Ghost Rider: Vengeance Unbound

GHOST RIDER # 12 (volume 1)

SYNOPSIS
Traveling through the Arizona desert, the Ghost Rider comes across an old man that's raving about somebody tormenting him. Johnny grabs the guy and roars off on his bike, just as a World War I biplane strafes the area with machine gun fire. Blaze manages to find cover between two rock outcroppings, but is shocked when the plane pass right through the stone. The Rider pulls the old man into a small cave, just as the sun begins to rise. With the dawn, Johnny transforms back into his normal form, and notices that the ghost plane has disappeared as well. The old man, Hermann Von Reitberger, tells Johnny that he was a German airfighter during WWI, and his greatest enemy was a mystery flyer named the Phantom Eagle. During combat, Reitberger shot down his opponent's plane, but before he died, the Phantom declared that he would stalk him as a ghost until he had his revenge. He'd been tormenting Reitberger ever since, all the way to America. Johnny offers to give the old man a lift to a nearby hanger owned by his grandson.

That evening, Joel, Reitberger's grandson, tells Blaze that the Phantom Eagle was actually a German named Karl Kaufman who fought in the war under an alias in order to protect his parents that still lived in Germany. Moments later, the Phantom flies through the hangar, only to land on the other side of the runway. The sun sets just in time, as Johnny's transformation into the Ghost Rider is triggered. He rides out to the Eagle's plane, where the ghost tells him that Reitberger is a liar. On the night of his death, Kaufman had attempted to smuggle his parents out of the country. As they boarded the fighter plane, Reitberger saw them from the sky and mercilessly strafed them, murder both Kaufman and his parents.

Reitberger jumps in Joel's restored biplane, determined to kill the Eagle once and for all. The Eagle takes to the skies, despite the Ghost Rider's attempts to stop him. A brief firefight takes place, but eventually Reitberger's plane is shot down and crashes into the hangar, killing him instantly. With Reitberger dead, the Eagle flies away into the night, his spirit finally able to rest. Johnny looks on, thinking to himself "I hope he has bad dreams."

REVIEW
This issue, like the one before it involving the Hulk, is an odd one. Falling in the brief span of time between status quos, the book had finally shaken off the trappings of the Satan storyline but had yet to embrace the full-on superhero approach that started with issue # 13. So we're given filler material written by the book's regular writer, Tony Isabella, and there's really not much that needs to be said about it.

The Phantom Eagle was one of Marvel's earliest characters, a World War I flying ace that had defected from Germany to fight for the Allies. I honestly don't know much more than that about the character, so I can only assume that this was the only story to chronicle what happened to the Eagle after he faded into obscurity - if his death had been depicted already, I'm not aware of it. So this gave Isabella the chance to both bring back a Golden Age character and do another variation on the "ghost seeks revenge" motif (or cliche, as a more accurate description).

The twist that Von Reitberger was the person that killed the Eagle in an act of cowardice instead of the honorable battle described earlier in the story...well, it was kind of expected. What bugs me about this story is Johnny's steadfastness when it came to defending the old man after he's told the truth about his crime. Reitberger was a murderer of not just the Eagle but also the man's parents, so who could blame the ghost for wanting revenge? I suppose it was just Blaze's heroic nature to defend those who couldn't defend themselves, but it still felt a bit uncharacteristic to me.

We do get some pretty decent artwork by semi-regular Ghost Rider artist Frank Robbins, but it's nothing spectacular. One thing I DID like about Robbins' art is the way he illustrated the flames atop Blaze's skull, giving them a more kinetic quality than most artists before him. But still, the artwork is like the story: stable and serviceable, but nothing extraordinary.

So should you track this issue down? I dunno, really. There's nothing BAD about it, for sure, but it's fairly run-of-the-mill in my opinion. It's a very healthy mediocre.