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. 

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...!

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. 

On The Champions Classic Vol. 1

In my last post, I said that I would be covering the first 560 pages or so of Marvel's Ghost Rider saga, via a copy of Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1. That wasn't entirely accurate, though, as there were some early Ghost Rider appearances missing from that collection, including an issue apiece of Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-in-One and, of course, any issues of The Champions. 

That last title was, of course, the name of a short-lived, West Coast superhero team that Ghost Rider joined, lasted a team shoe title lasted just 17 issues between 1975 and 1978.

And unlike so many other Marvel superhero teams, The Champions never really received a proper revival. Part of that is due to the legal issues involving the team name, I suppose, but, more likely it had to do with the oddball nature of the team, the lack of cohesion among its members and, even more so, its non-existent raison d'etre. Like what, exactly, was the point of The Champions, really? They seemed so randomly assembled that they made Marvel's famously non-team team The Defenders look like The Fantastic Four.

(While the original, 1975 incarnation of the team was never revived there would, of course, be later West Coast-based Marvel super-teams, like the West Coast Avengers and The Order, and the name "The Champions" would eventually be reclaimed in 2016 by a group of teenaged heroes. The only time the original Champs were ever really seen again tended to be in flashback stories, though).

It's hard to guess why exactly that might be over 50 years later, of course, beyond those broad problems that I had already mentioned. Additionally, there were apparently some significant publication delays, even if the book was meant to be bimonthly for some of its run. And, of course, there was a pretty remarkable merry-go-round of creators involved in the book's short life.

The credits on the first issue's opening splash page start with "Series conceived and written by Tony Isabella," but regardless, Isabella only wrote only five of the first 11 issues (and got a "plot" credit for a sixth, written with Bill Mantlo). Chris Claremont was credited as "guest writer" on issues #4, and Mantlo took over for writer with issue #8 (According to comics.org, Isabella's last issue of Champions came out in August in 1976, the same month as his last issue of Ghost Rider, which then assistant editor Jim Shooter apparently re-wrote part of, drastically changing a somewhat long-running plot point of Isabella's). 

The art wasn't too terribly consistent either, although given the fact that Big Two comics in the seventies hewed so much closer to basic designs and a sense of house style than their later comics would, the book reads smoothly enough. 

Don Heck penciled the first two issues and came back for issues #5 and #6. George Tuska handled issues #3, #4 and #7, Bob Hall drew issues #8-#10 and, finally, John Byrne handled #11 (And he got a pretty interesting credit in it; his was the final one, coming after those for letters, colors and editing, and read, "And introducing the pulse-pounding pencils of John Byrne--Artist").  

And that is just the first 11 issues of the title, which is all I have to go on, as I have before me a 2006 trade paperback collection entitled Champions Classic Vol. 1, borrowed from a local library. The back half of the series was collected in 2007's Champions Classic Vol. 2, along with what must have been guest appearances in other titles, and it seems like the team's entire 1970s publishing history was collected later still in 2018's Champions Classic: The Complete Collection. 

I can't find copies of those books though, so for now let's just read the first 11 issues of the series, shall we? Here are some thoughts that occurred to me while I did so...

•The cover of the first issue (and those of the next ten too) screams the line-up at the reader, listing each hero with an exclamation point just above the book's title. So, what have we got? A couple of ex-X-Men (Angel and Iceman), a former Avenger (Hercules), an Iron Man villain-turned-Avengers ally most recently seen as Daredevil's partner (Black Widow) and, finally, a still rather new-ish character who had never been affiliated with a team before (Ghost Rider). A pretty odd mixture, I think anyone would conclude...even, I imagine, regular Marvel readers circa the late 1970s.

•I referred to the team above as a West Coast super-team which, from afar, would seem to be the organizing principle for the team, a sort of West Coast answer to the Avengers (Coming some years before the more directly so West Coast Avengers, of course). That's not quite why the team is formed, though. It's never articulated on any of its pages that most of the Marvel's superheroes seem to hang out in New York City, anyway, and that Los Angeles and the surrounding environs could therefore use a little superhero coverage.

Rather, this team's coming together seems to be more a matter of coincidence than anything else. All of the five heroes on the cover above just so happen to be in the same place at the same time, that specific place being the UCLA campus, and that specific time being when otherworldly foes arrive there to attack and abduct Hercules...and another Olympian, Venus, who is apparently posing as humanities professor Dr. Victoria Starr. (It's unclear to me after minutes and minutes of Internet research if this Venus is meant to be the same one who shows up in later 21st century Hercules comics or any of the various Agents of Atlas comics)

•What brings all of these heroes to UCLA at the same time? Well the former X-Men are there as apparent students, although a brief conversation between the two, and a narration box referring to them as "confused young men," makes it sound like neither Angel Warren Worthington III or Iceman Bobby Drake intend to finish their degrees. 

"Prof X was great-- gettin' me a scholarship here and all--" Bobby tells Warren, "But I guess college isn't what this little mutant is lookin' for."

As for the Widow, Natasha Romanoff is there with her "old friend" (and sometimes mentor/driver/love interest) Ivan Petrovich. She's come to apply for a job as a Russian teacher, and she wears a purple skirt over her regular tight black bodysuit. It's a weird look, but one that allows for Ivan to cry, "'Tash! Strip for action!" when various mythological menaces appear on campus.

Hercules? Well, he's there as a guest-lecturer.

And, finally, Ghost Rider? Well, by this point he has relocated to Hollywood to serve as a stuntman in Stunt-Master's TV show, and he's only on campus to deliver a package from his new friend Katy Milner to her brother, who attends school there.

So yeah, it's basically just a bunch of coincidences. The players are all in place though when harpies, Amazons, Cerberus and mutates all attack, at the orders of Pluto and his allies Ares and Hippolyta. The Greek god of death has a rather convoluted (and kinda dumb) plan: To force Venus to marry Ares and Hercules to marry Hippolyta and, with these potential enemies of his wed to his allies and thus somehow unable to contradict or fight them, Pluto can go ahead and overthrow Zeus and conquer Olympus.

•So hey, stupid question: Where do Warren's wings go when he's in disguise as a normal human? Does he just bind them, or otherwise stuff them under his clothes, and they then seem to disappear...? They seem awfully big to be able to comfortably hide under a shirt and blazer, as he apparently does here. 

Iceman just ices up, apparently freeze-drying his street clothes so that they simply crumble off of him (I do wonder what happens to his wallet, though). He's therefore able to start fighting harpies right away, while Warren has to dash off to change into his superhero costume. 

When Warren returns, Bobby asks what happened to his mask, and Warren says he's decided to go public with his identity.

I would have asked what happened to his shirt, and if he's sure about that headband. 

•Ghost Rider, who almost has his head taken off by a rather Kirby-esque looking giant who calls himself Cerberus and later turns into a (one-headed) giant dog, transforms into Ghost Rider, and uses the word "fracus". 

He did so at least three times in the Isabella-scripted issues of Ghost Rider, too. I'm assuming that Isabella and editor Marv Wolfman (who edited both Ghost Rider at the time and these earlier issues of Champions), must have just agreed that there's a "u" in "fracas"...? Me, I like to just pretend that Johnny pronounces it funny, whether he's thinking it to himself as above or saying it aloud.

•Speaking of assumptions, I would guess the various Olympians in these first few issues all first appeared in the old Thor comics, or something else Jack Kirby was drawing? They are all very much apiece with Kirby's Asgardians and New Gods, their costumes more tights than togas. 

•In further discussion of his plan, Pluto tells readers that he seems to have unionized the various death gods and devils of the Marvel Universe. Note that both Satan and Mephisto seem to be completely different and distinct personages here.

•Eventually the goofy-looking Zeus-powered supervillain The Huntsman appears and, with a bit of trickery, he's able to kayo the Champs and make off with the unconscious Hercules and Venus, taking them back to Olympus, where the mortal heroes are unable to follow them. Defeated, Johnny, Black Widow and the two mutants all walk away from one another in different directions. This is the end of the second issue.

•And this is the opening of the third issue. Yowza! As I said on Bluesky, I'm not sure why this George Tuska and Vince Colletta splash wasn't used for the cover, which is simply an image of the heroes punching out mutates while Pluto and Zeus look on, and a caption reads "Assault on Olympus!" 

This splash, meanwhile, is like an early pre-cursor to the swimsuit specials.

Anyway, Warren and Natasha are apparently so broken up about seeing Hercules abducted right out from under them that they retreated to Warren's beach house and stripped down to their bathing suits to pose in. Bobby, meanwhile, ice skates and thinks about what a loser he is and recaps the events of the previous issues. Interestingly, among his thought clouds is a mention of "The girl I loved, Lorna Dane." 

Apparently, Bobby is so closeted that he even thinks like a heterosexual! Of course, given how much time he spends around psychics, maybe that's necessary to keep his homosexuality a secret...

•Johnny Blaze shows up (maybe everyone exchanged contact information between issues?), wearing his regular leathers rather than swimwear. He's thought of a way to get them to Olympus and tells the others that one of the portals that Pluto had opened up on campus, a portal that Iceman blocked with a mountain of ice, may still be open if they can just dig their way through the ice. 

They do, carry out their "Assault on Olympus!", have a big fight, Ghost Rider tells off Zeus and convinces him to take his anger out on Pluto, and the five Champions-to-be and Venus return to Earth.

Why doesn't Venus, whose divine abilities, like Hercules', are basically superpowers, join up? I don't know. I would say maybe the goddess of love just isn't much of a joiner, but then she did join the Agents of Atlas, a rather oddball super-team that lasted much, much longer than the Champs did (Although, again, these may be different versions of Venus...I know the Venus on the Agents' team is, after all, eventually revealed to not actually be the Olympian love goddess herself, although now I can't remember how long that fake Venus was meant to have been impersonating the real one...)

•Issue four of a brand-new series! Time for...a guest-writer...? 

That's how Chris Claremont is credited here, anyway. He joins Tuska and Colletta for a one-issue story in which yet another mad scientist is engaged in trying to re-create the super-solider serum that created Captain America. This guy, named Lansing, runs a state hospital that seems to essentially be some kind of nursing home, and he experiments on his charges, creating super-strong old men. It is played completely straight.

Our heroes basically just stumble into the plot. At the opening, Hercules and Black Widow are walking on the beach (this time Tuska draws Natasha not in a bikini, but rather her usual costume, and with a trench coat over that). They're kidnapped, brainwashed and then sent to attack Iceman, Angel and Ivan at the beach house, leading a small army of super-old men. Then Ghost Rider shows up. There's a big fight, and our heroes win. 

Though it's the fourth issue and a guest-writer, it's at the end of this story that someone finally suggests that maybe a team of some kind be formed. There are two panels of Hercules and Angel arguing about the fate of the mind-shattered old men, and Angel gives a bit of a speech, the last of it over an image of the team standing side-by-side in silhouette:

All Right! 

There is evil in the world, Hercules--and Lansing was a part of it. 

But there's good as well--and we're a part of that!

The question is: Do we do anything about it--or do we sit around crying in our beer? 

Like it or not, folks, we're unique, we've got power--and I hope the responsibility--the duty to use it wisely...

To help those who can't help themselves, the innocents, the victims of people like Lansing. 

Because...the world still needs...CHAMPIONS...

•The villain of Champions #5, which sees the return of Isabella and Heck (the latter of whom shares an "artists" credit with John Tartag), is apparently named Rampage, and he is introduced on the opening splash page like so, "Presenting: The everyman of super-villains...the first menace borne of the recession..."

So, um, was there a recession in 1976? I wouldn't even be born until the following year, so you can't blame me for not having been up on current events in the late 1970s. 

Is this the time of high oil prices and long lines for gas, of "stagflation" and Jimmy Carter's so-called "malaise speech"...? 

Isabella certainly seems to be highlighting Rampage as a character whose backstory revolves around the economic climate at the time.

He's Stuart Clarke, a brilliant inventor with his own company, a company that his lawyer advises him must declare bankruptcy if he hopes to fend off his many creditors. How brilliant is he? Well, he has designed a super-suit to rival the one Iron Man wears, we're told a couple of times (That's what he's wearing on the cover above, and it's powerful enough to allow him to exchange blows with Hercules).

 After almost two pages of narration explaining his downfall, he embarks on his plan: Wearing the suit, he will rob FDIC-protected banks (was that not all banks in 1976...?), so that the only one really being "hurt" is the federal government itself, "the very government whose ill-conceived policies caused the recession which has put my business in such dire straits."

•The Champions still aren't really a formal team or anything, but most of them are still hanging around L.A. together. 

Hercules is challenged by UCLA's football team. 

Black Widow, now wearing a vest and skirt over her costume, talks with the brooding Ivan, who thinks "Warren's ideas for the Champions" might be like those of "The Avengers or even your partnership with Daredevil" and will end with her being hurt. 

"It's nothing that makes any logical sense," she tells Ivan of the team, which, um, might have been part of the team's problem. "Just a feeling. You know, the Champions are really a lot like us. Loners."

And as for the mutants? Well, they take a meeting with Warren's lawyer about his inheritance, and he learns just how rich he actually is. It's certainly rich enough to found and fund a super-team, and so before the issue is out he sits down with Hercules, the Widow and Ivan to talk about his idea for the Champions, for them to be "storefront superheroes"..."extending a needed hand when ordinary people face out-of-the-ordinary problems."

They will never actually get there...at least not in these first 11 issues, anyway.

Iceman misses the meeting because he's busy with the team's business manager, who we briefly saw in the first issue, where he was UCLA's lecture agent. The university fired him, blaming him for the damage Pluto's forces caused to campus, so Angel and Iceman hire him to manage the Champs.

Iceman doesn't sound like he wants to be part of the team, though, as his thought clouds reveal to readers that he's worried about operating too publicly as a superhero and risking his secret identity and that he "may want to chuck this whole Iceman bit someday-- --and live a normal life."

•The next issue continues to tie Rampage to the recession, the title page calling him "Rampage-- The Recession-born super-villain who could be YOU!!" and stating that this is "A tragedy of today." It takes the entirety of the issue, but the four heroes—Ghost Rider remains MIA in this issue, dealing with his own problems in his own book—eventually corner the villain. He tries to commit suicide, but a last-second ice shield blunts the explosion that would have done it.

In a bit of a twist accentuating the nastiness of our current capitalist system, Clarke/Rampage's lawyer, who we met in the previous issue, spends the last few panels being pleased with the outcome: "He never had a chance to alter my power of attorney status in regard to Clarke Futuristics. If I move fast enough, I can sell the company-- --and make a tidy fee for myself-- --even after paying his creditors."

•The Champions first came together when the enemies of one of their members attacked, and that's the case for this next arc of issues too, which will comprise issues #7-10. A team of (mostly) Soviet villains will come for defectors Ivan and the Black Widow. They are led by a new Crimson Dynamo, who turns out to have a connection to Ivan (Spoiler alert for a 49-year-old comic: He is actually Ivan's son), and they include The Titanium Man, Darkstar (making her debut here, apparently) and The Griffin (who I actually just looked up to make sure he wasn't from the Soviet Union; I'm actually not sure what he's doing hanging out with the others). 

The bad guy's also rescue Rampage from a certain prison sentence, but that particular alliance is rather short-lived, as the Dynamo tricks Rampage into detonating a bomb placed on his costume while in the presences of some of The Champions.

•With issue #8, Bill Mantlo takes over scripting duties, and he's joined by pencil artist Bob Hall and inker B. Patterson. 

•Angel's dumb costume is damaged in an explosion, and so he needs to change into another one. The Champs' business manager gets him one, but it is apparently an old one from his X-Men days...although the color is wrong...? It's not great (I've never been a fan of those head-socks that some X-folks like Cyclops and Gambit wear), but it's much, much better than the yellow and red costume Warren's been wearing up until this point. 

•That same business manager has arranged a big press conference to officially announce the formation of The Champions, but only Angel and Hercules are available to make it (Black Widow is captured, Iceman is searching for Black Widow and Ghost Rider has rushed the badly injured Rampage to the hospital). The villains are available, however, and so they attack Angel and Hercules. 

•Darkstar eventually betrays the other bad guys, rescuing the male Champs from an inescapable trap she herself had put them in with her powers and allowing them to rescue the Widow. She'll show up in issue #11 as well, and it seems like she's in the process of joining the team, but, according to the Internet, she never formally does so.

•In the final issue of the collection, penciled by John Byrne and inked by Bob Layton, the team seems to have finally become your standard superhero team, complete with a headquarters and a fancy new team vehicle with a "C" logo, and they monitor for crises that require superhero intervention. Here, it's an invasion by some shadowy aliens who have apparently appeared in a few other, previous Mavel comics. 

•This issue is heavy on guest-stars, as Black Goliath, Hawkeye and the Two-Gun Kid all appear.

•As for Black Goliath, he appears first in his civilian identity as Bill Foster, "Tony Stark's west coast rep." He's on the roof of the Challenger's new HQ as they test their new air car, which he apparently designed. He's dressed in a long white coat but, when the car malfunctions, he grows to giant size, ripping out of his civilian clothes, and revealing the costume he apparently wore underneath them (and which must also grow with him...?). Note the big collar; I guess that must fold down to fit under his shirt?

•Once he's grown giant and blown his cover, he introduces himself to the team as "L.A.'s hardest-to-miss, spanking new super-hero". As an LA-based superhero, he would seem to be a good candidate for joining The Challengers, but he apparently never officially does so either.

•The last panel of issues #11 is a cliffhanger involving Stilt-Man. I would really like to see how that turned out, and how a guy whose super-powers are apparently just stilts would prove a challenge to The Champions...