Everyone knows Ghost Rider. The flaming skull. The Hellcycle. Penance Stare. Hell, just last week I posted a Cavalcade Comics cover featuring the motorcycle riding demon fighting the Headless Horseman. But did you know that Ghost Rider was originally a supernatural western hero?
Back in 1949, Magazine Enterprises was publishing a western comic called Tim Holt: Cowboy Star of the Movies. In issue #11, a backup story was introduced featuring the ghostly first appearance of the Ghost Rider.
The story was written by Ray Krank and drawn by Dick Ayers. It told the origin of the Ghost Rider. Rex Fury, aka the Calico Kid, is ambushed by renegade Indians. He fights the attacking braves while saying classy things like this:
It *was* 1949. Anyway, the Indians’ numbers eventually overcome the Calico Kid and they throw him and his Chinese manservant, Sing-Song (I’m not even joking. 1949, guys.), into the “Devil’s Sink”, a bottomless whirlpool from which no one that has fallen in has ever returned. Except Rex Fury. After somehow washing up inside a hidden cave system, Rex decides to come back as the spectral Ghost Rider to fight crime and get the men who sent him to his watery grave.
Ghost Rider would appear in Tim Holt a few more times before, in 1950, getting his own title.
For this new title the character was again drawn by co-creator Dick Ayers. The first issue retold the character’s origin from Tim Holt #11 but with new art and an expanded story. This time they expanded on his time in the Devil’s Sink. Instead of washing up in a hidden cave system, he enters something like the afterlife, or Purgatory. While there he learns skills from famous Western heroes like Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Kit Carson, etc so he can return to the living and fight evil. They even give him the suit.
The title was a different type of Western and the Ghost Rider was a different type of Western hero. The book was essentially a horror title. The stories pitted our hero against a motley assortment of ghosts, monsters, cursed treasure, witches, and demons.
I’ve read a few issues of this title and there are some fun issues. Ghost Rider even manages to meet another of my AWESOME-tober-fest theme monsters, Frankenstein. In issue #10.
The character was a big hit for Magazine Enterprises for nearly a decade until the company went bankrupt. In 1967, after the trademark on the character had expired, Marvel Comics released their own almost exact copy of the character in his own title written by Roy Thomas and again drawn by Dick Ayers.
Unfortunately Marvel stripped out all of the horror and supernatural elements and made Ghost Rider a more traditional western gunfighting hero. Several years later, after Marvel introduced their motorcycle riding demon version of Ghost Rider, they renamed this Western character Phantom Rider. Phantom Rider would team up with the new Ghost Rider several times for Marvel.
For Halloween a few years ago I did a Cavalcade Comics cover featuring a meet up of the Original Ghost Rider and the New Ghost Rider.
Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.
Cavalcade of Awesome 