Review: Ghost Rider #2

STORY

This comic starts with and opening blurb in the credits to get us up to speed on the situation. We learn that the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, has become the King of Hell in order to save the Earth from chaos while Mephisto is imprisoned in Las Vegas but has come to Earth seeking demons that have escaped Hell to roam the world freely. The blurb says that Blaze has been corrupted but more on that below. Danny Ketch, Johnny’s younger half brother and also a Ghost Rider is a bar owner trying to forget he was ever a Spirit of Vengeance, seeing it as nothing but a curse upon him.

The set of for the story is pretty straight forward, Blaze appears to be murdering normal humans to the eyes of mortals and suspicion falls on Danny because multiple Ghost Riders in the same town are pretty uncommon even in the world of Marvel Comics. When a cop named Stacy, who knows Dan is the Ghost Rider, comes by to inform him of the “murder”“ of one of his patrons we get some of their concerns about whether Dan’s GR is capable of killing the innocent of not. Dan is positive his influence on the Spirit would prevent this but you can still feel how disturbed he is at the possibility and how much it bothers him that someone he knows has been killed. Its a nice character set up for Danny for things to come in the series I’m sure and you can see just how troubled his life has become since he became the Ghost Rider. I find this turn for the character pretty sad to be honest because I was a big fan of the 90s Ghost Rider and Danny seemed to be a lot stronger character back then, but with the return of Blaze as the main GR poor Dan has been put through the wringer the last couple of decades.

Now the blurb has said Johnny has be corrupted Hell but honestly I’m not seeing it. He just appears to be doing his duty and returning the fallen to Hell. Unfortunately he is going about it in an absolutely ruthless manner so his time in Hell has no doubt affected him but the escaped demons are stealing lives and souls just so that they can be free to walk the Earth no matter how much they protest they aren’t wishing to hurt anyone. The trouble is, is that when Dan confronts Johnny, Dan has denied the Ghost Rider to a point to where Dan can’t even see the demons for what they are. We end up with the brothers battling from a couple of interesting perspectives. With Johnny savagely performing his duty as Lord of Hell, fully committed to the role that he has been forced to accept while Dan is in such denial of his status as Spirit of Vengeance that he is no longer effective as a Ghost Rider. This definitely makes for an interesting conflict between the protagonists. One wonders if this issue can be resolved and it seems ti needs to be soon as a subplot is introduced depicting Mephisto loyalists plotting against Johnny in Hell.

ART

I’m not certain why the comic needed so many artists on it. I don’t see any glaring change in style throughout the book, it all looks pretty consistent. For the most part the art is pretty descent, the slower moments look like the artists just tried to get through them so he could get back to drawing the fun stuff. There is a weird bit where the first panel with Dan has him looking pretty buff and then every other panel has him looking oddly scrawny thereafter. It gets the job done but this is never going to be a classic that you collect for the art.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s interesting enough for me to want to read more but I don’t this is a series I’d keep in my personal collection.

SCORE: 3 out of 5

GHOST RIDER #2
Writer:Â Ed Brisson
Art:Â Aaron Kudder with Craig Yeung, John Lucas, Luciano Vecchio
Colors:Â Jason Keith