{"id":20977,"date":"2024-04-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-18T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=20977"},"modified":"2022-08-22T23:25:40","modified_gmt":"2022-08-23T03:25:40","slug":"sm-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2024\/04\/18\/sm-93\/","title":{"rendered":"SM 93"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This issue is basically just Howard Mackie doing some pretty self-indulgent retconning. The Ghost Rider title got really weird after he left, adding all sorts of bizarre secret history and new ideas to the version of the character Mackie co-created and shepherded for 68 issues. Subsequent writer Ivan Velez, Jr. gave Dan Ketch a bizarre ancestral connection to Ghost Rider, a few new costumes, did a bunch of other weird stuff and then seemingly killed him. This is one of the weirder footnotes in Marvel history to me, as the final issue of the series was part 4 of a 5 part story, and the intended final issue was almost entirely finished, but Marvel canceled the series without publishing it, anyway. The original creative team would finish it up and Marvel would release it almost 10 years later. The premature cancellation is weird, the final issue getting put out way later, even moreso. But, anyway, its been all of 5 months since Ghost Rider was canceled, and Mackie has clearly decided to bring his boy back to basics, as we shall see. Cover credits are wrong this month, as this issue is drawn by Javier Saltares, who did layouts for Mark Texeira in the early days of Mackie\u2019s Ghost Rider and for that series\u2019 final arc, so it\u2019s only fitting. The issue begins with an out of control fire in Cypress Hills Cemetery, where Dan Ketch first became Ghost Rider, out of which springs\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Meanwhile, Spider-Man is swinging around feeling good about not being wanted for murder anymore, and decides he has to work on his rep. So he gets a kitten out of a tree, stops a home invasion and rescues some kids from a burning building. But people still don\u2019t trust him, no matter what. The bad press is too bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, that seems like no fun. Saltares looks so much better here than he did in Sensational 30<\/a>. I really think that one must\u2019ve been a rush job to beat a deadline. That\u2019s a dangerous kind of job to take, \u2018cuz it can make people think you suck. And to think, most of Sal Buscema\u2019s career was those kinds of jobs. MJ starts walking home, brooding about Jill and her family, when Peter jumps out of a tree and scares her, having just changed out of his work clothes. He\u2019s in as good a mood as she is a bad one, and he leaps them up onto a rooftop in his joy. But he\u2019s not convincing MJ to have a good time, she\u2019s too worried about his still-damaged rep. And then they almost get set on fire. Even though they\u2019re up on a roof, Ghost Rider whizzing by melts cars, lampposts and hydrants in his wake, and almost cooked them if not for a hasty web shield. So, after they usual \u201cI know you have to go\u201d from MJ (Who is now trapped on some random roof?)…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey finds GR\u2019s trail pretty easily, as he\u2019s left a wake of fire across the river, even. And further up ahead, the dismissal of all that happened in GR\u2019s book since Mackie left begins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spidey has flipped up onto the safety of a wall, but GR starts begging for help, saying the pain is too great, and Spider-Man sees Ghost Rider has just smashed a hole in the ground to reveal some wouldbe super terrorists who\u2019ve strapped a bomb to a gas main. Our man swings into action, and it\u2019s just 3 dorks in armor, so it doesn\u2019t take him long to put them down. However, there\u2019s still the matter of the bomb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dan\u2019s looking a lot less dead than advertised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The notion that Ghost Rider was \u201cNoble Kale,\u201d and not the demon Zarathos who\u2019d been bonded to both Johnny Blaze and Dan Ketch, was one of the many weird swerves in the GR book post-Mackie. He clearly wasn\u2019t having it. So now he\u2019s got his guy back to one. But I think this was largely ignored, and then they decided to make Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider again for awhile, and eventually King of Hell, even. That\u2019s comics for ya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This issue is basically just Howard Mackie doing some pretty self-indulgent retconning. The Ghost Rider title got really weird after he left, adding all sorts of bizarre secret history and new ideas…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[617,560,275,415,682,976,21,1242,417,2],"class_list":["post-20977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-arthur-stacy","tag-ghost-rider","tag-gregory-wright","tag-howard-mackie","tag-javier-saltares","tag-jill-stacy","tag-mary-jane-watson","tag-paul-stacy","tag-scott-hanna","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20978,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20977\/revisions\/20978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}