‘Lost in the Longbox’ with Brad Gischia, Episode Three

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“Ghost Rider” #50
(Marvel Comics, November 1980)

SCRIPT:  Micheal Fleischer
ARTWORK:  Don Perlin

Greetings from the Wasteland,

I’ve loved westerns since I was ten and Young Guns came out.  The next year Young Riders premiered on ABC and I sat rapt as Stephen Baldwin and Josh Brolin shot it out and carried the mail from town to town.  Naturally I would be drawn to cowboy comics as well, right?  Not so.  Until recently (pre-Shaolin Cowboy) it seemed to me, that most cowboy-themed comics were lame compared to the exploits of everyone’s favorite mutants and the wall-crawling exploits of Spider-Man.

Little did I know that eight years before a young Brad would watch Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen blast away at an outhouse, the Spirit of Vengeance would visit the old west.

Time travel has always played a big part in comics.  Usually it either fixes the mythology or screws up the story arc, but it is a tool that is often pulled to get out of a writing jam.  Simply go back in time and fix it.  Just so in Ghost Rider #50.  Gathering from what I learned from exposition, a group of bad guys is about to blow up a dam in #49, which would flood the nearby Indian burial ground.  Just as he is about to save the day Ghost Rider is tossed back a hundred years.

It seems the only thing better than time travel in comics is a team-up. Enter Night Rider.

Carter Slade was attacked by bandits and left for dead when the local Comanche medicine man heals him and he is gifted with the “sky dust” which will make his cloak either invisible or growlingly white.  He becomes Night Rider.

Johnny Blaze is injured by the Tarantula gang, and taken in by Slade.  As the comic progresses he changes to the Rider a couple of times, searing the evil with blazing hellfire, and fighting Hobomokko, a winged serpent, who was summoned by the medicine man’s daughter.

Night Rider and Ghost Rider dispatch the Tarantula gang and in payment he is sent home, ten minutes before the dam was to explode and stopping the tragedy at the last second.

All in all the story is kind of flat, one straight line to the next, which is, Ghost Rider trying to get back to his own time.  The only reason he fights the Tarantula gang at the end is happenstance, he stumbled upon them while trying to find the cave that moved him through time in the first place.

Don Perlin was the Ghost Rider artist from 1977-1981, so he was very comfortable with the character at this point.  I like this Rider, with the blue/black 70’s cycle leathers with a high collar, and the bike is just a flaming motorcycle.  No frills, no skulls, just a bike.  It was more about the character than his accoutrements.  There was no flaming chain, although that’s a great addition to the character’s mythos, he shoots hellfire directly from his hands.

I enjoyed this for the one-shot story that it is.  So often it seems that you have to read the four books previous or do extensive research just to jump into something new.  It was refreshing to read one comic, and one story, and be done.  This one has everything, cowboys, damsels in distress, and a super-hero, cross-time team-up.

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Follow Brad Gischia on Twitter:  @comicwasteland