In 1989 and 1990, it was time for a new direction at Marvel Comics: it was a new decade preceding the new millennium, and they wanted to face it with bold, new ideas. Naturally, they did so by looking back to concepts they had left fallow in the decades preceding.
The back catalog was teeming with hundreds of neglected concepts, particularly from the 1970s – a wildly creative decade wherein fans-turned-creators were turned loose on the Marvel sandbox. That was the decade of Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Chillers, and Marvel Feature, and any number of books that swapped headlining characters every few issues. Son of Satan, Modred the Mystic and 3D Man all got turns as cover-worthy characters before being turned loose to Marvel pasture.
Any of these characters might be the perfect jumping-off points for reinvention, and some were: Richard Ryder, the Man Called Nova, who had primarily been used in the ’70s, was shined up and tossed into The New Warriors. The Guardians of the Galaxy, largely absent since 1980, got their first ongoing series.
Few of these characters had been as lucky as Ghost Rider, who debuted in 1972’s Marvel Spotlight #5 and, miraculously, spun out into his own ongoing series the following year. That series lasted another decade, concluding with 1983’s #81, and that the character surpassed so many of his strange peers spoke to the character’s appeal: people weren’t going to turn down a book with a flaming skeleton in it.
But by 1990, the concept had been left fallow for almost a decade. Johnny Blaze’s story was ostensibly over, and the Rider hadn’t been conceived as a legacy-style character.
All the same, writer Howard Mackie, along with artist Javier Saltares and inker Mark Texeira, struck out to truly reinvent the character; unlike the other reintroductions of classic characters, 1990’s Ghost Rider #1 reinvented the concept from the ground up. Original Ghost Rider Johnny Blaze was nowhere to be seen, nor was the contract-with-the-devil origin from which he sprang. Gone was the wild American West, where most of the original Ghost Rider stories took place. There are no death-defying motorcycle stuntmen or road-show carnivals.
Set in Howard Mackie’s childhood turf of Brooklyn, the new Ghost Rider was already pulled into a more intimate focus, with hapless teenager Danny Ketch mirroring any adolescent of that city. Danny’s life has never been touched by magic; he has none of Johnny’s inclination toward demon-summoning. Instead, it is raw and brutal circumstance that pushes Danny into the path of horror. Walking through a cemetery with his sister, Barbara, the two are swept up into an arms deal gone awry. Barb is tragically wounded by stray gunfire. Hiding with her in a pile of junked cars, Danny is desperate to save her.
In the darkness, something begins to glow.
The contents of Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Epic Collection: Vengeance Reborn are steeped with a truly horrifying darkness unlike any of the new books of the time. Even meshing more closely with the capes-and-tights major Marvel playground of New York and pulling in guest stars like the Punisher, X-Factor, and Wolverine, Danny’s adventures reject the tendency for lightheartedness and action for action’s sake.
Saltares and Texeira create a gloomy, heavily hatched world, a New York after dark soaked with shadow. There is an implication of things in the dark, just out of view, and even the Rider’s jagged and vibrant flames fail to illuminate any panel quite enough to dispel that darkness. This is a world of horror set down right in the middle of the superhero brightness; even characters from brighter books like Captain America are submerged in more terrible and gruesome realities.
Danny’s tragedy – the wounding and lingering presence of Barbara – all but suffocates the character, deepening the atmosphere at the heart of this version of Ghost Rider: mortality, loss, and the lingering mystery at the edge of human experience. A near-cosmic cruelty is ever-present as Danny slowly loses grasp of his mortal reality, and while these themes and terrors deepen and blossom in the issues beyond, this first volume cements major roots for a major—if largely forgotten—Marvel narrative.
And that narrative is, tragically, primarily ignored. In 2001, three years after Danny’s last issue, a new Ghost Rider title launched under the Marvel Knights imprint. Just as Marvel had taken old concepts and flipped them around for a new decade, so too did they approach the new millennium: concepts like Guardians of the Galaxy were reworked into the team we know now; Johnny Blaze returned to his role as the preeminent Ghost Rider. Despite amassing a distinctive and unquestionable new mythology, Danny – and many of his themes, villains, and concerns – ultimately suffered the same fate that Johnny had back in 1983.
This volume of the Epic Collection, then, is a massive step in reintegrating an amazing reinvention story into the larger Marvel memory.
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