Ghost Rider (2001) # 3

"The Hammer Lane, Part 3: Chain of Fools"


Cover Date: October 2001

On Sale Date: August 2001

Writer: Devin Grayson
Artist: Trent Kaniuga
Inker: Danny Miki
Letterer: Jason Levine
Colorist: Dan Kemp
Editor: Stuart Moore
Editor In Chief: Joe Quesada

Cover Artist: Trent Kaniuga

At a leather and bike shop off the 1-81, Johnny Blaze looks at his new leather outfit in a full-length mirror, while the shop's owner Mace comments that it's a close to Blaze's original outfit that he could find. Two men walk into the shop and immediately recognize Blaze from his stunt-riding days. The two men ask for Johnny's autograph, asking them to sign it to Pete and Artie Corbal - the two meth dealers that had supplied the trucking company destroyed by the Ghost Rider. Blaze tells the brothers to run as the transformation into the demon begins, but Artie is too slow and gets grabbed by the Ghost Rider while his brother runs off. With the one Corbal brother wrapped in his chains, the Rider gets on his bike and follows Pete. After a few moments, Gunmetal Gray pulls up beside the Ghost Rider and levels his shotgun at his bike's gas tank. With one shot, the bike explodes - killing Artie Corbal and wrecking the Ghost Rider on the side of the road. Gunmetal walks up and places his shotgun to the Rider's head and pulls the trigger, blasting apart the demon's skull. But, as Gunmetal gets back on his bike, he turns to see the headless Ghost Rider walking toward him. The demon's skull reforms in a swirl of hellfire, and Gray finds his shotgun grabbed out of his hand. The Rider reforms his motorcycle and rides away, while Gunmetal gets on his cellphone and calls an associate named Ryder, asking if his brother still works for Chemco.

Later that evening, at a roadside rest stop, Pete Corbal walks into the bathroom and splashes water in face - only to find the Ghost Rider standing behind him with Gray's shotgun when he looks back up into the mirror. Pete begins to talk about his brother, Artie, and how his life turned to the worst the moment their father was shot in the back by a crooked police detective named Harlan Smith. Corbal hands Smith's business card to the Ghost Rider, but the demon is distracted by the screaming of innocent people elsewhere in the rest stop. The Rider walks into the building's foyer and sees Gunmetal Gray driving a tanker truck toward him. Gunmetal jumps out of the truck before it crashes into the building, and the tanker filled with liquid nitrogen explodes when it hits the Ghost Rider, destroying the rest stop and killing countless numbers of innocent people. Gunmetal watches the Rider crawl out of the wreckage, but misses seeing him transform back into Blaze due to the police arriving on the scene. Johnny sees Gunmetal and races toward him, asking if he was successful in killing the Ghost Rider. Gray tells him that he's still working on it, and Blaze looks around in shock at all the carnage the Ghost Rider has caused, explaining to Gray and Magnus about how the acts of vengeance keep snowballing from one to another - the biker to the trucker to the trucking company to the Corbal brothers, and now to this Detective Smith. Gray starts to put the pieces together, and then tells Blaze that the Ghost Rider didn't cause all of the destruction - he did. Gunmetal has figured out Johnny's connection to the Ghost Rider, realizing that the demon has a big Achilles' heel. Blaze tries to convince Gunmetal to drop the contract, but the hit man refuses. He promised Blaze that he'd take out the Ghost Rider, "no matter how, no matter how much, and no matter what." He then pulls out a pistol and points it directly at Johnny's head.

Gunmetal Gray is the Wile E. Coyote to Ghost Rider's Roadrunner.

CHAIN REACTION

John Blaze tries to get his motorcycle lifestyle back on track, while Gunmetal Gray starts his hunt for the Ghost Rider's head in the third chapter of "The Hammer Lane". It's interesting that you can actually see where the issue goes off the rail at the book's mid-point, both in the writing and artwork.

For the first half of the issue, things are working in writer Devin Grayson's favor. Johnny's attempt to recapture his biker life at the issue's start is a nice touch, though credibility is stretched pretty thin when the Ghost Rider's targets just coincidentally happen to walk into the same store that Johnny's occupying. But that's okay, because it leads to a pretty cool running battle between the Ghost Rider and Gunmetal Gray. I really liked the sequence where the Ghost Rider gets his head blown off, only for it reform moments after Gunmetal thinks he's won. So far so good...

And then the book hits the mid-point, and the wheels completely fall off the wagon during the Ghost Rider's confrontation with the second Corbal brother. So here's this giant flaming skeleton with a shotgun leveled at his face, and what does Corbal do? He goes into a long soliloquy about how tragic his life has been due to the actions of a crooked cop during his childhood. I'm sorry, I know what Grayson is trying to accomplish here with the domino effect of vengeance, that everyone - no matter how evil they are - will always have someone that has done them wrong in the past. But this just completely lacks all logical sense, and it's such a dumb moment that I can't help but think it was a result of the writer backing herself into a corner. There was no other way to string the Ghost Rider along to his next victim, and this was what Grayson came up with. It's so ludicrous that it actually pulled me out of the story so I could roll my eyes in disbelief.

Another problem comes with Grayson's chosen antagonist, Gunmetal Gray, and all of the effort she goes through to prove that he's a bad-ass. Yes, okay, we get it already. Gunmetal Gray is one wicked piece of work when it comes to blowing away biker road trash, but how anyone could think this very human villain is a threat to our demonic lead character is beyond me. A more realistic moment would be for Gunmetal, after he sees that shooting the Rider in the head didn't work, just throws up his arms and says "well, okay, guess I'm done with that". But no, this is "The Hammer Lane", and stupidity abounds in the actions of every character. Not the least of which is John Blaze himself, who ignorantly spills his secret connection to the Ghost Rider during his conversation with Gunmetal. Honestly, what did Johnny expect this hit man to do once he found out his secret?

For the first half of the book, artist Trent Kaniuga continues with the decent work he'd shown on the previous two issues. Granted, it's highly stylized and not to everyone's tastes, but I was enjoying it in a small way. The chase and battle between the Ghost Rider and Gunmetal is illustrated nicely, and I really liked the full page spread of the headless Rider lumbering after his surprised foe. But once the mid-point of the story hits, like magic, the art takes a downward turn into mediocrity and sloppiness. The tanker truck explosion, meant to be a breathtaking scene of destruction, comes across as an awkwardly drawn mess that caused me to focus on it for several moments just to understand what the hell was going on. Kaniuga's grip on anatomy and perspective also fall to the wayside with each new page as well, and you can see the pressure starting to build in the quality versus timeliness argument.

Up until this issue, "The Hammer Lane" was a story that, despite being a complete mess of continuity and full of shoddy characterization, had still been an enjoyable read. This is where the series really fell apart, and it only got worse from here.

Um, wouldn't you know if he'd "got him", Johnny?