I know, I don’t write enough anymore. I got a lot of stuff going on, most of it is your standard job/husband/dad stuff, but that does eat up a surprising amount of time and energy.
That being said, I do want to write for you all. So I’ll be starting a small, semi-regular series I’m calling “Quick Comic Rewind”.
The short idea is that I own a lot of comic books. Very many thousands of them. I read them all the time. New ones, yes, but also a lot of old ones. Comics from before the internet. While the newest comics are reviewed everywhere and in depth, I’m planning on writing and reviewing, quickly, books from the 70s, 80s and the dread 90s. Maybe it’s be plot and art related, but maybe I’ll get autobiographical in talking about a book, of philosophical. Who knows?
Tonight, Ghost Rider #32.
Written by Howard Mackie and drawn by Bret Blevins. Blevins is a guy I know and like from his work on New Mutants and Sleepwalker, and while I’ve heard a lot of people complain about his style, I’ve always liked it. I never knew he had worked on Ghost Rider, but this comic has been in my collection for probably at least 15 years.
Blevins drawing Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange is a hit. It’s weird, it looks dangerous, and it looks like black magic is everywhere on the page. He really kills it here.
So, about last week I pulled a run of the 90s Ghost Rider books out of a box. I did this for a few reasons; Ghost Rider is on Agents of SHIELD this season, that I like the art of Mark Texeira (who works on the issues before this one), Doctor Strange is in theaters right now, and the box with these books in them is under my desk at the moment.
The run, as a whole, is pretty much crap. The writing and pacing is terrible and it’s so very full of itself. There is no insight, theme or thought into these books, but rather they are filled with page after page of “badass-ery”. I blame Wolverine and the Punisher for this, but what can you do?
Anyways, getting into #32, Danny Ketch was nearly killed, and turned into Ghost Rider so he wouldn’t die, but they became separated because of evil magic or something. Doctor Strange is brought in to rescue Danny’s spirit, as Dr Bruckner waits for Danny to return to the real world to surgically save his life. Johnny Blaze is there too, watching over things.
A, I dunno, shady evil corporation called The Firm wants to steal Ghost Rider’s body, which is comatose during Strange’s magicial intervention, so they send a bunch of paramilitary security agents to kidnap him and kill everyone else, but Johnny Blaze shoots a few of them with his shotgun that shoots hell-fire, but other agents in The Firm go rogue, and they kill there own guys. It’s pretty dumb.
As that is happening, Strange finds Danny in a magical dimension between the real of Nightmare and death, and Danny’s all fucked up. He’s half hell-tainted, and Strange has to magic the magics to fix him. It’s weird, but the art here is worth it, as Blevins has always done this sort of messed up stuff well.
In the end, Doc Strange saves the day, Doc Bruckner works to save Danny, and the book ends letting me know that after this ordeal, that neither Danny Ketch or Ghost Rider will ever be the same again.
That’s pretty much it. Oh, and there are like 6 pages of ads for a boardgame called Dragon Quest. It’s even mentioned on the cover. The photos make this look like the most boring, D&D derivative and needlessly complicated game ever created.
So yeah, that’s a quick comic rewind Of Ghost Rider, volume 3 issue 32 from December 1992. It’s probably in quarter bins around the world, and while it’s no classic, at least it was fun.
