Ghost Rider #17 // Review
It isn’t a pile of dead bodies so much as it is...a column. Somebody tied them all together into some twisted nightmare of a totem pole. Some of the people in the column don’t look entirely human, but they are. They’re mutants. It’s the fifth crime scene in as many days for Logan and Johnny. It’s been a long week, and it’s about to get longer in Ghost Rider #17. Writer Benjamin Percy, artist Geoff Shaw, and colorist Rain Beredo do a respectable job of bringing the Wolverine and the Spirit of Vengeance together in the second part of the “Weapons of Vengeance” story.
The police got to the bodies first. By the time they clear out, the trail of the murderer will have grown cold, and all the clues will have been whisked away by CSI for well-meaning homicide detectives. There’s no way that one small-town police department has enough body bags for a stack of corpses as tall as the one they’re looking at. This gives Logan and Johnny a bit of time to think...and they come up with a possible strategy that could help them out in their hunt for the lunatic in question.
Percy makes the meeting between the two dark heroes feel fresh and interesting. It would be all too easy to let them both loose in a series of action sequences. Bringing them together on an extended investigation ends up drawing in a hell of a lot of dramatic tension that adds to the horror element of both characters quite beautifully. Percy hits some of the more intense horror buttons without going crazy with gore or gratuitously vulgar visuals. There’s a deeper, more sinister terror at work in Percy’s script that goes beyond the surface, articulating quite well with the dark nature of both heroes.
Shaw has a beautifully vivid sense of kinetic action on the page. Sudden bursts of violence explode across the page with a clever radiance that is amplified by Beredo’s colors. Wolverine’s distinctive fighting style slides across the page, accompanied by the glow of hellfire in a fun aesthetic fusion. The supernatural drama of the series is suitably intense as well. Shaw also manages to capture some of Percy’s dark humor and transfer it to the page without making it look goofy. There’s a particularly fun panel where both heroes discuss matters with each other before gaining the intel they need from a despicable human being.
More clever moments of comedy like the one mentioned in the above paragraph might have aided the issue a bit, but Percy brings both heroes to the page in a way that’s a lot of fun, even in the issue’s darkest moments. Team-ups aren’t often quite this much fun. Unlike some of the best team-ups, Ghost Rider and Wolverine clearly DON’T belong together, but it’s going to be really fun to watch them continue to work together in the course of the brief crossover series that they’re engaging in at Summer’s end.
