GHOST RIDER #1

By: Al Brown
Review Date: Friday, September 09, 2005

GHOST RIDER relaunches this week, presumably to drum up some interest in the character before next year's crapariffic movie. Seems a bit premature though, don't it? Since this is a six-issue limited series, and the movie doesn't come out for 11 months? My first guess would be that they're just allowing for the inevitable lateness of artist Clayton Crane's digital art (a la IRON MAN), but Crane insists he's actually already finished the whole thing, or at least most of it. I guess they're hoping this will sell well enough to either launch an ongoing series when it's over or at least start working Ghost Rider into the regular Marvel Universe again.

Ooh, hey! Maybe he could join the AVENGERS! They'll let anybody in nowadays!

I have to keep forcing myself to stay on-topic instead of going off on yet another rant about Mark Steven Johnson (director of movies such as "Daredevil" and "My Ass") and the doleful, stultifying sincerity that Nicolas Cage is sure to bring to the title character. Partly because we've heard it before, and it's sortof like predicting that I will get drunk at Fenway Park tonight: it's so obvious that it's really not worth saying. But also it's hard not to talk about the movie because nothing friggin happens in this book.

Here's what happens: okay, there's a wicked cool prologue that shows what Johnny Blaze has been doing for the past few years (here's a hint: burning). (And yes, we are back to Johnny Blaze. 2001's GHOST RIDER relaunch brought Blaze back without particularly bothering to explain why, and this series seems fine with that.) Then there's a whole lot of some dudes with wings talking. Lots and lots of talking. There's a quick introduction to what I assume are a couple of bad guys, or else really mean good guys, but we don't learn anything about them other than they're mean. Then one of the wingy dudes is all, "Hey, we should get Ghost Rider!" And the other dude's like, "Golly, that sounds hard!" And that's pretty much it.

The weird thing is that this is written by Garth Ennis (PUNISHER), who's usually quite a bit snappier than this. Yeah, he's definitely been decompressed - most of his PUNISHER arcs have been six issues. But the thing with decompression, as we all know, is that it's cool as long as you don't get friggin bored. And Garth's usually pretty good about not being friggin boring. Man, it just kills me when the first issue of a story is all prologue, and by the end all that's happened is that some folks have decided to do stuff and some other folks have announced their intention to do stuff and some other folks have just stood around looking moody and no one's actually gotten around to the "stuff" part yet. This seems especially misguided when you're trying to reintroduce a character that's been out of the picture for years.

At least it looks nice, though. Crane has created completely digital art for the book, and it's pretty badass. Ghost Rider himself is particularly cool, as is his flaming bike. Crane has a little more trouble with normal people, whose faces tend to be kinda weird and shiny-looking. Hey, you know those little flesh-colored plastic things when you were a kid and you squeezed them and their eyes and ears popped out? No? Well anyway, some of Crane's people look like that. But in some ways they're actually more expressive than Crane's fellow digital artist Adi Granov (IRON MAN). And Crane has a much sketchier, more organic style; his art at its best, like in some wicked scenes in Hell, looks like something that you can't imagine being created either on a computer or by hand. Which is definitely cool.

So I have a good feeling that some really cool stuff will happen at some point in this series. It's Garth Ennis, after all, and the first issue does promise some fun action around the bend. And also...well, it's Ghost Rider! He's got a flaming skull for a head! But still: you know what you get when you take a great-looking book with potential, and you mix it with some deathly slow action? You get a trade paperback, is what you get. And this book screams "WAIT FOR THE TRADE!" Then it threatens to hold its breath until its head lights on fire unless you do what it says.