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...!

On 1994's Wolverine: Evilution by Ann Nocenti, Mark Texeira, John Royle and others

A long time ago, I somewhat facetiously titled a blog post "Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?" I was likely being far too hasty, as there were, at the time as well as now, just so many bad comics I had never even read. 

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read 1994 over-sized one-shot Wolverine: Evilultion—the subtitle of which I swear is real, and not a typo on my part. Not because Evilution is that bad, of course, although it is a very badly made comic. 

No, rather because it's simply an X-Men comic from the mid-nineties, making it one of the many, many comics that I had never read, and thus, as far as I know, it is simply the tip of the iceberg of what might be some truly terrible comics (I generally don't read comics that I'm pretty sure I won't like, which is why I've only read a handful of comics featuring Wolverine from that era). 

For the record, I don't think this is worse or even as bad as Ultimates 3, but it did remind me of just how many really bad comics are probably out there (And Evilution is from Marvel, one of the premiere superhero publishers, rather than, say, Image, or any of the other many small publishers that tried their hand at the genre during the '90s boom years!).

Anyway, this is a pretty bad comic book, and it's bad in a particular sort of way that I think it could probably be used in some sort of How To Make Comics class as a textbook, the professor pointing to various aspects of it and passages from it as negative examples, of what not to do when trying to tell a story in comics. 

It's written by Ann Nocenti, which, based on her reputation and the relatively few comics of hers I've read, sure sounded promising to me. As for the art team, the first credited artist is Mark Texeira, who handled the layouts. The book was penciled by John Royle and inked by Philip Moy and Andrew Pepoy. 

If I had to diagnose what exactly went wrong with the creation of this book, some 30 years after it was first published, I would guess that it was created using the "Marvel method" and that the point at which it fell apart was when Texeira was laying it out, as what now seem like the most egregious mistakes have to do with what is being shown when (Although maybe the most blame should be reserved for the editors, three of whom are listed: regular editor Suzanne Gaffney, group editor Bob Harras and editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco...?)

Essentially, whatever one might think of the plot or characters or conflict, it's the storytelling that seems most obviously, glaringly wrong to my eyes in 2025. 

The book is all but devoid of establishing shots, and, when they do occur, they sometimes do so after a character has already arrived at a particular location, so the reader is never really introduced to the settings. Curiously, where establishing shots might be used, we instead often see tight close-ups of Wolverine's head. 

We get these also in place of panels that would now more commonly be used for a character's narration and, oddest of all, during early scenes wherein Wolverine is apparently traveling to the small New York town that most of the action is set in. 

From my experience with the X-Men cartoon from around this time, I imagine that he hopped on his motorcycle to get there, but we never see him doing so, just tight, background-less panels of his face as he travels. Imagine a scene in a film where the director frames a scene of a character riding a motorcycle such that all you saw was his face, and never the motorcycle. 

That would be weird, right...? 

Also, we'll get images of Wolverine, sometimes in action, sometimes just standing around, interjected at random in the narrative, at the pace of about once a page.

I imagine the artists really, really wanted to draw Wolverine, and getting the popular star on the book on every page makes sense, but they do so at the expense of the storytelling. There are also several instances where a character is having a conversation with Wolverine, but he's the only one in the panel, the other character's dialogue coming in balloons whose tails point off-panel.

Finally, Texeira and/or Royle show little diversity in their character design. The book is filled with blonde, white young people, and some of them look so much alike that it sometimes took me a moment (or, in one case, the entire book) to tell if, say, this blonde teenage girl is supposed to be the same blonde teenage girl as the one who co-stars in the book.

These are deeper concerns than the style of Royle's art in the book, which was not to my personal taste, either. I mean, we expect certain things from mid-90s books, and certainly Marvel's X-Men seems emblematic of what one thinks of when they think of "'90s comics," but there isn't really any of the expected excesses.

There are a few panels in which Royle's big, body builder-looking Wolvie has humorously dainty feet, for example, but I think that is more a matter of style than any sign of deficiency. Typical of the era, though, we rarely see his feet; in several scenes they are obscured by a curious cloud of ground fog. (There's only one real example of really wonky anatomy, on page 10, when we get a full body shot of Wolverine, and his torso looks too long and his legs too short....Oh wait, there's also a bit in the climactic action scene, but I'll mention that when the time comes.)

The script itself feels somewhat Vertigo-esque, with its focus on religious concerns, the supernatural and the environment; Nocenti had, of course, just been working for DC's mature readers imprint, attempting a Kid Eternity revival with Sean Phillips that lasted 16 issues between 1993 and 1994. But it's Vertigo-esque paired with what otherwise feels like an episode of the X-Men cartoon, the two aesthtetics wedded to one another with the violence of a car accident. 

The original comic book had a cardstock cover and glossy interior pages and sold for $5.95 at a time when the Wolverine monthly was just $1.95, apparently denoting that it was meant to be something special. 

There's a little poem on the inside front cover discussing the pollution of the environment and ends with the line, "We are going the wrong way." (At the bottom of the page, it notes that this story takes place before X-Men #25, published a year previous, whatever happened there...Oh, wait, I just looked it up, and that appears to be the issue that Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine's body. So that note is probably there to explain why this issue's Wolverine has his normal metallic claws, rather than gnarly bone ones.)

The first page is a splash, revealing a young blonde boy holding aloft a severed head pouring blood from its neck, while a huge Wolverine face emanating action lines is seen in profile in the background, and a big blue "Stan Lee Presents EVILUTION" is super-imposed over one of Wolvie's mask wings.

A younger little girl opens a door, calling for Jimmy, and understandably freaks out when she sees him with the bloody head; his ranting probably does little to calm her: "I met a man in the woods-- --with the face of God! Wanna meet him?" As she starts to cry, he reveals that it is a fake head and stage blood, and that he was "just funnin'."

Meanwhile, at the bottom of this second page, pink narration boxes over the bust of Wolverine tell us that he's in a waking dream. 

In the dream, he is gigantic, looming over the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant with his claws out and his thighs disappearing beneath the horizon. He's wearing a strange necklace (And his blue shoulder pads, by the way, look bigger, thicker and pointier than those worn by football players; one might reasonably ask why a guy with a healing factor needs such armor, but then that's like asking why Wolverine wears a cowl shaped like his hair. The answer is because someone—the artists, the audience or perhaps Wolverine himself—must think they look cool). A missile heads straight for his chest.

He rears up with sweat on his brows, in a bed in a darkened room (Where isn't clear; I assume the X-Mansion in Westchester). One of those weird, super-tight close-ups shows a sliver of his figure in full costume, as he narrates: "I don't believe in all that psychic garbage about visionary dreams...But...well...what the heck. It can't hurt to visit the town with the twin towers."

Cut to "Some faraway garbage dump at the edge of a rural shantytown," where a pair of young boys (Is one of them the boy from the first scene, given that their faces are the same? No, as it will eventually turn out) find a cannister that looks like the one that blinded Daredevil and created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, open it up, and play with the sickly-looking green glop found within.

Back to a background-less close-up of Wolverine's face in profile and then, in the panel below that, a rare establishing shot, showing what looks like a downtown street, tiny buildings in the background dwarfed by impossibly huge cooling towers. The perspective of the panel is pretty screwy; if one ignores the buildings in the background, it looks as if the town is built right up against the towers. If one takes those buildings into account, the towers look too big, something on the scale of the Death Star or similar sci-fi construct. 

This is Prescott, which Nocenti's narration tells us is "a seven-mall, three-church, ten-saloon kinda town..." (Seven malls! That is so many malls!) A town that is "Complete with bored, restless, frustrated teenagers."

Suddenly we are inside some sort of teen hangout with a juke box and kids dancing in the background. In the foreground, two busty girls are talking, one of them a blonde with a huge pair of opaque pink sunglasses who the other girl refers to as "Boom Boom." 

This is our introduction to the other character on the cover, a more minor X-Men character whom I have heard of, but who I don't remember appearing in any of the X-Men movies or cartoons I've seen and I don't think I have ever actually read anything in which she appeared. (UPDATE: Wait, she was in Nextwave, a series that must now be memory holed due to the malfeasance of its writer. Does that count as the real Boom Boom, though...? After all, the whole cast were basically just written as standard Warren Ellis characters... Anyway, I read that.)

Based on what I see in this comic, though, it's hard to tell what, exactly, differentiates her from Jubilee. Both are teenage mutants with big pink glasses and whose super-powers seem to be explosive light shows; Boom Boom's powers are repeatedly referred to as "fireworks" in this comic, too, which I was sure was Jubilee's deal. Checking her Wikipedia entry later—and asking about what differentiates her from Jubilee on Bluesky—it would seem to be that her energy powers are more akin to time bombs than fireworks, as there is sometimes a delay in the explosions she creates...?

We won't see a full body shot of her until the page after she's introduced, but in addition to the big glasses and a pair of high heels, she's dressed in a tight-fitting mini dress, with cut-outs exposing her abdomen, hips and cleavage. (Wait, she is a teenager, right?)

She's trying to ignore her friend, and listen in on the conversation of Jimmy, the boy with the bloody head from the opening scene. He's holding a primitive-looking idol and ranting to two other kids about modern progress, and how, "Ultimately, we'll die by machine."

"That's why we're the Devos," he says. "Our gang is for devolution! We gotta drag the human race back to before cars and computers and iron lungs and missiles..."

I'm not sure what's playing on the juke box Jimmy is leaning over, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a particular new wave band from Akron, of which he must be a fan. 

The scene in interrupted by another close up of Wolverine's bust, his thought cloud telling us that he's asked Professor X for some time off to visit Prescott, "the town in my dreams," and that Xavier told him that X-Force's Boom Boom has "been known to hang out there."

Scan appropriated from The Real Gentlemen of Leisure's much shorter and punchier blog post on the book.

Boom Boom approaches Jimmy, whom she calls by name (Does she know him? Or did she just overhear the other kids call him that?), and he stammers when he sees her (Because she interrupted him? Or because of her revealing dress?). She seems to roofie his drink, then asks about the idol, before walking away. His drink mysteriously splashes soda all over his face (After learning a bit more about Boom Boom online later, I guess the little white round object she dropped in his drink wasn't a pill, but an energy time bomb).

Then there's a page I couldn't make sense of. 

The narration boxes talk about Silvo, who was a little boy when the Wright Brothers first flew, and an old man when America landed on the moon, although he didn't believe the reports of it on the TV and then the nature of television. There are four panels of art running alongside the narration. The first shows a shack, the second shows three boys faces; one looks delighted, another is terribly distressed. The third shows the boys silhouettes in the foreground, a bright TV screen emanating light in the background. In the fourth, the distressed boy collapses backwards. And the fifth is yet another close-up of Wolverine's head with no background, thinking to himself, "Humph...looks like a normal, peaceful American town like any other." (The comic won't show us what Wolvie's seeing until the next page, though.)

(After finishing the book and re-reading the parts I didn't understand, I think Silvo is supposed to be the dead man who figures prominently later on, and the collapsing boy is one of those from the earlier scene who found the environmental waste and smeared it on his face; here he is in the process of dying from it, as will be made explicit later in the book.)

Wearing a little backpack, Wolverine stands upon a hill overlooking the power plant and thinks about how he heard something about a threat to close it down, while popping one set of claws (This is the panel with the wonky anatomy mentioned previously, by the way). These he suddenly whirls to drive into the trunk of a tree directly behind him, narrowly missing the head of an older, white-haired Native American man, who apparently snuck up behind him, then sat down cross-legged at the base of the three.

The man tells Wolverine he had a vision about his arrival, and then the scene jumps to Jimmy again, somewhere outdoors, and talking to a disembodied voice that appears in tail-less thought clouds. The voice instructs him to dig, and he does so, until an extremely buff ghost appears, telling him to "Get a woman."

Instead, Jimmy keeps digging, until his shovel makes a "KEK" sound and he says, "A coffin!"

Halfway through the page, the scene shifts to Germany (!), where a little blonde boy that looks just like Jimmy is in some kind of museum as someone off-panel talks about "the tip of a metal spear that pierced the side of Christ...And so called the Spear of Destiny... ...It was stolen by Charlemagne and then by Hitler... ...Each man who possessed it believed that he rode the crest of fate itself."

The boy steals the spear, which is really just a small spearhead attached to a bit of shaft. It will take a few more pages to explain, but apparently the boy is at the museum with his father, a Mason who brought him to attend the meeting to learn about Mason stuff.

Meanwhile, the narrative checks in on the other players. The old man talks to Wolverine about their dreams ("'Dream' is a white world...what you call dreams we call reality"), and how the government is threatening to shut down the plant, and an idol that was stolen from a local museum and something old and evil awakening in the forest. Boom Boom, now dressed in the costume seen on the cover (which also has a cleavage cutout), sees a newspaper article about the stolen idol, which is the one that she saw Jimmy with at the teen hangout. And Jimmy stops digging up the coffin long enough to read the newspaper, in which he sees an article about how the green goo from earlier in the book killed one of the kids who found it.

We're then introduced to a new character, a mustachioed man in a suit at a podium, giving a speech to a crowd about the economic importance of Gycon's power plant to their town of Prescott. He says the plant is apparently being shut down because of "one old man", referring to the Native American man hanging out with Wolvie, whose name is actually Red Water Fall. It's a threatening-sounding, vaguely racist, or at least impolitic, speech:

The old man doesn't understand... Just as his people did not understand a hundred years ago. It is now as it was then--when two cultures clash, one must relinquish. 

There is a natural progression, an inevitably to change. People must adapt to our ways-- --or perish.

In a classroom at Prescott High School, the students are dissecting frogs. A blonde girl who looks so much like Boom Boom that I'm unsure if it is meant to be her or not (Does she live in Prescott? Or just hang out there...for some reason...?), stands up from her table, saying "EEEEK! Forget it...I'm not going to do it."

Meanwhile, that little psychopath Jimmy has perfectly removed his frog's tiny heart, and it's still beating, which his teacher lauds him for (Are frogs dissected while still alive in high school biology...? That's not dissection, it's vivisection, isn't it? We only did some kind of big worm at my school...)

Friday night in the woods, some teens dance around a big red pentagram painted on the ground, chanting "We're the Devo's! [sic]" and "We're the chumps!" One of them says "We can't wake up no corpse" mid dance move. A coffin containing a body wrapped up like a mummy is leaned up against a tree (and partially covered by the narration box reading "Friday night, the woods"), and chickens hang by their necks from ropes in the foreground. Jimmy tells his gang to shut up, and then one of them notices the body has disappeared, as there is now only wisp of smoke in the coffin/crate where the wrapped-up body was.

Boom Boom, in costume, sneaks into Jimmy's house, looking for the stolen statue, and uses a "light bomb" on Wolverine, who has snuck up on her. After an argument over whether or not she's a little kid in over her head, Wolvie drags her out to the woods, showing her another red pentagram, this one surrounded by various dead animals, all wrapped up in phone cords and dripping blood.

Boom Boom finally agrees with Wolverine to leave whatever's going on up to him, and says she'll leave town—"Okay... I'm gone... I'm history..."—but she actually returns to Jimmy's house, this time finding him in the dark, surrounded by a halo of light, his eyes glowing and a grin of bright teeth on his darkened face.

He addresses her as Boom Boom, so either they do know each other, or perhaps the heroes of X-Factor were more well-known to the civilian population of the Marvel Universe in 1994 than they were to 17-year-old Caleb, and he tells her that the stuff with the statue and the animals? Well, "It's a boys' club. For boys only. Wanna join?"

She agrees, and the next panel is the most superfluous image of Wolverine in the entire book. It's an image of half of his head, just randomly juxtaposed between two panels. He's not doing anything, or saying anything, or thinking anything. There's just an image of Wolverine's face on the page there for some reason.

When the scene finally does return to Wolverine, he is being instructed by Red Water Fall, who tells him that he's going to go inside Wolverine's vision to look for clues and asks Wolverine to protect his body as he does so. He then drops onto his back and closes his eyes.

Are we nearing the climax? God, I hope so...

Jimmy takes Boom Boom to the nuclear power plant to meet the other Devos and to discuss her initiation. Ground fog envelopes Wolverine's feet at the ankles, and menacing silhouettes come out of the trees, Wolverine picking up the scents of "nine, ten--a dozen men!"

Before the other boys and the muscular ghost, who has appeared and addressed Boom Boom and the Devos, Jimmy uses a scalpel to take a wild slash at a chicken, eliciting a long, arcing gush of blood, the panel juxtaposed with Wolverine doing something similar with his blades to one of the attacking men. 

During the few panels of violence, Red Water Fall, whose name seems to have changed to the simplified "Red Fall" in the narration, has a vision in which he sees a huge spear flying towards a figure tied to a huge cross in the distance, the cross perched atop a cooling tower. A few panels later, we get a close up of the figure on the cross, and it's not Christ, but a seemingly nude Boom Boom, the border of the panel terminating just before where her nipples might be, keeping this book all-ages, I guess.

When the real, non-visionary Boom Boom makes a big pink explosion to free the other animals that the Devos had gathered for sacrifice, Jimmy pronounces his disappointment in her: "She is weak, weak and forever a girl!"

Then things get weird. Jimmy goes home, his thought clouds telling us that they made Boom Boom surrender between panels. He eats some chocolate chip cookies with his mom before an image of TV set on the table, half-melted as if it were made of ice cream. He notes that he has bloody feathers on his bomber jacket, but it's drawn and colored as a green liquid. His dad confronts him: "Come on son, who melted the television set?"

They argue. Apparently, Jimmy's dad is the head of the nuclear power plant, the mustachioed guy we saw giving a speech about the old Native American man earlier, and he wants his son to inherit and run the plant someday. He doesn't seem to be aware of Jimmy's anti-progress Devos beliefs.

Back at the plant, we see that Boom Boom is tied up to pipes that form a cross, mirroring the crucifix-like pose of Red Fall's vision, but here she has all her clothes on (She has lost her big, dumb glasses though). 

Finally, the next morning, it seems that whatever Jimmy and the Devos have been up to, it's starting to have some effect on the modern world, beyond resurrecting the buff dead guy. A man in a phone booth notes that the phone in melting. At Jimmy's house, just as the other blonde boy presents the tip of the Spear of Destiny to Jimmy, the engine in Jimmy's dad's car starts to melt. 

Father and son repeat their argument from the previous night, at greater length and at greater intensity, and they end up exchanging blows before Jimmy runs off, returning with his gang to the plant, where Boom Boom is still captive, awaiting being sacrificed.

Nocenti than engages in one of those passages that seemed not uncommon in the '90s, wherein the writer rattles off a list of phenomena related to some supernatural goings on, the art team not quite keeping up as they attempt to provide visual images to match her verbal imagery.

And in the natural world...

A flock rises, and heads south months too early...

A few towns away electricity shoots out of a socket... ...looking for appliances to power...

Call it unholy, call it unnatural-- --it's impossible to name but somehow things are just wrong.

This goes on for a few pages, with technology melting and people and animals acting weird, the panels interrupted only to check in with the captive Boom Boom and the ranting Jimmy, preparing to sacrifice her using the Spear before the body in the crate, and images of Wolverine posing (as, indeed, every page of the book seems interrupted by an image of Wolverine).

After hearing Boom Boom's "EEEEEEK", Wolverine prepares to go into the plant, tarrying a bit to have an argument with Red Water Fall/Red Fall about whether or how badly to stab the Devos and some stuff about tests and culture clashes (most of this plays out in a splash page, in which we get a rare full body image of Wolverine, one of those that reveals his dainty little feet).

He ultimately enters the power plant straight through one of its walls (!) and then he retracts his claws to punch and kick the kids around with a "THAK" a "KRUP" a "SPAK" and so on. With the Devos down and Boom Boom freed, things finally seem to be winding down—but there's till the ghost to deal with! Now boasting a size and musculature like that of The Incredible Hulk in the '90s, he engages with Wolverine. 

"Can't kill the dead, wild man," the ghost says, grabbing Wolvie in a bear hug from behind. In the weirdest-looking bit of anatomical drawing in the whole book, Wolverine seems to fold like a lawn chair at the shoulders and thighs, allowing him to kick his attacker in the head. "Then I guess I'll die tryin'!" he retorts.

As it turns out, he does not, in fact, die tryin'. Red Fall knows the Spear can kill the dead man, and after some wrestling, Boom Boom finally gets it into Wolverine's hands, and he proceeds to stab it into his undead opponent's side, and he dissolves into mist, promising to be back. ("Wow! He's gone," Boom Boom says. "Too bad his stink ain't," Wolverine grimaces.) 

On the final page, Jimmy starts to apologize, but Wolverine dismisses the Devos over his shoulder as he walks away with Boom Boom and Red Fall, apparently leaving the Spear of Destiny behind (or maybe it dissolved with the dead hulk?). A church bell starts to ring, and we see an image of the power plant in the distance, a sign noting that it's closed and condemned in the foreground. Red Fall tends his garden. Wolverine regards a church in the distance, disgusted that the same men who he saved the sleeping Red Fall from and the Devos were attending Sunday church, "like nothin' happened."  "Sometimes I can't stand the human race," Wolverine says over his cigar. "Maybe that's why nature created mutants!" Boom Boom grins and shrugs, and one of them laughs in big block letters as they walk off into the sunset...er, maybe it is sunrise, since it's Sunday morning. Fin. 

Woof. 

So that was rough, but I survived. If you refuse to take my word for how badly made this book really was, or think that perhaps I was exaggerating at all, it has been collected, in the pages of 2023's Wolverine Epic Collection Vol. 7: To the Bone. I was unable to find a copy in either of the local library systems I have access to, but I did find it on Hoopla, and Evilution itself is, of course, available on Amazon's Comixology, if you don't mind supporting a Jeff Bezos venture. 

(And, because I read it electronically, I was unable to scan any images to illustrate this review, which is too bad, as so much of it needs to be seen to be believed. I did try my best to seek out images of the interiors online, but found relatively few, and only used the one showing off Boom Boom's dress and apparent roofie-ing of Jimmy. I don't think there are very many images of the story online in the first place, but also my search was frustrated, as Google, for example, kept assuming I was looking for Wolverine + Evolution, not Evilution.)

Anyway, I think I'm going to go read the latest collection of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to help me recover from this...