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Ghost Rider #2

The Macabre Menace of the Tarantula!

Featuring: Ghost Rider
Release: February 14, 1967
Cover: April 1967
12 cents
Edited by: Stan Lee
Written by: Gary Friedrich
Drawn and plotted by: Dick Ayers
Inked by: Vinnie Colletta
Lettered by: Artie Simek
17 pages

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Hold, sons of Satan! If it is your wish to protect– then protect yourselves– from the wrath of the Ghost Rider!

After dealing with some cattle rustlers, Ghost Rider returns to his secret cave. We are reminded of his origin and how some of his tricks work.

A pullstring from a tree opens the cave. The lantern projects his own image in a ghostly manner, and covering parts of his body makes parts of the image seem to disappear, so he can appear to have no head or no chest. His lasso is black to the point of being invisible at night.

They spend a lot of time making very clear to the reader there is nothing supernatural going on. And I wonder if that’s entirely for narrative purpose. Or if the audience also includes the censors from the Comics Code Authority, who generally forbade supernatural concepts in Code-approved comics. So it may have been important to clarify that Ghost Rider was not in fact a ghost.

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Ghost Rider #1

The Origin of the Ghost Rider

Featuring: Ghost Rider
Release: December 1, 1966
Cover: February 1967
12 cents
Edited by… Stan Lee
Written by… Gary Friedrich and Roy Thomas
Plotted and drawn by… Dick Ayers
Inked by… Vince Colletta
Lettered by… J. Verpooten
17 pages

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It is sheer folly to do battle with a ghost!

Magazine Enterprises is long since defunct. So nobody owns the character of Ghost Rider we met in Tim Holt #11. The co-creator Dick Ayers is now a Marvel regular, so Marvel takes the character and has Ayers revive him.

Of course this means Marvel, now owned by Disney, owns the character of Ghost Rider and will for all time.

Ayers would attempt to return to his character in the ’90s, adding some new covers to the old stories, but they had to call him the “Haunted Horseman”, as they had no rights to the name. Because of the world we live in (or at least the country I live in) and laws built to serve corporations and not artists.

Gary Friedrich is a mostly new name to us. This is his first Marvel work. He’s in his early ’20s. He started at Charlton and we saw his work with Steve Ditko on Blue Beetle over there. He’ll become a prolific writer over the decades.

Gary has no relation to Mike Friedrich, who will be starting work at DC soon.

The letterer John Verpooten is also new to us. He’s just started as a regular at Marvel, working on staff. He’s here for behind-the-scenes stuff, and we’ll start seeing him occasionally as a letterer, and soon enough as an inker. He’ll spend a decade with Marvel until his untimely death in 1977 at the age of 37.

Giving Ayers a plotting credit is part of a general trend we are seeing of recognizing artists for their plotting contributions.

Though Thomas would much later claim that credit was false, and the plotting was entirely done by Friedrich and himself.

While the name and likeness are lifted directly from Ayers’ 40s hero, this is a different character with a different origin. The original Ghost Rider was Rex Fury. This issue introduces Carter Slade.

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