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Came in sooner and looked very new. It is very cool.
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With the GHOST RIDER movie coming out, Marvel's decided to give the character a new ongoing series. This collection, VICIOUS CYCLE, collects the first five issues of the series, written by Daniel Way with art by Javier Saltares and Mark Texeira.
Ghost Rider's a problematic character to write because, while he looks cool, he's stupid, gullible, and (given my admittedly limited familiarity with the character) doesn't seem to fit in all that well with the rest of the Marvel Universe. In this book, the lack of any foreseeable growth for the character is made up for by giving him a quest that it will probably take him a good many issues of the series to complete. (Though his decision to embark on that quest seems at odds with his character in the recently released series GHOST RIDER: THE ROAD TO DAMNATION, in which his key motivation was not altruism but an overriding desire to get out of Hell.) It doesn't help that the primary villain for this book comes off as more annoying than unnerving. (I'd have been very interested to see Mike Carey's take on this story.)
This series is written by Daniel Way. Marvel has, for four or five years now, been touting Mr. Way as one of their up-and-coming greats, keep giving him relatively high-level assignments, and . . . well, I don't see it. He managed to make Venom so boring the title was cancelled, he's managed to make Wolvering boring, and now he fails to inject GHOST RIDER with the energy that such an insubstantial character needs to survive.
The art here is good but nothing to write home about.
This book manages to be silly when it needs gravitas, characters behave nonsensically too often, and the threat propelling the plot seems either inconsequential or contrived enough that I just don't care all that much. As other reviewers have noted, Ghost Rider is far more about style than substance, and, unfortunately, this book lacks the style to make up for its other deficiencies. The reason is book gets two stars instead of one is that I recently read a comic by Chuck Austen.
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