Marvel Spotlight #5. Ghost Rider: A legend is born!

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The Ghost Rider. He was in two terrible movies that starred Nic Cage.

But, then again, he achieved the remarkable feat of single-handedly making TV's Agents of SHIELD actually watchable.

However, he didn't start out life on either the big screen or the small screen.

He started it on the small page.

The comic book page.

And here's where we take a look at that start, as we visit his first-ever adventure, thanks to the pages of Marvel Spotlight #5.

Marvel Spotlight was, of course, the book that first introduced the Son of Satan to the world, and all sane judges know the first Son of Satan tale's one of the comic book highlights of the 1970s. So, how will Gary Friedrich and Mike Ploog's offering compare to that one?

It's night time and a strange figure rides the streets of whatever town it is we're in.

It's the Ghost Rider, a motorcyclist with a flaming skull for a head.

Who is he?

Where's he from?

And doesn't he know it's illegal to ride without a helmet?

But he's not the only one crimeing on the streets tonight. So are two murderers who decide they should try to kill him because he's the only witness to their latest slaying.

Fools! As though the mighty Hell-spawned of Ghost Rider has anything to fear from the likes of them!

Well, it turns out he does because he's completely useless in a fight and has no choice but to flee them.

Finally, trapped by a dead end, our hero must, at last, unleash his full power!

Of jumping off a plank, with his bike, allowing him to escape before they can hurt him.

But now it's dawn and, his pursuers left far behind, the terrifying figure transforms into a more conventional form. That of Johnny Blaze, motorbike stunt rider. And, here, we discover just how he got his amazing, "powers."

He's a man whose adoptive father - motorbike stunt rider Crash Simpson - had only a month to live, due to an unnamed disease. To prevent his death, Johnny struck a deal with the Devil who agreed that Simpson wouldn't die from the unnamed disease if Johnny agreed to become his servant in Hell.

For some reason, Johnny decided this was a great deal and eagerly said yes.

Happy as Larry with his pact with evil, Johnny was then shocked when Crash promptly lived up to his name and died in an attempt to jump over some cars. Thus, as promised, not dying from the disease.

And now that means Johnny must serve Satan!

Forever!

Except he mustn't. Just as Satan's about to take him to Hell, Johnny's girlfriend Roxanne shows up and drives the fiend away with the self-declared goodness of her soul. There's a woman with a high opinion of herself. One that's not necessarily justified by her behaviour at any other point in the book.

Thanks to that, whenever it's nighttime, Johnny Blaze turns into the Ghost Rider and zooms around the streets, on his bike, in order to avoid being seen by anyone. I'm not sure how riding around the streets, at night, with a flaming skull, making big motorbike noises, is a good way to avoid being noticed. Wouldn't it make more sense for him to just stay in his house?

I've already mentioned that the Nic Cage Ghost Rider movies are catastrophically bad but it's depressing to discover the original story's no better, stricken with clunky dialogue, unlikely behaviour and hateful characters.

Johnny's clearly a moron, having a level of trust in the Devil that makes you wonder if he knows who the Devil even is. At one point, he cheerfully reminds himself, "I have the Devil's word on it."

Not one of the characters is remotely likeable. His adoptive mother uses her deathbed as leverage to blackmail him into not riding a bike. His adoptive father keeps calling him a coward and trying to bully him into riding a bike. His girlfriend Roxanne makes it clear she's only willing to love him if he's willing to endanger his life every night.

And yet, somehow, he's willing to do anything for these people.

Then again, he's not noticeably likeable himself. His reaction to the death of Simpson is to instantly climb aboard his bike and attempt to complete the stunt that just killed the man, leaving his body still warm on the floor and making no secret he's doing it purely for his own personal glory.

But perhaps the biggest letdown is just how pathetic the Ghost Rider himself is. There are clear parallels with the early Hulk, in him being a tortured soul who changes into his monstrous form at night but this is a very feeble Hulk who can't even fight off two perfectly normal criminals.

Granted, he does have the ability to fling a modest dollop of Hellfire from his index finger but, this being a 1970s comic, he's clearly not allowed to use it on people, just as the Valkyrie was never allowed to use her sword on them.

All in all, you don't really read this tale and think the character has any great potential. Nor do you feel any urge to read his future adventures.

With its clumsy dialogue, charmless characters and massive lapses in logic, it feels like something Atlas Comics would have produced. The difference being that, at least an Atlas take on the character would have seen him leaving a trail of corpses behind him. Admittedly, they'd be ones who'd been eaten by him.

Son of Satan comics I have owned.

One of the banes of my late father's life was that when he'd saunter on to the local shops, the local madwoman would often suddenly point at him in the street and shout out for all the world to hear, "It's him! It's Satan! He walks among us!"

This could explain why I've always had a soft spot for the Son of Satan. After all, if a back-story like that doesn't make him a kindred spirit, then what would?

And that can mean only one thing.

It's time for me to look at the Son of Satan comics I had when I was barely more than an imp.

It's our anti-hero's first appearance, as he goes to Hell to retrieve the soul of Johnny Blaze, in a tale blessed with the tortured looking art of Herb Trimpe.

Despite what it claimed on the cover of the previous issue, this is the issue in which we actually get to learn the origin of Daimon Hellstrom and how he got that fancy pitchfork of his.

Apparently, his mother never once suspected she might be married to Satan, despite the fact her husband was called Hellstrom and he insisted on naming their two children, "Daimon," and, "Satana."

Bored with fighting Satan, Daimon branches out and tackles a bunch of ice demons lurking in a college building.

My memories of this one are vague.

Does it involve time travel and a team-up with Dr Strange to defeat some Steve Gerberesque menace to the cosmos?

If I remember right, this is a Gene Colan drawn tale of possession and exorcism.

The SOS finally gets his own mag.

And he's back off to Hell again after he discovers there's only one thing in life worse than having your house repossessed - and that's having it possessed in the first place.

My memories of this one are fairly vague. Clearly, it continues the storyline started in the previous issue and gives us the origin of the Possessor, which may or may not have had something to do with a travelling carnival.

I genuinely have no memory at all of what happens in this issue.

It all looks very dramatic though.

Great mastheads of our time.

A wise man once told me that, "Life is the name of the game."

His name was Bruce Forsyth and he told me through my television.

But life is also a magical thing, filled with strange coincidences that test the resistance of even the hardest of sceptics.

Only last week I was going to review Marvel Spotlight #13, featuring the Son of Satan. Oh how I thrilled at the thought of raving about Happy Herb Trimpe's artwork and Daimon Hellstrom's descent into Hell to sort out his dad.

As it turned out, there was only one problem with this plan.

I'd already reviewed it.

I'd reviewed it here, way back in August 2010.

How many things have changed in the two years since then. But the one thing that hasn't changed is the one thing I didn't mention in that review.

And that's that the masthead to Marvel Spotlight #13 is almost certainly my favourite comic book masthead of all time. Not only does it feature lettering that practically curls its way out of the cover at you but, on this occasion, and this occasion alone, it shines like Lucifer himself.

My initial plans thwarted, instead of reviewing that issue, I chose to review Monsters Unleashed #11, featuring the not totally dissimilar Gabriel the exorcist. But, in one of those twists of fate that prove there're dark powers at work, in the comments section, Comicsfan said he loved the masthead of that mag and that I should ask you about your favourite comic book masthead.

And, by Captain Kremmen's well-honed beard, that's exactly what I'm doing. You know where the comments button is. Feel free to use it.

Marvel Spotlight #14. The Son of Satan chills out.

And there was me thinking I had it rough, with my dad never seeming to know when it was Christmas. I should've recalled  that there're those amongst us for whom it's never Christmas.

Why?

Because their dad's Satan.

I could be showing my prejudice here but I suspect that, when Daimon Hellstrom was growing up, Yuletide was never celebrated big-time in Chez Lucifer. Still, not to worry; if the Son of Satan won't get to celebrate the birth of the Lord this Christmas, at least this issue he gets to have fun with snowmen.

Returning home from his latest clash with Darkness, it's not long before the Son Of - in his daytime guise of Daimon Hellstrom - finds himself invited to meet Dr Katherine Reynolds, about a university building that's haunted by demons. The demons are Ikthalon and his hordes, a group of beings from a world of ice, and themselves made of that substance. Granted, we only get to see about five or so of his hordes but I'm sure he's got the rest  hidden somewhere. Needless to say, Ikthalon and his kin plan to overrun the planet Earth.

Fortunately the Son of Satan's on hand and after getting captured in their ice kingdom where his fiery powers don't work, he quickly contrives a return to Earth to defeat the dread Ikthalon by melting him with Hell Fire, straight after promising he wouldn't. Exactly what happens to the rest of Ikthalon's demons isn't explained. The mysterious disappearing demons aside, this is the best part of the tale as the comic's "hero" proves himself perfectly happy to lie and cheat to get what he wants. He then follows this up by giving the hapless Dr Reynolds a good old-fashioned bitch-slap before flying off in a very ungainly manner.

While it might be ungallant and unbecoming for a hero to threaten a young lady - especially one as lovely as the young doctor - it has to be said she's been asking for it. After agreeing she wouldn't enter the building that night, she promptly entered it for no good reason, standing there like a lemon while the cretinous caretaker failed to take care and washed away the ankh that Hellstrom'd painted on the front step to prevent Ikthalon and his goons from leaving the building and taking over the world.

This is the Son of Satan's third outing and, for me, the tale's not up to the standards of the first two. For one thing it's not drawn by Herb Trimpe and therefore lacks the sweaty twisted delirium Trimpe brought to the title. Instead it's drawn by Jim Mooney. I like Jim Mooney. He drew Spider-Man and he drew Supergirl and he did both with a visual charm. But his somewhat wholesome style isn't ideal for a strip that deals with demonic creatures from Realms Diabolique.

Despite this, it's an engaging if insubstantial read. Clearly writer Steve Gerber at this point was looking to move the strip away from the, "Daimon Hellstrom takes on Satan," template laid down in the first two stories, and to widen its palette, its world and its supporting cast by bringing in Dr Reynolds who keeps declaring to herself that she's "fascinated" by Hellstrom. It makes the first move towards doing that, and does it entertainingly but you can't help feeling it's a strip that's rapidly conventionalising out, and already starting to lose sight of just how dark and macabre it had the potential to be.

The Son of Satan in Marvel Spotlight #13. Families at war.

If there’s one thing we all should learn in life it’s never to read other people’s diaries. Like that mirror of the soul the Phantom Stranger was always going on about, you’ll rarely be pleased by what you see in them.

In his second adventure we learn how the Son of Satan first came to learn he was the Son of Satan. Admittedly you’d have thought that being called Daimon Hellstrom, having a sister called Satana, having a great big pentagram on his chest, pointy ears and hair in the shape of horns might have all have been pretty big giveaways but our Daimon’s clearly none too bright and it seems he only found out when he read it in his mother’s diary.

Obviously her diary was somewhat more interesting than the one I tried keeping when I was younger because it seems to carry no references to anybody’s new albums or having once seen a bloke at the local Jobcentre who looked a bit like half-forgotten Olympic steeplechaser Colin Reitz.

The plot of this issue is to a large degree a retread of Marvel Spotlight #12, in which our "hero" goes to Hell and steals something from Satan. Last time out he stole Johnny Blaze and some woman. This time he steals something far more valuable; Satan’s horse and cart. He also steals his trident whose metal is the only thing that can weaken Satan. Why Satan carries a trident made of a metal that weakens him is never explained. With a level of critical analysis I never had as a kid, it now strikes me as being like Superman carrying a sword made of Kryptonite.

But, as today’s teeny-boppers say, it’s all fab stuff. SOS hasn’t mellowed yet into being an out-and-out good guy - although he’s already more morally compassed than in his first outing - and Herb Trimpe’s overwrought pencilling’s perfectly suited to the subject matter, while Frank Chiaramonte’s inking’s perfectly suited to Trimpe’s pencilling. Virtually every character looks as though their soul’s been wrung out like an old dish cloth and their bones are about to burst through their skin.

And, if the whole thing’s totally derivative of The Exorcist, The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby, somehow it doesn’t matter. All that matters is Satan’s in it and, as Samuel Johnson never got close to saying in his own diary, when a man’s tired of Satan he’s tired of life.

The Son of Satan. Marvel Spotlight #12

As the 1970s kicked in and the Comics Code had less and less clout, Marvel moved into horror. Admittedly, for the most part it was horror grounded in the super-hero sensibility they'd developed in the 1960s but it was still a widening of the company's pallette, and one of its ventures was the Son of Satan.

Supposedly, Stan Lee'd wanted Marvel to do a comic about the Devil himself but'd been talked out of it and so, instead, we got a strip about his son.

In terms of its core concept, it wasn't exactly an exercise in originality, basically stealing the ideas behind the Omen and the Exorcist and fusing them into one but it's not what ideas you have that matters, it's how you handle them and  they clearly handled it well enough for the adventures of Daimon Hellstrom to eventually break out of the pages of Marvel Spotlight and into their very own comic.

But here's where it started; Marvel Spotlight #12.

I got this from Sheffield's Sheaf Market in the early 1970s, attracted by its melodramatic cover and use of the word Satan. I mean, come on, what ten year old's not going to want to read a comic with that in the title?

What I love about this issue are the artwork and the colouring. The pictures are by Herb Trimpe. A highly distinctive artist, you wouldn't necessarily want Herb Trimpe to draw your favourite mainstream super-hero but, when it came to off-beat characters like the Hulk or the Son of Satan, he was perfect. Here, his style's so overwrought it's a thing of twisted beauty, abetted by Marie Severin's absolutely luscious colouring job.

The story itself doesn't hold up to a lot of questioning. Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, wants to find his dad, so he can annoy him, and thus interrogates various people who might've seen him, until he has enough clues to decide Satan's probably in Hell (we're clearly not dealing with the new Sherlock Holmes here), to where he promptly goes via a conveniently located cave.

There, he has an argument with daddy, who looks a bit like the Human Torch, before rescuing Johhny (Ghost Rider) Blaze and fleeing in his fiery chariot. But, of course, it's a first appearance and the purpose of the tale isn't to tell a story, it's to introduce its protagonist and show us his powers, which it does nicely. He really is a mad and threatening thing in this tale.

Clearly the strip as it was in its début couldn't work long term because Daimon Hellstrom's shown as being as unpleasant and dangerous as his dad. You're hardly going to be rooting for him in a fight. Thus, in subsequent issues, he gained a conscience and a mission to rid the world of his father's evil, traits that're totally lacking in this outing.

In truth, his first two stories are probably his best. After those, Trimpe left the strip and, though a number of accomplished artists drew it after that, none of them were as perfect a fit as Trimpe had been. Some, like Jim Mooney and Sal Buscema, made the thing feel a little too conventional for my tastes, while Gene Colan certainly had the horror chops but wasn't best suited to depicting an exorcist who was half-super-hero.

Still, even now, nothing can take away the odd pleasure I still get from reading this issue.