Cover Date: December 1994; On Sale Date: October 1994
Writer: Len Kaminski; Artist: Kyle Hotz; Letterer: Richard Starkings w/ John Gaushell; Colorist: Christie Scheele w/ Heroic Age; Editor: Evan Skolnick; Group Editor: Bobbie Chase; Editor in Chief: Tom DeFalco; Cover Artist: Chris Bachalo
Zero has entered the mind of his girlfriend, Kylie Gagarin, to wake her form the coma induced by D/Monix. The theory from Dr. Sandoz is that Kylie can awaken at any time, but she's trapped in a memory loop and has to be pulled out. Walking through the visual iconography in Kylie's mind, Zero discovers that her memories are hidden behind a series of doors. When he opens one and enters, he finds himself in something like an emulation program, where he is reliving the memory as Kylie. The first memory is of when she was a child, and her poverty-stricken father's decision to be a "suicide stuntman" for a television show called "Samsa NYPD". When her mother discovers the note left by her husband, she goes to talk him out of it and accidentally triggers an explosion that kills them and 25 other people. The producers of the television show pay Kylie a large amount of money to use her story as a "tragedy of the week" and assorted other death benefits, which causes her to swear that she won't care about anyone else ever again. Realizing that Kylie is not trapped in that particular memory, Zero moves on to the next one.
Meanwhile, at D/Monix, CEO Dyson Kellerman watches an interview he had performed with Harrison Cochrane, Zero's father and the person who ordered the boy's death for date theft. Kellerman, who now knows that Zero is the Ghost Rider, tells Harrison that he plans to use the boy as a public enemy, the fear in which he will instill in the populace guaranteeing that they will give up their rights in exchange for safety. In the meantime, Kellerman tells Harrison that he will be in charge of finding a way to destroy Zero once they've finished using him. In his office, Kellerman then watches the footage of the Ghost Rider's speech against D/Monix, which has an altered audio track that paints Zero as a horrific terrorist bent on destroying Transverse City.
Back in Kylie's mind, Zero finds a door marked with a number zero sign, obviously meant to represent him. When he enters the memory, he finds himself in her bedroom, acting as Kylie herself. The memory of Zero is getting dressed to leave after having sex but stops long enough to ask Kylie for $50. Kylie breaks into laughter, thinking to herself that he's perfect, she'll have a new reason to dump him every day of the week. Kylie melts away into the Ghost Rider, as Zero takes control and smashes the memory version of himself, upset at how she really felt about him, that he was disposable. Realizing that she didn't love him but couldn't stand that he was taken away from her, he locates her in a recent memory: the one of her finding Zero's body at D/Monix. He wakes her up by telling her that if she has something to say to him, she needs to do it quick, because he's busy. She breaks up with him inside her mind, and the two both wake up in Sandoz's lab. The Ghost Rider leaves, and when Kylie runs after him, she asks if Zero is dead. He says yes but asks her why she even cares considering how awful a person her was. He tells her that he's "got biz" and leaves, making her wonder if the Ghost Rider is actually Zero.
Harrison Cochrane learned that his son was the Ghost Rider in Ghost Rider 2099 (1994) # 5.
In Ghost Rider 2099 (1994) # 5 reporter Willis Adams recorded Zero's speech against D/Monix, which Kellerman turned into the "media virus" from this issue.
CHAIN REACTION
Kaminski and Hotz finish the title's second story-arc with a really fascinating look at how the characters handle loss.
As much as I loved the previous issues in this series, and I loved them A LOT, I also accused them of being pretty shallow. They were filled with a lot of fantastic action sequences that went by at a breakneck pace, allowing for only a little bit of characterization moments to sneak in the pauses between the carnage. There's nothing wrong with having this be a full-on action series, especially when those few and far between character building scenes were handled as well as Kaminski handled them. This series was damn near perfect in its previous seven issues, but then the creative team gave us THIS issue, and it blew my mind the first time I read it.
This was the issue of the series were Zero and Kylie (and even Kellerman, to a lesser extent) became real people instead of stock comic characters. This comic had no action at all, save for perhaps the dramatic page where Kylie melts away to show the Ghost Rider's enraged skull, but it was absolutely riveting to read through. At no point did this book bore or disappoint me while I read it, and with each page the tension and sadness was ratcheted up another notch. There's a gloom over this comic, and not just a visual one (though that's certainly a factor, I'll get to Kyle Hotz and Christine Scheele in a minute). Kaminski was a writer who was able to introduce all of these brilliant "futuristic" concepts so naturally, and that continues here with the "psychespace" inside Kylie's mind and the door imagery. Using the doors as a way to enter memories probably isn't a new idea, but it's used so well here that it might as well have been.
Kylie was a likable enough character in the previous issues, spunky and determined to find out what happened to her boyfriend. This issue, though, gives us her backstory in the most heartbreaking way possible, by having us (and Zero) relive it through her eyes. From the death of her parents and the way it informs her relationship to other people as he gets older, to the reality of her relationship with Zero, it adds up to one fundamentally broken young woman. I sympathized with Kylie throughout this comic, and she's a much richer character because of the tragedies that have come to define her. Zero, too, gets his deserved shot of characterization in this issue, and it paints him in a very unflattering light. He's a disposable hunk of meat to Kylie, and the way she represents him in her memory as being literally heartless (there's a chunk of his torso missing, in the shape of a heart) continues Kaminski's portrayal of pre-Ghostworks Zero as a really shitty human being. His shock and anger at how Kylie really thought about him, and their relationship is like a gut punch, not just to Zero but to the readers, who have been with Zero the last three issues as he's tried to save the girl who he thought loved him. The best exchange between characters is after they wake up in the lab, and Dr. Neon pats Zero on the back for a job well done. Zero's response to the kid is "touch me again and I'll KILL you", probably the most direct threat he's ever lobbied at someone.
Another truly fascinating part of the issue is the conversation between Kellerman and Harrison at D/Monix, and how prescient Kellerman's plans are in relation to using a boogeyman enemy to convince people to sacrifice their rights. This comic was written in 1994, but you could easily make me believe that Kaminski had written this as a response to the early 2000s "War on Terror" and Patriot Act, where the threat of terrorist made America as a whole give up their privacy and Constitutional rights in exchange for the illusion of safety. Hell, you could probably convince me that it was written TODAY as a response to the Trump administration, it's that close to how things have been progressing in real life. The "media virus" speech given by Kellerman's version of the Ghost Rider is terrifying, especially when you consider the implications behind the fear campaign. "I will dance upon the ashes of your children" is about as literal a threat as one can get, and in a future world controlled by D/Monix and other corporations it's scary that all Kellerman wants is even MORE control.
Going back to the work by artist Kyle Hotz and colorist Christine Scheele, this comic is drenched in darkness. I said there was a visual gloom, and it's not only overwhelming but it gets more imposing as the comic goes along. The opening pages are full of pinks and reds, with Zero wandering through the girl's mindscape, but once he enters her memories it's all flickering blues and deep blacks, a life lit by television screens and computer monitors. Hotz was a strange choice as a follow-up artist for Bachalo and Buckingham, but he sells the shit out of the drama in this issue. His Ghost Rider is a wire-strewn nightmare walking, especially when he's going around with his holographic flame turned off.
This issue is where Ghost Rider 2099 put its heart and soul on display, and it made the series so much better for it. That this series isn't available for new readers to discover is a crime.
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