visited by Nightmare, who temporarily separates them while they are in his realm and addresses G.R. as Zarathos (though he seems to be mistaken), and Doctor Strange likewise comes to the conclusion that Ghost Rider isn't Zarathos, nor a demon of any sort.

In addition to Zodiak, the pair also fight his demonic employers, who feed off of the human blood their agent spills for them.

•And that's it, I guess, unless Marvel decides the next issues in a future Epic Collection, or one of my local library systems invest in those big, $150 Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch omnibuses (Because while I liked these comics well enough, and am curious about how Mackie ultimately reconciles the two Ghost Rider mythologies and if it's actually as dumb as the Internet suggests, I'm not, like, $300 interested...)

But don't worry Ghost Rider fans, I've still got at least one more Ghost Rider-related post coming up in the near future...!

Fourth time's a charm...? (A few comments and questions about the Fantastic Four: First Steps movie)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the fourth live-action Fantastic Four film to make it into theaters, following 2005's Fantastic Four, 2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and 2015's Fantastic Four. It's also the third time re-casting the characters and attempting to start a new film franchise featuring them. 

I was, honestly, a little underwhelmed, perhaps owing to having my hopes raised by all the positive reactions I had seen on Bluesky between the day it was released and the afternoon I got around to seeing it, and perhaps owing to my own expectations based on the cool 1960s, Space Age aesthetic that the trailers and other marketing showed off. That is, it just looked like it was going to be pretty neat, and a sharp departure from the look, feel and tone of the previous FF movies, and the rest of the expansive Marvel Studios filmography.

Instead, I left the theater feeling pretty much like I do after most Marvel movies: That what I had just seen was a perfectly fine superhero movie, a competently made, perfectly adequate adaptation of the comics for a mass, mainstream audience. (Honestly, I liked Thunderbolts* quite a bit more, even though that was much more of a "regular" Marvel movie, in terms of aesthetics and tone.)

Here are some of the thoughts that occurred to me while watching, which, taken altogether, probably make it seem as if I had a negative reaction to the film, but they are really more just questions than complaints. Again, overall, I thought it was fine.

Spoilers, obviously, follow.

•I thought the four principals were all pretty good, and, overall, well-cast. 

I think it helped that, Pedro Pascal aside, I had no idea who any of them were from whatever films they might have been in before, so that when I looked at, say, Johnny Storm or Susan Storm, I saw Johnny Storm or Susan Storm, and not famous Hollywood actors Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, for example.  (This was, of course, helped along by the fact that I see so many fewer movies these days then I used to.)

That said, whatever weaknesses the first two films might have had, I think I might have preferred the casting in them. Evans felt more like comic book Johnny to me than the guy who plays him here did, for example, and Ioan Gruffudd definitely looked the part of Reed Richards more so than Pascal did. 

Pascal didn't look much like Richards (Sorry, I could maybe take Reed with a beard by this point, not just a moustache, and damn, did you see Reed's arms in that opening scene where he's wearing an undershirt in the bathroom...?). But I think he played him well, and I kinda like this slightly darker, much more conflicted view of Reed as a guy whose own genius can make him unhappy and even hurt his loved ones and who, for all his smarts, isn't always smart enough.

Vanessa Kirby was quite excellent, I thought, and the filmmakers did a fine job of giving her a lot to do and a lot of emotional content to work with. 

While I'm hardly a terribly experienced reader of Fantastic Four comics, I always felt that, traditionally, it was too easy for her character to be reduced to that of "The Girl" in them (and, perhaps, in some of the other adaptations), so it was nice to see her being something of a leader and, perhaps, the most prominent of the four characters (I don't think we can put her traditional portrayal down to pure sexism, though, nor to the nature of her powers—that is, literally disappearing from view. Rather, I think some of it has to do with the fact that Johnny and Ben are just so damn colorful and appealing as characters in the comics and cartoons and suchlike that the FF seems to have a "fun" half and a boring, "grown up" half).

•They sure were stingy with the stretching, weren't they? Based solely on what I saw in the film, I would guess that Reed's powers are that he can stretch his arms and legs like five times longer than the average person and, um, that's it, really? 

The filmmakers seem to allow him to stretch just enough to let us know that he does indeed have stretchy powers, but not so much as to overtax the special effects budget...or let us get a look at an elongated arm or leg (let alone a neck!) that lasts more than a split second. 

Given that Marvel Studios had previously changed Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan's stretchy powers for her appearances on her show and in The Marvels movie, it makes me wonder if they just aren't confident about what stretchy powers look like on the big screen, at least in live action? (Elastigirl's powers looked fine in The Incredibles, although that was animation.)

It makes me wonder if the Distinguished Competition will eventually give us a Plastic Man or Elongated Man in one of their future films...

•Was it just me, or did Ben Grimm—who I don't remember being referred to as "The Thing" at all in this film—seem a little too small in this film...? 

Like, he seemed to be the same size as the other three, rather than hulking over them. I just clicked on IMDb to check on the release date of those previous FF films, and I noticed there was an ad for the new film there in which Ben's size is magnified, so that he dwarfs his teammates, even though he's standing behind them in the ad...

•I have no idea what on Earth they were thinking giving Ben a beard midway through the film, but it distracted me the rest of the film's runtime. 

Ben needs to shave? (The first thing I did when I got back to my car in the theater parking lot was to do a Google image search for Ben Grimm + beard + comics.)

So he grows, what, rock hair out of his rock face, I guess...? 

Does it also grow out of his scalp, and he just sandblasts that away daily too? What about his body hair? Does he sandblast his whole body every day too, or...? 

Look, the only context in which I want to see Ben Grimm with a beard in a movie is if he is in the process of being the historical Blackbeard the pirate.

•Speaking of The Thing, I was somewhat surprised that he spent the entire film dressed head-to-toe, never appearing in his original, blue briefs-only look, with his rocky chest and limbs exposed. 

Heck, even in the cartoon show that exists within the world of the film, which we only get a brief glimpse of, he's wearing a shirt.

I guess four years into his career is long enough for him to develop a whole wardrobe of appropriately big and tall clothes, but it struck me as notable.

•I hate to even say this publicly, as I know it is an opinion that was shared very loudly by many assholes and some of the worst people on the Internet, but I wasn't really sold on using the Shalla-Bal version of The Silver Surfer instead of the Norrin Radd version, which was previously featured in the second FF film (And which ended up being maybe the best part of that movie, which sure had a disappointing version of Galactus, imagining him as some kind of cloud instead of a giant with an awesome funny hat). 

I understand that this is a different universe than the "real" universe featured in all the other Marvel Studios movies, and so perhaps they wanted to use a female Surfer to distinguish it, but if there isn't a Norrin Radd version in the other universe, then what's the point, exactly? And it's not like they did anything else to the involved characters to suggest that they were alternate-universe versions of the "real" characters (Reed's moustache aside, of course).

While I suppose they might do something dumb with the multiverse and therefore include the first filmic FF and their Surfer in an upcoming movie, I don't think, otherwise, we're likely to see the standard issue, male Surfer in future Marvel Studios movies, and so the rationale of distinguishing this universe by the gender of its Surfer would seem moot. 

As someone who would like nothing more than to see a Defenders trilogy of live-action movies starring Doctor Stange, The Hulk, Namor and The Silver Surfer, this is important to me. 

At any rate, Julia Garner did a fine job with a role that actually didn't ask much at all of her.

•Okay, I give up: What was Natasha Lyonne doing in this movie, exactly? 

•I did like all the name-dropping of FF villains in the movie, particularly in that passage near the beginning, although I'm a little disappointed that we didn't get to see any of them, save for Mole Man and a singular Super-Ape. 

And I thought that Mole Man, though funny, felt very Marvel Studios in his portrayal, as they basically just gave an otherwise totally normal-looking guy a pair of stylized sunglasses to sort of suggest the character, rather than going the whole nine yards, with the green costume, the cape and the staff. Hell, they didn't even give him Moleoids; just some folks in mining helmets milling around in the background. 

Given how comics-accurate Galactus looked, and the fact that they even spent a second on the monster that breaks through the street on the cover of Fantastic Four #1, I woulda thought the Mole Man's look might have followed suit...

•Again, I'm no expert, but was Galactus a little...too big here...? 

•I can't imagine how these characters will fit into Avengers: Doomsday, which the movie announced via a sentence of text on the screen they will appear in, nor can I imagine how they will fit into the Mavel Cinematic Universe going forward, at least if they are meant to be joining that universe proper rather than staying on their own retro-looking Earth (A scene in Thunderbolts* sure seemed to imply they had entered the main Marvel universe). 

I suppose that's a problem for Marvel Studios to work out, but it does worry me... 

•I am now completely, 100% ready for Namor to meet the Fantastic Four. Bring him on...

The End of JLA Part 1: "Extinction"

The very first of the story arcs to run in the pages of JLA during its odd final years, when it became a sort of anthology title with rotating creative teams, was this three-part story entitled "Extinction, from issues #91-93. Interestingly, it comes before what turns out to actually be Joe Kelly's last issue of the book, although that wouldn't come until issue #100, making it one of a pair of fill-in arcs, I suppose.

Looking back from 2025, it's now unclear if issue #100, which kicks off the Justice League Elite spin-off series, was intended to be Kelly's final issue of JLA, and DC just waited a few months to print it (perhaps giving pencil artist Doug Mahnke plenty of time to finish it up after the labor-intensive "Trial By Fire" arc), or if that anniversary issue a newly-scripted comic written during the nine-issue gap between Kelly's second-to-last issue, January 2004's JLA #90, and August's #100.

Similarly, it's now impossible to tell if "Extinction" was created specifically for fill-in purposes, similar to the four issues Mark Waid penned in 1998 and the pair of issues in 1999 (one of which he co-wrote with Devin Grayson), or if it was simply an inventory story being repurposed, or if it was perhaps it was originally created as a one-shot or mini-series, of which there were so many since the title first launched, and was simply shunted into the main title instead.

If it was in a drawer at some point, it probably wasn't in one for very long, judging by the characters it features. In addition to Superman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man and Batman, all of whom have been on the League together more-or-less since 1998 (with Wondy taking a brief leave of absence during which she was replaced by her mother Hippolyta), the story also features The Atom (who had been an on-and-off guest-star since at least 1998's DC One Million, but started appearing much more frequently after Kelly first made him a part of the replacement league that showed up in 2002) and the Green Lantern is John Stewart, who officially replaced Kyle Rayner in 200's #76. 

Regardless of the line-up, though, the story is pretty much self-contained, not really commenting on or otherwise being influenced by anything else that might have been going on in the DCU at the time of its publication, nor on what preceded it or what would follow it in the pages of JLA. 

Whatever its exact origins, "Extinction" was written by the late Denny O'Neil, a long-time writer turned editor probably best-known today for his time shepherding DC's Batman franchise, and it was drawn by artist Tan Eng Huat, a Malaysian artist whose odd style first came to DC via a run with writer John Arcudi on a short-lived 2001 Doom Patrol series. (Mahnke, as you can see above, continued to draw the covers.)

The story is a decent-enough sci-fi fable, one that's powered by its plot, which includes at least one strong twist. It's because of that twist that the story is more than one issue, I think, although it's not hard to imagine it being a more tightly-written done-in-one, of the sort that might have appeared in one of DC or Marvel's sci-fi or weird story anthologies from the 1950s or '60s (Well, that twist and, perhaps, a smaller, earlier one, that leads to the new character introduced in the story transforming from the more chimp-like form seen on Mahnke's above cover, to the more savage and threatening one on the cover below).

The story need not really feature the Justice League, or any particular superhero or group of heroes, really, and it's not hard to imagine O'Neil tailoring this story to other characters, even original ones or civilian characters (Which isn't to say his characterization of the characters used is necessarily bland or anything, it's just that he didn't really need to put, say, Plastic Man or Wonder Woman in it).

Plastic Man is on JLA monitor duty when mysterious, dangerous phenomena accompany the arrival of a bizarre-looking spaceship near the moon, and some of the various other super-powered characters mentioned above all respond (Batman mainly phones this adventure in, mostly appearing on a Watchtower monitor, save for a single, brief scene with Superman set in the Batcave). 

The ship contains a little monkey which, when it begins communicating with Superman and Green Lantern, takes on a shape that mirrors theirs, so that he looks like something of a small-statured admixture of the pair, complete with a costume that looks a bit like GL's with a "S"-shield on it.

His name is a little hard to pronounce (I don't even know how to type those characters), but Plas calls him "Peppy," and the others all follow suit.

Peppy is apparently a scientist and has come to Earth in search of the rare silver-masked monkey (the shape he was originally in when our heroes encountered him, a monkey that doesn't look much like the one Mahnke drew on the cover of the first installment, by the way). He finds the last one, but just as it is being killed, blown-up as workers clear the Amazon for farmland with dynamite.

Apparently, the silver-masked monkey was supposed to be Earth's dominant life form by now, according to Peppy, so he's surprised to find that humans actually are. He then requests the League show him all around Earth, which they do for several weeks, concerned by his interest in dwelling on all the bad things—wars, impoverished regions, sites of environmental degradation, etc.

He eventually comes to the conclusion that, as he says:

It has become clear to me that your species, homo sapiens, is choosing to become extinct. 

Why this should be the truth I do not know.

But it is my duty to assist you--

Which, of course, sounds like he's going to help humanity out, right? Except that, spoiler alert, in the classic "To Serve Man" kind of misunderstanding, what he actually means is that he is going to help humanity become extinct.

The League saves the day, of course, leading to an extremely bleak ending that at least keeps Peppy from ever being a factor in any future comics.

So it's basically a message comic, and, unfortunately, one that probably could have run anywhere between the 1970s and the 2000s...or at any time since (Actually, the way the Trump administration is rolling back various environmental regulations, and the Supreme Court some of the principles upon which those regulations were founded, we may actually be entering a period where our environment could get in much worse shape than it was at the start of O'Neil's writing career...certainly, thanks to climate change, we're closer to an apocalypse than we were 25 or 50 years ago...)

While it probably didn't need to be quite so long—some of the brief action scenes that occur on the world tour, or during the League's first contact with Peppy and his ship read a bit like filler disguised as super-deeds—it's a satisfying enough read. Although it's certainly a change of pace from the big, crazy, Silver Age-style plots and more immediate end-of-the-world threats that had characterized the title up until this point. 

Huat's art certainly keeps it interesting. His work is hard to describe if you haven't seen it before, as it can vacillate between extremely realistic in the rendering of the human form and its postures and expressions to highly exaggerated action...often in the same panel. 

It can sometimes look a little like Jeff Lemire finishing rough layouts from, I don't know, Corey S. Lewis...but not really...? 

Huat's characters are all certainly quite distinct, and it's fun to see them occasionally explode into action here or there. "Extinction" doesn't look a bit like any of the other JLA issues or stories to precede it, that's for sure. 

Where Huat's style is most welcome, however, is when it comes to drawing "alien" stuff, where the weirder things look the better. And so Peppy's ship doesn't really look much like any other spaceship, and the weird energy beams it pummels Superman and Green Lantern with in the first issue are strange and cool-looking.

Huat's best serves Plastic Man, of course, as the character's nature allows Huat to cut loose in a way that just isn't true of the other characters. This is probably most clearly seen in the splash page that opens the story, in which a frantic Plastic Man calls for help from the monitor womb, his limbs stretching and twisting at random as they explode away from his body, which is technically still seated in a chair.

Plas probably comes off as the most distinct character here, as O'Neil writes lots of jokes for him, each punctuated by a transformation (he becomes Albert Einstein in one panel, Alfred E. Neuman in another). O'Neil's Batman is standoffish, imperious, always thinking ahead and always right. Superman, who Huat draws vaguely Chistopher Reeve-ish, is a nice guy who tries his best. The others? Well, they are more-or-less interchangeable, I guess. 

At one point, Peppy refers to a "Book of Lol," which, in his language, means "the truth." That's where he got his information about the silver-masked monkeys, for example. I know 21-years-ago was pre-texting being ubiquitous, but was that acronym already in use online at the time? One imagines that if O'Neil was writing this story today, he would have found another name; he basically just uses it as a random alien-sounding word, not unlike when Peppy says "I lost control of my sneedleyfab" in another panel, but it's curious to see the word in that context here. 

Like the rest of JLA, "Extinction" was collected, and can now be found in 2015's JLA Vol. 7. 

Next: John Byrne, Chris Claremont and Jerry Ordway's "The Tenth Circle" from 2004's JLA #94-99

Review: Ghost Rider Team-Up (2007)

Given that this trade paperback collection was released in 2007, I think it's safe to assume that the impetus for its creation was the release of that year's live-action Ghost Rider film. 

I'm much less certain for how the editors chose what issues to include, as the half-dozen comic books within consist of two issues of the original 1973-1983 Ghost Rider monthly and single issues of four other books.

Given that they all date between 1976 and 1981, I'm going to assume the idea was to collect Ghost Rider team-ups that hadn't already been collected elsewhere, in various Essential volumes, which would explain the absence of some appearances from notable guest stars within earlier issues of Ghost Rider, as well as the character's initial team-ups with Spider-Man and The Thing from Marvel Comics Presents and Marvel Two-in-One. But then, that's just a guess.  

What we have here then is a bit of a grab bag, stories from a bunch of different creators, and featuring a variety of different Marvel characters, some big (Spider-Man, The Avengers), others decidedly less so (see the cover above).

Marvel Premiere #28 (1976) "Legion" seems like a pretty big word for a group of just four monsters, doesn't it...?  Still, that four-word phrase was one that someone at Marvel apparently liked, as it had previously shown up as the title of a 1975 black and white anthology magazine. And so it was recycled for the cover of this issue, which I had previously read, but certainly didn't mind reading again (It was also collected in the 2019 Decades: Marvel in the '70s—Legion of Monsters trade paperback).

The short, 18-page story by writer Bill Mantlo is a rather simple one, a sci-fi parable sort of story that doesn't necessarily need to star these particular characters, and is easy to imagine appearing sans Marvel monsters in one of those old fantastic story anthologies.

Mantlo writes in second-person, addressing the four main characters each as "You", which probably isn't the best strategy for an ensemble piece, as there are a few bits where who the specific "You" is meant to be can get a bit of confusing.

On the first page, he and artists Frank Robbins and Steve Gan introduce the four Legionnaires: Man-Thing, Ghost Rider Johnny Blaze, Morbius The Living Vampire and Jack Russell, the so-called Werewolf By Night. 

Then they introduce the inciting incident, the sudden, cataclysmic appearance of a mountain on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Johnny Blaze, who at this point was still working as a stuntman in Stunt-Master and Karen Page's TV motorcycle show, was in town to take in a movie, and, during the cataclysm, he transforms into his worse half and starts up the mountain to investigate. Morbius and W.B.N., who have a brief scuffle when the former attempts to feed on the latter, similarly head up the mountain (It's not clear where they are in relation to the mountain but, as we'll soon see, it doesn't seem to matter). And in the swamps of Florida, Man-Thing spies the mountain and ponderously makes his way towards it.

Atop it they are greeted by a bizarre golden man astride a golden horse, a beast that seems equal parts divine and strange in Robbins' rendering. The man introduces himself as "The STARSEED" and tells the assembled monsters or monster-adjacent characters his story, even though only half of them would really be able to actually understand it.

Thousands, perhaps millions of years ago, he and his people separated themselves from the majority of humankind, which was then consumed by brute violence. They fled to a mountain and lived there, until the day some particularly weird-looking aliens arrived on Earth, and took their whole mountain off into space within them. There, the people of the mountain gradually learned from the aliens and, once they had mastered their technology, took control of the ship and headed back home. 

The last survivor, Starseed, apparently dropped his mountain back where it was all those years ago, and now, with his powers and knowledge, he can offer Earth peace and prosperity, giving the weird quartet that were there to greet him something they have all long lacked, hope.

But being monsters (and/or men, I suppose), they almost immediately attack him. 

The werewolf and Morbius attack the golden man, and while Ghost Rider fights with them, trying to defend the visitor, Man-Thing shambles up to Starseed and places his hand upon him and, as we all well know by now, "whoever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch!"

With the last of his strength, the Starseed shows the Legion of Monsters what he could have done for them, briefly transforming each of them back to their original, pre-monstrous, human forms, but then he dies and the monsters each turn and leave, Morbius and G.R. the only ones who are really aware of what just unfolded.

As for the mountain, it's still there in the last panel, but I suppose it too must have faded away like Starseed's dream and his life, since I don't think there's currently a mountain in Marvel's version of LA. 

It's probably the strongest story in the collection.

Ghost Rider #27 (1977) Although he looks rather rat-like on the cover, I kinda like the design of this issue's villain The Manticore, whose monstrous shape is affected via some sort of high-tech robot suit with mechanical hind legs, the man within it being a double-amputee-turned-hitman of sorts. His job? To kill an Avenger, part of his employers' plans to recover Patsy Walker's Hellcat costume from her. 

I suppose this all relates to whatever was going on in Avengers at the time...?

As to why the villain has targeted Hawkeye, who is, at the time, rather inconveniently located at a ranch in the American southwest, far away from the rest of the team, well, as he tells the purple archer once he's taken him captive, "You're the easiest mark!"

At this point, Hawkeye seems to be in semi-retirement from Earth's Mightiest Heroes and is working at the Cheery-O Ranch with his new friend, the time-lost hero of the Old West, Two-Gun Kid. If, like me, you weren't reading Marvel comics in 1977 (perhaps because of the fact that you, like me, were a baby at the time), well, you're probably still well aware of this, as Hawkeye and Two-Gun showed up in one of the early issues of The Champions, which I covered not too long ago. 

As for Ghost Rider, he is, according to writer Jim Shooter's pages of recap via remembrance, in a pretty bad place at the moment. He's apparently just fled his friends, job and life in LA after Dr. Druid attacked him and he transformed into Ghost Rider right in front of them, fighting back against Dr. Druid so savagely that he apparently scared and disturbed his onlooking friends.

After some adventures on his motorcycle in the desert, Johnny ends up breaking down, and he heads to the nearby Cheery-O for supplies to repair his bike. There he meets Clint Barton and Matt Hawk, but Johnny doesn't recognize them, as they are wearing bright, primary colored-cowboy clothes (seeing their garish outfits here reminded me of the virtue of reading Marvel's seventies comics via black-and-white Essential collections). And, of course, they don't recognize him either, since his head isn't on fire. 

Johnny decides to hang around the ranch for a while, teaching Matt how to ride a motorcycle just as Matt teaches him how to bust broncos, until the night the Manticore attacks (Perhaps presciently, Hawkeye puts on his superhero costume just before the Manticore does so), at which point the heroes all go into action and realize that they had actually met before.

The adventure ends on a down note for Blaze, when Hawkeye and Two-Gun seem unconvinced that his demon act as Ghost Rider, during which he told Manticore he couldn't care less whether he killed the hostage Hawkeye or not, was just a bluff.

This one was drawn by Don Perlin and Dan Green. 

Marvel Team-Up #91 (1980) Ghost Rider returns to the pages of Marvel Team-Up for the third time, although this story, by writer Steven Grant, pencil artist Pat Broderick and inker Bruce D. Patterson, reads more like a Spider-Man story that just so happens to feature Ghost Rider than a true team-up.

Peter Parker seems to be on a date with a woman named Glory Grant, whom I don't think I've ever seen before. They're taking in a carnival in Connecticut. When they stop by the freak show, featuring a six-armed "Spider-Man" and a guy in a Man-Thing costume, Peter is sure he recognizes one of their number: "The Blazing Skull," a flaming skeleton with big, staring red eyeballs in its sockets.

Peter recognizes him as The Ghost Rider, of course.

Quick aside: Is this the first time we've seen the Johnny Blaze version of Ghost Rider naked before? In all the appearances I've read so far, he's always clad in leather toe to neck, and I just assumed it was only his head that changed when he becomes Ghost Rider; this story seems to imply that it's his whole body. Oddly though, as Spidey will later note, the Ghost Rider is strong, and we can see his big muscles bulging beneath his leather, so apparently the dude has muscles; maybe they are just translucent, as Johnny once said of his transformed face early in the Ghost Rider saga...?

Peter is forcibly ejected from the carnival when he starts shouting for Ghost Rider, and he's perplexed that the men who throw him out are so strong, as he reacted so quickly that he originally fought back using his "spider-strength", and "they didn't even feel it!"

So Spidey returns in costume that night to investigate, and a mysterious man in a cape and turban (seen on the cover above) orders the oddly strong roustabouts and freaks to attack him, including Ghost Rider (at this point fully dressed in his traditional leathers).

Eventually, the guy in the turban captures Spidey and reveals his story: He's Moondark The Magician, who apparently crossed paths with Spider-Man before and seemingly died during a plunge into San Francisco Bay.

But "the dark beings" he worshipped struck a bargain with him: He was returned to the land of the living, sans his own soul, and tasked with gathering the souls of others, with which he might one day buy back his own. And so he took a job as the carnival's magician, gradually stealing the other employees' souls and storing them in an orb. Doing so gave him control over his victims. And I guess also made them supernaturally strong, maybe...?

One of the folks working at the carnival was, of course, stunt-rider Johnny Blaze. Unlike the souls of the others, Moondark kept Johnny's soul in a special ring he wore, a cool panel by Broderick depicts the magician thrusting his fist toward the reader to display the ring, in which he can see a tiny Johnny seemingly pressing against the gem of the ring and saying "Help me..." in a tiny little dialogue balloon. 

You probably won't be surprised to learn that Spider-Man is able to free Johnny's soul, and, along with Ghost Rider, take on Moondark and his soul-less slaves, eventually breaking open the orb and restoring the victims to normal.

I think there are a couple of points of particular interest here. 

First is that this Ghost Rider seems more remote and alien than those in the previous stories in this collection, or that I had read elsewhere. Whereas Johnny used to have a Ghost Rider "act" he would slip into, the character no longer seems to be an act in this issue, but an entirely different entity from Johnny. Their dual identities now seem to be more of a Hulk/Bruce Banner situation than in comics from earlier in the character's history. (Spider-Man grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him when Ghost Rider turns his hellfire on Moondark, convinced it is too severe a punishment, even for the soul-stealing villain).

Second, whereas G.R.'s hellfire previously just seemed to be regular fire, now it burns cold, affecting the souls of those it touches, rather than their bodies. While how exactly that works isn't spelled out, it apparently hurts like hell, as we see in this and in some of the later stories in this collection.

Finally, this seems to be yet another Ghost Rider story in which someone has done a deal with the devil, but here Grant doesn't use the word "Satan" or "Mephisto" or even "devil." Instead, we get Moondark's "the dark beings I worshipped", "my dark masters" and, when one appears on-panel at the climax, simply "master."

The best look we get at this entity is that of a huge green humanoid giant, with clawed hands, a pink face and horns and prominent fangs. It's a weird, cool monster design, but it seems, much like Grant's word choices, to be a quite conscious choice not to use Satan or more traditional devil figure. I guess that by this point, Marvel had grown rather gun shy about using Satan as a comic book character...?

Though only 16 pages long, this story is very dense, thanks to how many small panels Broderick manages to pack onto the pages. It opens with a splash page establishing the carnival, but some of the pages contain as many as 12 panels. Thanks to Broderick's highly detailed art, there's a lot in each of them, too. 

I'm not super familiar with his work (that which most immediately springs to mind is his 1991 Ragman series with Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming), but he does a pretty incredible job here, and his Ghost Rider is magnificent, featuring a far more detailed skull than most artists usually give him, and boasting nicely unsettling expressions, thanks in large part to the eyeballs the character has in this story.

Ghost Rider #50 (1980) Though the cover boasts that this is "Ghost Rider's Strangest Adventure Ever!", I don't buy it. It's a pretty simple time travel story, and I've certainly seen him engaged in far stranger. 

Anyway, this 35-page story does finally team our hero with his namesake, the original Ghost Rider.

That guy's history is a little complicated. From what I've read, the first iteration of the character was co-created in 1949 by artist Dick Ayers for a Magazine Enterprises Western comic. After the trademark lapsed due to inactivity, Marvel had Ayers recreate a new version of the character in 1967, along with Gary Friedrich and Roy Thomas, the latter two of whom would later co-create the flaming-skull motorcyclist version of the character. They of course recycled the name for the motorcycle guy in 1973 and so, when Johnny Blaze meets the cowboy guy here, the latter was renamed Night Rider (Later changed to The Phantom Rider, given the term Night Rider's association with the Ku Klux Klan).

So in this issue, by Michael Fleisher and Don Perlin, Ghost Rider is caught in a wall of water released by an exploding dam from the previous (and, of course, uncollected here) issue. He awakes as Johnny Blaze in a cave, where an old Native American woman is yelling at him. Before his eyes, she de-ages into a beautiful young woman, walks him out of the cave, and gestures to the landscape, "a glorious bygone world," before she disappears. 

Then Johnny is attacked by native warriors on horseback and shot full of arrows, only to be rescued by the original Ghost Rider Night Rider. Somehow, Johnny has traveled back in time to the late 1800s. 

While Johnny is still unconscious, we're told the origin of the Night Rider. His ghostliness is simply a schtick; he uses his luminous, all-white costume with a reversible black cloak to pretend to be a headless specter or a floating disembodied head, convincing his foes that he's really a ghost (Although there is an otherworldly aspect to his story, and maybe some magic, as he was nursed back to health by a native shaman after suffering terrible injuries, and a vision had lead that shaman to a falling star, dust from which is used to make the Rider's white garments glow).

By day, the Rider is school teacher Carter Slade. Once Johnny heals from his injuries, the two men hang out a bit and have some Old West adventures, mostly centering around a whip-wielding Mexican (?) outlaw who sprinkles his dialogue with Spanish. The villain goes by the name The Tarantula. 

Eventually Johnny has occasion to become Ghost Rider and summon a hellfire motorcycle, fighting The Tarantula and his men, as well as a giant flying snake and a spirit warrior named The Manitou. 

The two heroes learn one another's alternate identities, and the Native American woman from the second page is revealed to be the daughter of the shaman who had once saved Carter's life and helped him become the Rider. She leads Johnny back to the cave and, through it, to the twentieth century, where he actually arrives before he had even left—and is thus in time to stop the dam explosion that kicked off the whole adventure. 

Johnny uses the word "Indian" throughout and, at one point, refers to Native Americans as "the redmen." 

This is some seven years later than Ghost Rider's first adventure involving Native Americans (the Snake-Dance and "Witch-Woman" stories from his last Marvel Spotlight issues in 1973), but Johnny (and/or Marvel) haven't gotten any more enlightened on that score during all that time.

This story concludes with a three-page "Ghost Rider's Gallery of Guest Stars!", featuring pin-ups to some of the earliest appearances of other Marvel characters in his book: The Son of Satan, The Hulk and The Phantom Eagle.

Marvel Two-in-One #80 (1981) Ghost Rider returns to the pages of Marvel Two-in-One for another Thing team-up in this issue, this one by writer Tom DeFalco, penciler Ron Wilson and inker Chic Stone.

Here, it's pretty clear that the Ghost Rider and Johnny Blaze are at this point entirely different personalities, and that not only is Johnny no longer in control of himself when he's transformed, but the Ghost Rider doesn't even seem to be much in the way of a good guy.

The story opens not with Ghost Rider, but with Alicia Masters and Ben Grimm in the Baxter Building. For some reason, her studio is right next door to his gym, and so when her studio starts shaking, the ceiling falling in and her sculptures breaking, she runs next door to check on Ben, who is actually the cause of the disturbance, as he's punching some giant "hydraulic exerciser" contraption. Being blind, she can't see it and runs right into its path. Were it not for Reed and one of his super-stretchy arms, she would have been killed. 

Gee, if only Ben and Alicia knew some kind of super-genius, maybe he would have known better than to put her sculpture studio right next to the incredibly loud and dangerous, building-shaking superhero gym...

Ben feels low for having almost inadvertently killed his girlfriend (to say nothing of all the sculptures of hers he ruins) and he leaves to go mope around about being an unlovable monster. He's cruising around on his little green flying bike thing from the cover when he sees an elaborate police chase involving Ghost Rider, who seems oblivious to how much damage he's causing and how many lives he's endangering as he streaks around New York City and plays chicken with a commuter train ("Ha! Ha! Ha!" he laughs when one police car flips over and he uses the hood of another as a springboard to jump off of).

When G.R. returns to Johnny Blaze, The Thing lands next to him and offers him a ride back to the "flea-bag hotel" he's staying in while performing at an auto show in Shea Stadium ("Us monsters have to stick together!" Ben tells him). Johnny thanks him with a pair of  tickets to the show. 

Ben and Alicia take in the car show, during which Johnny Blaze jumps sixteen cars and apparently pulls off a somersault while doing so, based on the trail of smoke from his motorcycle that the artists draw. A couple of teens decide to run onto the field and make off with one of the racecars, almost running into Johnny in the process.

As they speed away into town, Johnny transforms, and soon Ghost Rider runs the kids off the road, picks up the car after they've abandoned it and throws it at them. He is in the process of burning them with his special soul-burning hellfire when Ben arrives on the scene. 

Unable to reason with the Ghost Rider, Ben shouts his catchphrase and a slugfest ensues. Ben seems to have G.R. on the ropes, until he feels guilty for how badly he's walloping him, after which he switches to defense, eventually talking him into transforming back into his mortal self: "Blaze is somewhere deep down inside of you! He's a person like me, with feelings-- hopes-- and dreams! You gotta let 'im out sometime!"

Back home, Ben is in high spirits, realizing how much he's got—The FF, his friends, Alicia—while "there are others who have... ...nothing!" 

That last word appears in a yellow narration box, hovering in a panel showing the Ghost Rider driving off towards the horizon.

Avengers #214 (1981) Jim Shooter makes his second appearance in this collection, penning an issue of Avengers drawn by Bob Hall and Dan Green in which the team try to track down and take on the Ghost Rider. 

Like Grant and Broderick's Spider-Man team-up earlier in the book, it's a very dense issue, reading far longer and more substantial than its 21 pages, thanks in part to how many panels are on each page, and just how many words Shooter manages to stuff into each of them.

Neither Johnny nor Ghostie makes an appearance until page seven, the first half-dozen pages of the issue devoted to Avengers goings-on. I guess this is kind of a historic and/or notorious point in the team's history, as it seems that Yellowjacket Hank Pym must have just struck his wife, Wasp Janet Van Dyne. 

In these pages, Captain America is working out so hard that Jarvis and Tigra are worried about him; Tigra makes her low opinion of Pym known ("He's proven he's a rat to me!" she tells Jarvis); Tony Stark and Don Blake talk about Pym, with Stark saying he'll pay any money needed to get Pym the help he needs and, ultimately, Pym visits his wife, whose eye is still black and swollen shut. She tells him she's divorcing him. 

(Can we take a moment to appreciate just how weird a character Tigra is? In this issue, she demonstrates no superpowers or remarkable abilities and appears to just be a catgirl in a bikini, and thus an odd inclusion in a line-up of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, who here just consists of "The Big Three", plus team founders Pym and Van Dyne in the wider Avengers orbit).

When Johnny Blaze finally appears, he seems to be at a particularly low point, sitting on a cliff and shaking a fist at a Ferrari speeding by on the desert highway below: "Blast it! Some rich, carefree son of a gun is tooling around in his sixty-grand toy-- --while I'm wondering when I'll be able to afford a meal again!"

Mid-rant, he changes into Ghost Rider, who seems to have continued to be more and more of a bad actor, and a distinct, separate personality from that of Johnny Blaze. G.R. declares in his thought clouds that the world has wronged Johnny Blaze, and there must be "a reckoning!", starting with the guy in the fancy car. 

As it turns out, that guy is known to the readers and, of course, to Johnny. It's Warren Worthington III, former X-Man The Angel, and Ghost Rider's former Champions teammate. Small world, huh?

There's an amusing panel where Ghost Rider speeds by Warren, taking the time to slow down and glare silently at him. Ghost Rider then speeds ahead, pops a wheelie and parks in the middle of the road, causing Warren to swerve to avoid hitting him and wreck his sportscar.

Ghost Rider continues to menace Warren and his apparent girlfriend Candy, ultimately tearing off Angel's shirt to reveal his bound wings and challenging him to a race. Soon they come to blows, and Ghost Rider knocks Angel out of the sky with his hellfire, laughing as he remounts his motorcycle: "Ha, ha, ha, ha! Never again shall he defy me!"

Warren ends up in a local hospital in Alkalai Flats, and Candy calls the Avengers, looking for Warren's friend The Beast. Instead, she gets Captain America, and he, Iron Man, Thor and Tigra head out west, intent on dealing with Ghost Rider.

Meanwhile, Johnny is feeling guilty about what he did as Ghost Rider, and so he takes a job pumping gas at a station in town, in part to wait and watch over the injured Warren. He's forced to turn into Ghost Rider when a child is imperiled, hoping his faster alter ego can reach the boy in time...and that G.R. will actually bother to do so. 

Thus revealed, the Avengers close in on him. He leads a motorcycle-riding Cap on a chase, he blasts Iron Man with a handful of hellfire through the eye and mouth holes in his mask (I guess those weren't always sealed in the early '80s?), and he even knocks Thor on his butt with his flaming motorcycle. 

The Avengers fare better during round two, though, with Thor pinning Ghost Rider against a canyon wall with a wind vortex created by his spinning magic hammer. Ghost Rider remains defiant: "Stupid mortals! A hell-spawned spirit cannot surrender! I fight until the vengeance I crave is mine--or I am destroyed!"

Neither happens here, of course.

A semi-recovered Warren, wearing a bandaged arm in a sling, arrives on the scene and attempts to talk Ghost Rider down. "I heard you had shown yourself and I figured you'd need a friend," Warren says, to which Ghost Rider responds, "I have no friends!"

Warren offers a theory about the change Johnny and the Ghost Rider have seemingly been going through in his own book, I guess: "I think that the more bitter and unhappy you are as Johnny Blaze, the more ruthless and savage the Ghost Ride is when he emerges."

The words seem to strike home, and while Warren offers himself to the Ghost Rider—"I'm the one you picked to hate, demon! Here I am! Do it! Kill me!—Johnny eventually takes control again, transforming back to himself. 

Warren offers to help Johnny, but Johnny asks to just be left alone and, after Captain America pauses to compare Johnny and Hank ("He lets things get to him...made one mistake...and then made it worse!"), they all walk off and leave Johnny alone. 

This was just about a year and a half before the Ghost Rider ongoing would reach its conclusion, and Johnny Blaze's story would seemingly end...at least for a decade or so. 

Hopefully the character got some kind of happy ending then, as this collection sure doesn't give him one.