All-New Ghost Rider #1 – Review

By: Felipe Smith (story), Tradd Moore (art), Nelson Daniel & Val Staples (colors)

The Story: A drag race brings Robbie down in hellish flames.

The Review: I felt rather daring picking up this title, considering how I know nothing about Ghost Rider—quite literally nothing. Beyond seeing his image in various places, I don’t even have a passing familiarity with him. I’ve never read any of his comics, never seen him guested in anyone else’s, never saw the movie, never even looked him up on Wikipedia. Fortunately, the “All-New” part of the title absolves me from any of that, letting me take the series on its own merit.

Unfortunately, Smith does very little to make Robbie Reyes, soon to be our eponymous hero, someone who merits our attention. We get the barest of introductions: a young man struggling to make a living as an auto mechanic (not helped by his boss’ skimming practices) and support his wheelchair-bound younger brother, Gabe. Both live in a violent part of East Los Angeles, from which Robbie longs to escape. As an outline of the character and story, this works. The problem is Smith doesn’t flesh out protagonist or world beyond this minimum of material.

If I may direct you to one of Ghost Rider‘s fellow titles premiering this week, Iron Patriot made James Rhodes’ relationship with his family the center focus of that issue, allowing you to see the depth of history among them. Robbie’s relationship with Gabe, by contrast, reads like something out of a children’s cartoon, due in large part to Gabe’s too-cutesy-for-words dialogue: “You’re so cool. You’re my hero, Robbie! You showed them! …Yay! Mac n’ cheese! I’m gonna eat all of it, Robbie. So good.”* The sheer sugariness of Gabe’s lines makes you doubt Smith has any real experience of what kids talk like. The issue would have been better served had Smith eliminated Gabe’s dialogue entirely and actually explain, I don’t know, how Gabe came to be in a wheelchair in the first place? Or what happened to his and Robbie’s parents?

When the character work fails to drive an issue, the only place left to turn is the plotting, but here you’ll be sorely disappointed as well. Without any build-up or exposition of any kind, Smith takes a page right out of “Tell Laura I Love Her” and has Robbie bet his whole life on a drag race. Sure, the fifty-grand grand prize is attractive, but that doesn’t make Robbie seem any less shortsighted and deserving of the consequences. He may curse out the cops chasing him, and picture Gabe’s tragic future once he’s in jail, but obviously, these are things he should have thought of before the race.

Anyway, the men who corner him don’t appear to be real cops—a good thing, as that would have taken Smith’s vision of police violence to an almost offensive level once Robbie gets brutally shot down. On the other hand, their berets and the badges inscribed on them suggest Special Forces, which is probably worse. Even if they’re targeting the duffle bags of pills stuffed in the trunk of the car Robbie punked to enter into the race, it’s unclear why they’d just flay Robbie with automatic weapons fire and then torch the vehicle. Perhaps it’s this blatant miscarriage of justice that spurs Robbie’s sudden transformation into Ghost Rider. This turn of events would be completely inexplicable otherwise, especially since Robbie himself doesn’t seem to react at all to his new hellish form.

With the script this weak, it’s up to Moore’s art to carry the issue, which it almost does. His sharp, lanky style fits very well with the youthful, high-speed tone of the series, and his linework is strong enough to seem sophisticated, despite the liberal exaggerations in the characters’ anatomy. Moore can definitely capture the exhilarating, breathless thrill of a car chase, but he can also scale back the energy for quieter moments, even if he’s not the subtle of expressionists. But really, it’s Daniel and Staples’ coloring that steals the show. With all the bright, flashy neons that streak and swirl across the page as if alive, there’s no other word to describe the nighttime drag race except cool. At times, this same flashiness makes the characters in more dramatic scenes look plasticized, but mostly the colors are a highlight for the issue.

Conclusion: Even without the pressure of preconceived expectations, the issue largely fails to recommend itself beyond some slick, distinctive art. I give the series one or two more issues to impress me; there are plenty of other new series to focus on instead.

Grade: C+

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Please don’t take this as a reflection of my actual affection for kids and their adorable ways, but dear heaven, gag me.

– I’m pretty impressed that Robbie can afford a house for himself and Gabe on a mechanic’s cash-only salary. And to think I went to law school instead.