Sick

Spent the better part of the last week down with the worst bout of the ick I've exprienced in over 20 years. I haven't been this sick since I had mono in the 7'th grade. Just like then, I whiled away the hours* with massive doses of Vitamin C.

Comics that is.

Back then, I went back and forth between an issue of Batman (possibly Detective) - I recall little of the issue except that it had Catwoman on the cover - something that I variously remember as an issue of Action Comics, an issue of Daredevil, and, like, Rom or Micronauts or somesuch thing** and the sheer brain-melting glory of this:


I've never been a huge Iron Man fan. I like the character fine, but the Crimson Avenger never grabbed my imagination the way that, say, the Scarlet Speedster did. Even in my personal ranking of heroes rooted in the Cold War who used cutting-edge - and cool as all @$#% - technology and gadgets, Shellhead comes in a distant second to the S.H.I.E.L.D. ramrod himself, Nick frackin' Fury.

But this issue was different, and I don't believe it was merely a function of Amusing Brain Sickness. This issue featured an Iron Man with malfunctioning (his power cells may have been depleted, the specifics are kind of fuzzy) armor who had to save the day, including rescuing kidnapped members of his supporting cast - one of whom (possibly Jim Rhodes?) was staked out and left as a sidekick buffet for a passel of poisonous spiders - using nothing but his wits and a bunch of random gadgets (which had presumably never been used before because no previous writer had backed themselves into a corner where they needed to be used, and had therefore had no need to retcon them into the armor's configuration) like diamond-tipped microsaws hidden in one of the fingers of his gauntlets. All that plus an acidic purple gas that ate throug the armor making the suit look like the Toxic Armored Avenger, which was cool. But the real point was this was an Iron Man whose non-armored brain was at the core of his heroism; it was the man, not the costume.

This time I dosed myself with the Marvel Essentials Ghost Rider collection.

This is probably no great revelation, but Ghost Rider was an exceedingly bad series. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to be a charming valentine to the goofy 70s. I wanted to find in it the sort of needy potential Charlie Brown found in that darn Christmas tree, or that you might find in an three-legged, one-eyed, mangy, incontinent dog that just wants to be loved, darn it all. But it's just not there - at least not in the first volume.

It's repetitive. You know the annoying pace of the newspaper Spider-Man strip, where a week's worth of strips offers on average two panels of plot development, with the rest given over to recapping? That's pretty much every issue of Ghost Rider: Sun goes down, Johnny Blaze becomes Ghost Rider, and reflects on how he became Ghost Rider - we're talkin' the same @$#%ing origin sequence every damn time! - rides around for a while, kvetches about: a) his girlfriend; b) how doomed he is when Satan finally gets his hands on Johnny's soul, and; c) how lucky he is that his girlfriend's (and let's not overlook the fact she's his stepsister) purity of spirit keeps the devil at bay, gets outsmarted by biker gangs (who would need about 17 rewrites two rise to the level of two-dimensional villainy), fights ridiculous demons, and occasionally gets rescued by Jesus (no, really), just in time for the sun to come up, for Ghost Rider to turn back into Blaze, and for the whole spirit-deadening process to begin anew.

Too be fair,the whole mess shows a marginal improvement when the action moves to Los Angeles so Blaze can become a TV stunt rider (although there isn't a tremendous focus on the job, since writer Tony Isabella seems to recognize that Blaze isn't a terribly interesting character) but it's still baffling the series lasted nearly ten years.

*between the fever-induced hallucinations, expectoration of toxic mucus, desperate longing for the return of such luxuries as my senses of taste and smell, amazement that a body could ache so much without any exertion, and fervent, fevered prayers for either the sweet, sweet release of death or more juice [not sure which, as I'm pretty sure I was speaking in tongues by that point.]

**Look, I was, like, 11 at the time, and my brain was being slowly cooked in its own cerebral-spinal juices by viral invaders from Planet Ten by way of the 8th dimension, so we're not talking about a Proust and his @#$%ing madelines level of nostalgic recall here. Hell, I was so incoherently paranoid at the time that I thought Tina Yothers on Family Ties was the same kid as the one from Poltergeist, and I was convinced she was going to leap out of the TV and drag me into some hell dimension that it's a wonder I remember anything.