All-New Ghost Rider #12, the final issue in the initial run of the title with Ghost Rider Robby Reyes as the lead character, is a good example of what happens to most if not all comic books -- they run out of steam quickly. Though writer Felipe Smith shepherded the series from start to finish (in issues #11 and #12 he even supplies the art), once Tradd Moore left after issue #5, the comic book lost most of its creative pop.
What the reader is left with is a concatenation of lifeless conventions -- the Russian mobster (in a previous era, the ruthless Commie), the estranged little brother, high school bullies, a pining girlfriend -- stretching back to the beginning of the medium. Marvel wisely ended the series.
I'm sure we'll see Robby Reyes again in his own title -- Ghost Racers, the Battleworld tie-in, which succeeded All-New Ghost Rider, had a few nice moments -- the Reyes Ghost Rider is a high-school hot-rodding Latino; Marvel needs more of those characters in its bullpen.
Below are six scans from the All-New Ghost Rider #12. A Ghost Rider family squabble, noteworthy for the Xbox 360 controller that Robby Reyes takes in the face, morphs into little brother Gabe taking the form of a demonic wolf.
Running behind schedule this morning, which is a common problem for a comic-book reader. Issues stack up and go unread and misplaced. Organization is a constant struggle. My usual pattern is to go to the neighborhood comic shop every Wednesday evening after work. I come home and lay the stack of comic books I've purchased, still bagged in brown paper, on the dinner table.
And there they stay, along with issues that arrive in the mail from Midtown Comics in Manhattan, the company which now handles Marvel subscription service, for weeks on end sometimes. I add to the stack each Wednesday night.
Then, depending upon my Saturday post-run whim, I'll rummage through the pile and pull out the issues that I want to dine on with my endorphin high. Problem is by doing this I scatter any kind of natural chronological order which can be tracked by scanning the receipts from the comic shop.
I am then confronted with a puzzle when I want to try to find a particular issue, like this morning when I attempted to locate Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier #1. Mild anxiety ensues and I decide to pitch in and sort the issues by title. I'd say this happens every month. And this morning was that time of the month.
In many ways it is a boy's life I lead. I am still enthralled with the National Football League as I was in grade school, and, now, after many years away, I read comic books.
Anyway, the current predicament, a tendency towards disorganization, I remember from my grade-school youth. A recurring dream I have dreamed all throughout my adult life, even after I had left comic books many years behind me, was this feeling of anxiety of having all these unread issues stacked up and waiting to read.
Now at age 50, feeling this way not only about comic books, but book books, and newspapers and magazines, I'm beginning to think this is the prime engine for a certain category of the Chinese Buddhist "hungry ghost." Spirits such as my own, addicted, greedy for textual encounters that have gone unrequited, will be reborn as hungry ghosts. No Nirvana for me. I'll hover over the wall-mounted new-release display at the neighborhood comic shop and the remainder table at the few, if any, brick-&-mortar bookstores still standing.
Last Saturday and the afternoon of Veterans Day holiday on Tuesday I read all the issues of All-New Ghost Rider. Each number was tantalizing, even when the superb artist Tradd Moore handed off to Damion Scott (pencils) and Robert Campanella (inks) after the fifth issue.
Val Staples provides the colors -- which are incredible! -- for both. You can see a lot of cholita-lipstick red in the seven scans below from All-New Ghost Rider #5, as a new Ghost Rider -- this one inhabits the body of a LA high-school student named Robbie Reyes, who drives a ghost hot rod instead of a chopped Harley like the original Marvel Ghost Rider, stunt rider Johnny Blaze -- does battle with a pill-popping, overdosing Mister Hyde. Writer Felipe Smith crafts a brisk narrative.
