Today, we go back 50 years to the first appearance of Johnny Blaze, the supernatural hero known as Ghost Rider!
It’s “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I’ll highlight a single issue of a comic that’s appeared in the past and talk about that issue (often on a larger scale, like the series in as a whole, etc.). Each spotlight will be a preview of a comic from a different year that was released in the same month X years ago. The first spotlight of the month takes a look at a book released this month ten years ago. The second spotlight is on a book released this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book released this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we’re looking at weeks in a broad sense, so if a month has five Sundays or five Saturdays, that counts as having a fifth week) look at books from 20/30/40/60/70/ 80 years old.
Today we watch the introduction of Johnny Blaze, the Ghost Rider, in Spotlight on Marvel #5 by Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog (with the “help and complicity” of Roy Thomas, who became EVERYTHING else years later)
WHY IS THE CREATION OF GHOST RIDER SO CONTROVERSIAL?
A few years before Ghost Rider’s debut, Roy Thomas introduced a sort of motorcycle anti-hero known as the Stunt-Master into his daredevil Course…
The character was a moderate hit (if not the biggest character, mostly literally a dude on a bike and that was it), returning multiple times. When writer Gary Friedrich took over the title, he pitched Roy Thomas (who was Friedrich’s good friend of the two who grew up in Missouri) the idea for a new motorcycle character called Ghost Rider. It was very similar in nature to a character Friedirch had just created the previous year for Skywald Publications called Hell-Rider….
Thomas told Friedrich the character was too cool to just be a Daredevil character and so the character was approved by Stan Lee as a “Ghost Rider” to be in. Spotlight on Marvel like a whole new character. Then we come to the place that’s in dispute, because SOMEBODY decided that Ghost Rider would be a supernatural hero with a flaming skull, as we see on the iconic cover of Spotlight on Marvel #5…
Thomas remembers saying that the character should have a skull and Ploog then set the skull on fire, while Friedrich insisted that he had come up with the ENTIRE concept himself (motorcyclist with flaming skull). Ploog doesn’t really remember anyway. I obviously tend to trust Roy Thomas on matters like this, so I guess it happened as he described it, but whatever, just noting that there was conflict over the specific creation of Ghost Rider.
Oh and then Friedrich years later sued Marvel when a Ghost Rider movie was made, and he lost, Marvel crudely trying to make an example of Friedrich by counter suing and making him pay the court costs and having to accept that he could never make money calling himself the creator of Ghost Rider. Another judge (my former law professor, actually) reversed that decision and sent the case back for another trial, and then Friedrich and Marvel settled down.
HOW WAS GHOST RIDER INTRODUCED?
Okay, that’s the raw drama of the character’s real life, but what about the comic book drama? The issue is brilliantly drawn by Ploog, who kicks things off with a stunning opening page…
We see the Ghost Rider toying with crooks and showing off his hellfire abilities before returning home and becoming Johnny Blaze again, and then we’re treated to one of the weirdest superhero origins in Marvel history. Comics…
Johnny Blaze’s father was a stunt motorcycle rider, and he died in an accident and his partner, Crash Simpson, took Johnny and raised him. Eventually, Crash’s wife died in an accident and her last words were to make Johnny promise that he wouldn’t risk his life as a stuntman. He agreed, even though Crash despised what he considered cowardice. Johnny, however, trained in secret and Crash’s daughter Roxanne discovered Johnny’s secret and the two began dating.
However, Crash contracted cancer and had little time left, so Johnny, like you, turned to Satan for help…
He sold his soul in exchange for Crash not dying of cancer. Instead, Crash died doing a stunt. Johnny then did the stunt in honor of Crash, but Satan came to claim Johnny’s soul…
Roxanne, however, being a badass, had noticed that Johnny was doing all this satanic stuff and she had studied enough to save Johnny’s soul…
However, the side effect was that Johnny would now transform into Ghost Rider…
It’s a weird opening problem, but hey!
If you have any suggestions for comics for June (or other later months) 2012, 1997, 1972, and 1947, message me at [email protected]! Here’s the guide, though, to book cover dates so you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional time lag between cover date and release date of a comic for most of comic book history has been two months (sometimes it was three months, but not during the periods we discuss here). So the comics will have a cover date that is two months before the actual release date (so October for a book released in August). Obviously, it’s easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago came out, because there was internet coverage of the books at the time.
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