There's a new Marvel Masterworks collecting the Ghost Rider run I did with artist/co-plotter (and all around great guy) Bob Budiansky. I wrote an introduction to the collection and you can read it below. (Seems appropriate just a few days before Halloween, doesn't it?)
In the early 1980s, not long after I’d started working for Marvel Comics, my phone rang and it was Tom DeFalco—soon to be not just one of my favorite editors but favorite people—asking if I wanted to take over the writing duties on the Ghost Rider book from the great Roger Stern. My answer, unsurprisingly, was a wildly enthusiastic “Yes!”—not so much because I loved Ghost Rider (if I was making a list of my favorite Marvel characters at the time, GR would have been near the bottom. A guy with a flaming head who rides a motorcycle? It just didn’t appeal) but because, as a freelancer, always on the lookout for more work, always eager for new challenges, the offer of another regular gig was too good to pass up. (I probably would have responded with an equally-enthusiastic “Yes!” if Tom had offered me Millie the Model.) I’d already auditioned for Tom, working on a couple of GR fill-ins (featured in the previous Ghost Rider Masterworks) illustrated by my Defenders collaborator, the late, great Don Perlin, and I assume that’s what landed me the gig. But doing a few fill-ins and signing up for a lengthy run are two very different things.
As mentioned, I wasn’t a massive Ghost Rider fan. Oh, I’d read the early issues, and I was especially enamored of the stories illustrated by one of the true masters of the form, Mike Ploog (what a thrill it was, many years later, to collaborate with Mr. P on Abadazad and The Stardust Kid), but I hadn’t really followed Johnny Blaze’s adventures after that—so I took a deep dive into the recent issues by Stern and Bob Budiansky. Roger, of course, never failed to deliver an engaging story. Budiansky’s work was new to me, but his ability to provide crystal clear storytelling and expressive emotions—all wrapped in the requisite shadows, fog and bone-chilling mood required for a book steeped in the supernatural—was impressive.
Still, Ghost Rider was, like many a Marvel title in the early 70s, when the tight grip of the Comics Code had been considerably loosened, a horror book, and I wasn’t exactly a horror enthusiast: Oh, I’d watched all the requisite movies as a kid—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and the rest (it probably says a lot about me that, growing up, my favorite spooky movie wasn’t any of those but the comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which played endlessly on local New York television)—but my taste in the fantastic ran more to tales of everyday people whose lives take a left turn into the mysterious and magical: I was more a child of Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling than Bram Stoker and Stephen King (both of whom I’d read and enjoyed). But during my apprenticeship at DC Comics—where I broke into the business writing for their line of monster-centric anthology comics—I discovered that I had a knack for the horrific. I wrote numerous tales of blood-suckers and beasts, creating the ongoing I…Vampire and Creature Commandos features along the way. And I saw that the line between Serling and Stoker was thinner than I’d imagined. Horror didn’t have to be in your face blood and gore (although a good shock now and then could serve the story well), it could be a doorway into the unexplored shadows within the human psyche and the human heart. I was surprised to discover how at home I was in those shadows, with those creatures of the night.
I shouldn’t have been: I’ve always been fascinated by duality, in the world and, more significantly, in each of us. “Good and evil,” Dostoyevsky wrote, “are so monstrously mixed up in man.” All of us contain the purest of angels and the most maniacal of demons, the spires of Heaven and the pits of Hell, and our lives can often be a tug of war between those twin forces, as we seek a way to balance and, perhaps, transcend them. Tales of the supernatural offer an opportunity to literalize that war, and explore the paradoxes within the duality that so obsessed me: Even a demon has an angel in their heart somewhere, and even angels might be tempted by the darkness. That’s a formula for compelling stories, and a character like Johnny Blaze, who is literally at war with his inner demon, was—in the masterful hands of Stern and Budiansky—a genuinely compelling character.
Reading through the terrific work that Roger and Bob had done together—I couldn’t have asked for a better foundation to build my stories on—I saw that the relationship between Blaze and the demon Zarathos (a name Bob and I cooked up together. More on that later) was a doorway into both the psychological and spiritual aspects of our nature. All the themes I loved, as both a writer and a human being, were there for exploration. And, suddenly, I wasn’t just excited by the opportunity of a new gig, I was excited by the metaphysical worlds I could explore, the intriguing tales I could tell.
I was now officially a Ghost Rider fan.
All very heady and philosophical, right? But mainstream comics also have to offer big action and larger than life characters. The tug of war between Blaze and Zarathos supplied the ruminative meat, but Blaze’s supporting cast, from the denizens of the Quentin Carnival to the strange and deadly antagonists who rose up to challenge the Ghost Rider, provided the energy and fun. Adding to that fun was the fact that Bob Budiansky and I were co-plotting the book. I was a little cautious at first, I’d never co-plotted with an artist before, but I soon learned that Bob has a first-rate sense of story—as he later proved with memorable runs writing Transformers and Sleepwalker—and, within our first few issues, it became clear that we shared the creative chemistry absolutely necessary for a comic book to work. That chemistry can’t be created, it can’t be forced: It’s either there or it’s not. I’ve been in situations where I’ve written a solid script, the artist has done excellent work, and yet the final story falls flat. It’s missing some spark, some creative combustion that’s beyond words. Never a problem with Budiansky.
Working on Ghost Rider with Bob was a wonderful experience. No egos, no arguments: We’d get on the phone and spend an hour or two throwing around ideas, I’d go off and expand those ideas into a fully fleshed out plot, Bob would pencil the story, bringing it to life in his unique and powerful way, after which I’d supply the finished script. It was a joyful partnership—I don’t recall any major disagreements along the way—and Bob and I soon became not just collaborators, but friends.
Together we deepened the Ghost Rider mythology, digging into the how and why of the nameless demon who lived inside Johnny Blaze (he wasn’t anonymous for long: I still have a clear memory of the two of us bouncing names back and forth, like a game of tennis, till we came up with Zarathos)…created the soulless man named Centurious, who proved pivotal to Johnny’s story, both past and future…set Blaze against the tragic, tormented Steel Wind and the mysterious Sin Eater…developed the manipulative Freakmaster (a character mentioned, but never clearly seen, during Roger’s run)…and brought in classic Marvel characters like Mephisto and Nightmare. One of my favorite stories in this collection is GR #78, “The Empire of Sleep,” in which the Lord of the Dream Dimension takes us on a tour of every dark corner in Blaze’s psyche. It also features one of the oddest scenes I’ve ever written (and one I still love): Doctor Strange, Doctor Druid, and Daimon Hellstrom engaged in a heated game of jacks. Another of my favorites in this collection, Ghost Rider #76, was plotted and drawn by Don Perlin, who came up with an idea that was simple, exciting, and emotionally powerful: Johnny Blaze and Zarathos—now separated by Mephisto—in a race for their ultimate freedom, riding motorcycles, side by side, through the bowels of Hell.
Budiansky and I were zooming along at high speeds, too, but our collaborative motorcycle soon slammed into a brick wall when word came down from On High that Ghost Rider was cancelled. (In those days at Marvel, if a book dipped below 100,000 copies a month, it was on the chopping block. Today, a book consistently selling in the 90,000 range, as GR did, would be a runaway best seller.) But there was good news, too: We were given significant advance notice, allowing us the time to create a Grand Finale that would write an end to the saga of Johnny Blaze and Zarathos, giving Johnny and his true love, Roxanne Simpson, the “happily ever after” we thought they deserved. Bob and I were determined to complete Johnny’s tale in a way that respected the character and his history and I think the two-part tale in Ghost Rider #80 and 81 did just that. A definitive conclusion is something that rarely happens in comics and I remain grateful we were given the chance.
It's astonishing to me that our Ghost Rider run is now more than forty years old—“time,” as Bob Dylan observed, “is a jet plane, it moves too fast”—and, despite the fact that comics have jumped through many stylistic hoops since the early 80s, I hope these stories still entertain, excite, and perhaps enlighten just a little. One thing time hasn’t changed: the warm memories of working with Tom D and Bob (and a tip of the hat to inkers Dave Simons and Kevin Zuban and letterers Joe Rosen and Diana Albers, all of whom added immeasurably to these tales). And deep thanks to Johnny Blaze and Zarathos for allowing us to hop onto their flaming motorcycle.
It was a quite a ride.
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