Cover Date: June 1993; On Sale Date: April 1993
Writer: Larry Hama; Artist: Vince Giarrano; Letterer: Bill Oakley; Colorist: Gregory Wright; Editor: Bobbie Chase; Editor In Chief: Tom DeFalco; Cover Artist: Vince Giarrano
Sitting alone in a motel room, John Blaze is attacked by a giant spider creature. When he fires his shotgun at the monster, it vanishes, leading Blaze outside to find a tractor trailer truck sitting in the parking lot waiting for him. The driver charges the truck at Blaze and runs over his motorcycle, destroying it. Blaze fires his hellfire shotgun at the wreckage and fully restores the bike. While giving chase after the truck, Blaze is found by Ghost Rider, who says that the spider creature attacked him as well and can only be defeated by cold iron over running water. The driver of the truck, meanwhile, picks up a prostitute and attacks her.
Blaze tracks the truck to an empty diner, but he realizes Ghost Rider has disappeared. When he enters the diner, John finds the prostitute, who says the truck driver took everyone in the diner away. She grabs Blaze, but when he sees the shadow of the spider on the wall he shoots the girl, revealing her as a spider-woman wearing the other girl's skin. The spider-woman, Shelob, wraps Blaze in webbing and picks up a waitress whom she bites. The woman's insides liquefied, Shelob sucks down her internal organs and dresses herself in the waitress's skin. Blaze frees himself from the webbing while Shelob escapes to her truck. Chasing behind it, Blaze blows holes in the back of the truck, revealing a stockpile of human skin. Shelob wraps Blaze in webbing again and pulls him inside the truck, leaving his shotgun behind on the road. Shelob attempts to devour Blaze, but Ghost Rider arrives and tosses John his gun, which he uses to blow up the truck. Reverting to her monstrous spider-form, Shelob attempts to escape on the lattice-work of an iron bridge. Using chains and hellfire, Blaze and Ghost Rider kill Shelob, who falls from the bridge into the water. When Blaze questions why she didn't just shoot him full of venom and take his skin, Ghost Rider explains that Shelob wanted him to be the host for her offspring, the eggs of which she would have laid inside his headless corpse.
THE ROADMAP
This is a fill-in issue by a guest creative team and occurs out of publication order. Ghost Rider and John Blaze last appeared in Ghost Rider/Blaze: Spirits of Vengeance (1992) # 12. Ghost Rider appears next in Marvel Holiday Special 1993 and Blaze appears next in Nightstalkers (1992) # 10.
Shelob survives and appears next in Blaze (1994) # 10.
It was revealed in Ghost Rider/Blaze: Spirits of Vengeance (1992) # 1 that John Blaze is a "supernatural magnet" that attracts demons, which is presumably why Shelob is so interested in him in this issue.
CHAIN REACTION
Larry Hama gets his first opportunity to write John Blaze in this fill-in story.
Hama was the writer on the short-lived and unjustly-cancelled-too-soon Blaze series that launched following the end of Spirits of Vengeance. This odd little filler issue was probably what got him that subsequent assignment, because a lot of the themes and style of that later series show up in proto-form here. Hama was, of course, one of Marvel's bigger "name" writers at the time, what with him being the driving force behind Wolverine's solo series for years; so seeing him on a random deadline crunch-time placeholder like this was a bit strange. I'd say he took this on as a simple work-for-hire paycheck, but it's awesome that it led to him working more with Blaze.
This is actually a fairly unsettling comic on a lot of levels, easily both the scariest and most nauseating issue of the series. I'm personally really freaked out by spiders, I have severe arachnophobia, so a spider-woman that liquefies a person's insides to drink their organs and then wear their skin as a disguise? Yeah, that's where "fucked up" comes home to live for me. For a one-off villain, Shelob is appropriately memorable and frightening with a motivation that's truly sick. She's not just content with eating and wearing Blaze, as Ghost Rider explains she wanted to next her eggs in his corpse. Man, I really hate spiders.
The only real downside to this story is how abruptly it begins, with John just chilling in a motel room waiting to get attacked by a giant green spider. It starts the story in medias res, already in progress, with Ghost Rider helpfully filling in that Shelob has attacked him too before the first page. Once you get past the rocky first pages, though, the creative team ramps up the creepiness. The sequence in the diner is sickening in that way that only great horror stories can deliver.
Part of what makes this story so great is the artwork by Vince Giarrano, who did most of his work in the 1990s on DC's Batman titles. Like with the story, the artwork takes some getting used to in the first few pages. It's very stylized with a major influence from the art gurus of the time at Image Comics, but something about it just works with this story. Giarrano turns out some impressive panels, such as with Blaze reforming his destroyed bike by shooting it with hellfire, and turns in a memorable design for Shelob (whose arms totally freak me out). His Ghost Rider looks pretty good, and though he has tiny ankles he also draws a good Blaze.
This issue was such a departure from what Mackie and Kubert had been delivering in the last year, but sometimes a change of pace is good. This was a highly entertaining one-off story that thankfully led to more work by Hama on Blaze.
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