Category Cosmic Ghost Rider

Nov 19 2018

Cosmic Ghost Rider 5: Discussion

by Patrick Ehlers and Michael DeLaney 

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

Patrick: What makes an audience try to see heroism in their anti-heroes? We all try to do it. No matter what Don Draper does, no matter who he hurts, we want to believe that there is some kind of moral or narrative victory in him achieving his goals. Is that just how we relate to protagonists? Or is the protagonists’ own buried desire to be good, to be morally right, more compelling than the villainous actions we see them undertake? Donny Cates and Dylan Burnett’s Cosmic Ghost Rider 5 sees the titular character making a heroic stand at the end of a failed timeline, but ultimately confirms what we should have known all along: Frank Castle ain’t no hero. Continue reading →

Oct 9 2018

Pastoral Horror in Cosmic Ghost Rider 4

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The entirety of Donny Cates and Dylan Burnett’s Cosmic Ghost Rider has been about enthusiastically mashing up disparate elements of the Marvel Universe to create singularly compelling ideas. Our hero, if we wanna call him that, is a mix between Punisher, Ghost Rider and Silver Surfer. He spent the whole last issue battling teams of What-If cross-over mash-up characters until grown-up Punisher-Thanos came back in time from the future to rescue him. But the fourth issue finds the creative team juxtaposing disparate qualities that are far more elemental and aesthetic. Instead of a Juggernaut that is also a Duck, Cosmic Ghost Rider 4 give us a pastoral fantasy that is also a post apocalyptic nightmare. Continue reading →

Sep 10 2018

Razing Mash-Up City in Cosmic Ghost Rider 3

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

The very concept of “Cosmic Ghost Rider” is a great example of Writer Donny Cates  using disparate ideas from all around the Marvel universe as the building blocks for something wholly new and exciting. In my write-up of issue #1, I called it “Mythological Omnivorism”, a turn of phrase that I like, but which feels a least a little dishonest. Cates and artist Dylan Burnett weren’t consuming this mythology so much as they were shuffling, repackaging, and repurposing it. Issue three is where the consumption begins – and all of those jumbled-up building blocks are devoured to sate the gluttonous reader’s appetite. Continue reading →

Jul 5 2018

Mythological Omnivorism in Cosmic Ghost Rider 1

by Patrick Ehlers

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

I aways struggle to identify with the Punisher. The straight line from Army vet to man suffering from personal loss and PTSD to gun wielding maniac only ever plays as tragedy for me. Like… where’s the fantasy? Where’s the escapism? Writer Donny Cates and artist Dylan Burnett address this dissonance by taking the two most sadistic parts of Frank Castle’s origin — military service and a mind set on vengeance — and mythically amplifying them both in uniquely Marvel ways. The result is, and I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Frank Castle story, tons of fun. Continue reading →