Number 1523: No animals were harmed in the making of this comic book

Two stories from ME’s Ghost Rider #8 (1952). The longer story, featuring the Ghost Rider, has a panel where a dog gets killed. This is not to rile up any animal lovers who read this blog, but the dog is not real. Nor is his hunchback owner, nor the villain of the piece, nor the Ghost Rider. And while we’re at it, how can you be sure I’m real?

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For real, more Ghost Rider. Just click on the thumbnail.

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Number 1423: “A thirst for blood!”

On the occasions I’ve shown an original Ghost Rider — not the Marvel Comics motorcycle guy with the flaming skull, but the original Western character with reversible cloak, riding a horse — there has been a bit of grousing because the Ghost Rider stories usually turn out to be tricks that look like supernatural. So here you are, supernatural fans. A “Tales of the Ghost Rider” seven-pager from Ghost Rider #8 (1952) that features a “real” supernatural being, a vampire.

Art by Dick Ayers.

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Number 1130: The Talking Head

It’s an election year in America, and television is full of talking heads. Those are people who sit around a table and endlessly talk politics, political strategy, polls, statistics...blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH! I’m a voter, and I know for whom I’m voting. I suspect many other citizens are the same, but we put up with these damn talking heads...I wish I had a job where I got paid a huge amount of money to be a gasbag. As it is, I'm doing my gasbagging right here for free.

On to today’s post, which, beyond the title, has nothing to do with my rant on television. “The Talking Head” is a Ghost Rider tale, drawn by Dick Ayers for Best Of the West #4. That title used the four Western stars of the ME Comics line: Durango Kid, Straight Arrow, Ghost Rider and Tim Holt. Best Of the West was a very nice comic book which had a run of twelve quarterly issues between 1951 and 1954.

The Indian babe, Fawn Woman, reminds me of what Harvey Kurtzman once said in Mad: “. . . if they'd had girls like this, the Wild West would have been a lot wilder!”

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Number 1108


Frankenstein and the original Ghost Rider


Realizing that I've never before shown "The Devil Tiger" from Ghost Rider #10 gave me the opportunity to not only scan it for presentation, but also to re-scan the cover story from that issue.

The cover is a classic:

As a comic book fan, for me there are several highlights in Dick Ayers' extraordinary career. I first noticed his inks on Jack Kirby's pencils when they collaborated in the late '50s and early '60s at Marvel, but realized what a good artist he was in his own right when I saw his pre-Code work on Ghost Rider.

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Number 666


The Phantom Brander


I wonder how the folks at Magazine Enterprises felt in 1952 if or when they noticed the cover of DC's Jimmy Wakely #18, and saw what looked like their character, the Ghost Rider, under another name. Vincent Sullivan was the publisher at ME; in the earliest days of comic books he had worked for DC Comics. I can imagine a phone call to Jack Leibowitz, DC publisher: "Uh, Jack, Vin here...yeah, Vinnie Sullivan. Say, Jack...I wonder if you know you folks have stolen my character?"

The Phantom Brander was a one-out villain, one story and he was gone, but very close to artist Dick Ayers' depiction of the Ghost Rider.

In 1952 there were hundreds of comic book titles. Maybe folks at DC who worked on Jimmy Wakely comics hadn't heard of the Ghost Rider, or had even seen it. But Gardner Fox would know. Fox worked for both DC and ME, where he wrote most of the Ghost Rider stories.

Jimmy Wakely was a singing cowboy who was in movies toward the end of the singing cowboy era in the late 1940s. This story is from the last issue of his comic, artwork attributed by the Grand Comics Database to Gil Kane and Bob Lander.







As a bonus, here's a radio clip from 1943, Jimmy Wakely and his Rough Riders doing "Boots and Saddle":

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