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Ghost Rider

Nicolas Cage

 

Comics are uniquely American and are just starting to tap their potential. Still, there are moments when you defend comic books where you feel like you are defending that strange kid in your elementary school class that enjoys eating paste and riding his chair like it was a horse. This usually occurs about the moment you come across a panel featuring a woman dressed in tight spandex, with a chest so large, that if she turned around too quickly, she could take out two or three city blocks. For most people, comics are a childish affair featuring steroid-ridden monsters living out 30-something-year-old male power fantasies for guys that couldn’t get lucky at a Viagra party during the AVN (Adult Video News) awards. Yet, we are in the midst of a revolution of this art form. Comics are the combination of words and art that allow for a type of sequential storytelling that neither can do on their own. With writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Brian Bendis, and Warren Ellis hammering out stories, comics are entering their own. It is only a matter of time until someone in the industry captures the public imagination like an Ernest Hemingway or Stephen King.  Some day capes and cowls will play only a small part in the medium known as comics.  In order to understand what a revolution this is one must understand where comics came from and the role Ghost Rider played in this transformation.

For the most part comics before the 1980s were garbage. As a kid, I remember picking up a comic book at the local convenience store and thinking what an awful load of garbage. Most of them contained paper-thin characters, goof ball plots, and villains who seem to be bigger losers than the Washington Senators in a game against the Harlem Globetrotters. I half suspected that the people who wrote comics hated the children. Yet, in the mid ‘80s there was a change in the industry. The roots of this transformation of comics to artistic graphic novels of literary substance can be traced back to Marvel Comics decision in the early 1970s to forego or work around The Comics Code. In 1954, medical doctor and psychiatrist Dr. Fredrick Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent. He claimed that comics contributed to the delinquency of minors and to sexual perversion. (Much like video games, the Internet, and television, almost every new form of media is met with rubbing hands and worries about the children.  Yet, strangely kids are pretty much the same.)  Retailers, under pressure from concerned parents’ groups, started pulling books off their racks. In order to save themselves, the major comic book companies, after a US Senate Subcommittee Investigation on Juvenile Delinquency heard Wertham state that “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry,” tried to head off government regulation at the pass.  The companies agreed to self-regulate with a comic code that guaranteed their comics were safe for children and no distributor would carry a book without the code’s seal on it. With a string of rules and regulations of what could be shown and not shown, horror tales almost disappeared and half a dozen publishers quickly closed their doors, but American children were safe from the bad old comics monster.

Cut to early 1970s, the comic book industry like the film, book, and television industry began to test the margins of expression. Writer Roy Thomas and artist Mike Ploog reintroduced horror comics to America with titles like Tales of the Zombie, Tomb of Dracula, and Monster of Frankenstein. Garnering moderate success, they also decided to reinvent a flopped western comic called Ghost Rider. They would modernize the stories, put their protagonist on a motorcycle instead of a horse, and he would be a supernatural being with a flaming skull where his head used to be. Johnny Blaze was now a stunt rider who makes a deal with Mephisto (a Satan-like villain) to spare his stepfather from dying from a lethal disease. The price of saving dear dad’s life is Johnny’s soul. Problem is Johnny’s step-dad dies soon afterwards in a stunt. Johnny refuses to give Mephisto his soul. Mephisto has the last laugh on the stunt rider by fusing him with a soul-eating demon named Zarathos, the Spirit of Vengeance. When he transforms into the Ghost Rider, he hurls through the city on a flaming motorcycle and throws fireballs. Unlike most Marvel heroes from this era, Ghost Rider was canceled in 1983, after 81 issues. In the last issue, Johnny is able to get rid of Zarathos by penning the demon up in a bottle with the demon’s archenemy, the shaman Centurius. Blaze went back to life as a motorcycle stunt driver and seemingly headed off into the sunset. Not so fast, the men who used to save up their spare change in elementary school to get the next issue of Johnny’s adventures are now movie stars and directors. One of Ghost Riders biggest fans is Nicolas Coppola. Never heard of him? He is just one of the coolest men ever. You might better know him as Nick Cage and he has one of the largest comic collections in America. His last name is a homage to his favorite comic book character Luke Cage, another Marvel product, and he has been trying to get in a comic book movie for almost 2 decades now.

 

It has taken over half a decade for Ghost Rider to make it to the screen.  In 2001, Marvel announced to fandom that Johnny Blaze would soon be at a theater near you and that possibly Johnny Depp would be jumping on the motorcycle as Ghost Rider.  When Marvel zombie Cage found out about the film, he contacted producers to express his interest. Yet, things are never that easy.  Production problems arose and Dimension Films dropped the project. In 2002, Columbia Pictures quickly swooped in and picked up the project and put Mark Steven Johnson in charge.  Cage was quickly signed up again to star.  Yet, after three years of delays, Ghost Rider was finally in production with up and coming Eva Mendes as Johnny’s girlfriend, Sam Elliott as the Caretaker, Peter Fonda as Mephisto, and Wes Bentley as the villainous son of Mephisto, Blackheart.  Even when the film was in the can, it would take another year-and-a-half to finally find a place in Columbia’s schedule.

The movie keeps the essence of the comic book character with some minor changes to make it more cinematic.  So, what is the plot? Who cares?  It is a guy with a flaming skull driving around on a flaming motorcycle.  It is not Shakespeare.  It is goofy comic book fun with Cage chewing up the scenery in the way only Nick Cage can do.  It is on the level with Johnson’s other film, Daredevil.  With dozens of Marvel films on the horizon and countless other comic book projects hitting the big screen, we are in the age of superheroes.  Even Johnson, who has shown he has a touch for capes and cowls drama, is not staying away from comic books for too long.  He is in charge of developing Vertigo’s Preacher, one of the most profane and hilarious epics ever put on paper, for HBO. 

Verdict: On the Level of the Daredevil Movie