On Sale Date: July 2019
Writers: Paul Scheer & Nick Giovannetti
Artist: Nathan Stockman
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Colorist: Antonio Fabela & Rachelle Rosenberg
Editor: Darren Shaw
Assistant Editor: Danny Khazem
Senior Editor: Jordan D. White
Editor-in-Chief: C.B. Cebulski
Artist: Nathan Stockman
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Colorist: Antonio Fabela & Rachelle Rosenberg
Editor: Darren Shaw
Assistant Editor: Danny Khazem
Senior Editor: Jordan D. White
Editor-in-Chief: C.B. Cebulski
Cover Artist: Gerardo Zaffino
Frank Castle, the Cosmic Ghost Rider posing as his own "Uncle Fredo", accompanies his younger self and his family to Central Park for a picnic. He knows that this is the day his family is fated to die at the hands of the mob and plans on changing history yet again to save them. He tells his kids a story of how he helped form the Avengers at a circus. Later, he begins to tell a story of when he was part of a black ops Avengers team that his younger self says is too violent, prompting Frank to change the story to him fighting with candy instead of bullets.
Finally, he leaves his family and goes to the area where the mob are executing someone. He kills two of the mobsters, but before he can kill the third the Watcher appears and gives Frank a dire warning. Due to his meddling with the histories of Earth's heroes the death of his family, which caused him to become the Punisher, is now a focal point in time. If he changes the events of the day he will cause the destruction if the universe. Not dissuaded by the Watcher, Castle prepares to kill the final mobster. A gunshot is heard just as everything goes black...
THE ROADMAP
Frank Castle, the Cosmic Ghost Rider posing as his own "Uncle Fredo", accompanies his younger self and his family to Central Park for a picnic. He knows that this is the day his family is fated to die at the hands of the mob and plans on changing history yet again to save them. He tells his kids a story of how he helped form the Avengers at a circus. Later, he begins to tell a story of when he was part of a black ops Avengers team that his younger self says is too violent, prompting Frank to change the story to him fighting with candy instead of bullets.
Finally, he leaves his family and goes to the area where the mob are executing someone. He kills two of the mobsters, but before he can kill the third the Watcher appears and gives Frank a dire warning. Due to his meddling with the histories of Earth's heroes the death of his family, which caused him to become the Punisher, is now a focal point in time. If he changes the events of the day he will cause the destruction if the universe. Not dissuaded by the Watcher, Castle prepares to kill the final mobster. A gunshot is heard just as everything goes black...
THE ROADMAP
Cosmic Ghost Rider made his final trip to the past in Cosmic Ghost Rider (2018) # 5.
Frank Castle relates his version of events from Avengers (1963) # 1 and The Ultimates (2001) # 7.
Frank Castle relates his version of events from Avengers (1963) # 1 and The Ultimates (2001) # 7.
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| Award winning comedy, everyone! |
CHAIN REACTION
Despite landing at least one genuinely clever comedic moment, this series continues to induce just the worst migraines.
I guess we should get the surface stuff out of the way first and address the two Avengers moments, one of which is actually pretty funny and one that's a colossal failure. The circus bit referencing the founding of the Avengers is everything that's been wrong with this series' attempts at comedy. Castle is once again shat into a classic story to make bad jokes and narrate unreliably, its a storytelling engine that wore out its welcome in the first issue. However, the Ultimates sequence that replaces the violence with candy is really great and elicited some actual laughter from me as I was reading. Fighting with Twizzlers instead of knives is hilarious, I won't even pretend to not give the creators props for that sequence.
However, one winning sequence isn't enough to save this comic, which seems to be a four color representation of bi-polar disorder. What the hell does this series want to be? Is it a parody story with Cosmic Ghost Rider making bad jokes while inserted into old comic stories or is it a tragic drama about Frank Castle trying to save his family from their murderous fate? It wants to be both, to have its cake and eat it too, and it just does not work on any level. It creates this tonal dissonance that tries to go from jokes about Tony Stark's alcoholism and Hulk as a robot clown to little kids getting shot in the face and a father trying desperately to change their fate. I wish Scheer and Giovannetti had approached this as a more serious story with the focus being on the fate of the Castle family and the pathos involved with Frank trying to save them, leaving aside the gimmick of the Marvel history insertions. That's a series that I actually would like to read instead of this poorly executed soup of ideas.
There's also another big glaring problem, but perhaps its more because of my assumptions than what's on the actual page. According to the Watcher in this issue, all of Frank's stories about meddling with the origin stories of the Marvel heroes actually happened, making him essential to the time stream. So when I assumed that he was just telling asinine stories to his children to teach them dubious moral lessons I was actually wrong, he really did become the Phoenix and keep the Clone Saga from happening. It's hard to reconcile that when the timeline of the stories he told doesn't line up at all with where he's actually at in history, he's not skipping around in time he's living it linearly. Sow can he interfere in events that happened on the timeline way after his family was killed? It does set up a potentially interesting moral dilemma for the character because of course Frank Castle would choose to kill a mobster even if it meant the destruction of reality. It's the one moment in this whole series that actually felt like something Frank would actually do.
The comic isn't aided by the artwork either because we're back to Nathan Stockman, who's set up a rotating shift with Todd Nauck. Stockman's work is goofy to a fault, robbing the final sequence of any dramatic tension. Sure, it's a comedy series, and he's trying to sell the silly parts, he just goes too far in that direction when the plot veers off into serious territory. He does do well on the Ultimates sequence, doing a fairly decent job of adapting Bryan Hitch's artwork and filling it full of the candy gags.
All in all, this is a Ghost Rider comic that still barely features Ghost Rider, hangs its hat on really bad retreads of old stories, and can't decide when it should be funny and when it should be serious. This is flawed from front to back and I cannot wait for this series to be finished.
I guess we should get the surface stuff out of the way first and address the two Avengers moments, one of which is actually pretty funny and one that's a colossal failure. The circus bit referencing the founding of the Avengers is everything that's been wrong with this series' attempts at comedy. Castle is once again shat into a classic story to make bad jokes and narrate unreliably, its a storytelling engine that wore out its welcome in the first issue. However, the Ultimates sequence that replaces the violence with candy is really great and elicited some actual laughter from me as I was reading. Fighting with Twizzlers instead of knives is hilarious, I won't even pretend to not give the creators props for that sequence.
However, one winning sequence isn't enough to save this comic, which seems to be a four color representation of bi-polar disorder. What the hell does this series want to be? Is it a parody story with Cosmic Ghost Rider making bad jokes while inserted into old comic stories or is it a tragic drama about Frank Castle trying to save his family from their murderous fate? It wants to be both, to have its cake and eat it too, and it just does not work on any level. It creates this tonal dissonance that tries to go from jokes about Tony Stark's alcoholism and Hulk as a robot clown to little kids getting shot in the face and a father trying desperately to change their fate. I wish Scheer and Giovannetti had approached this as a more serious story with the focus being on the fate of the Castle family and the pathos involved with Frank trying to save them, leaving aside the gimmick of the Marvel history insertions. That's a series that I actually would like to read instead of this poorly executed soup of ideas.
There's also another big glaring problem, but perhaps its more because of my assumptions than what's on the actual page. According to the Watcher in this issue, all of Frank's stories about meddling with the origin stories of the Marvel heroes actually happened, making him essential to the time stream. So when I assumed that he was just telling asinine stories to his children to teach them dubious moral lessons I was actually wrong, he really did become the Phoenix and keep the Clone Saga from happening. It's hard to reconcile that when the timeline of the stories he told doesn't line up at all with where he's actually at in history, he's not skipping around in time he's living it linearly. Sow can he interfere in events that happened on the timeline way after his family was killed? It does set up a potentially interesting moral dilemma for the character because of course Frank Castle would choose to kill a mobster even if it meant the destruction of reality. It's the one moment in this whole series that actually felt like something Frank would actually do.
The comic isn't aided by the artwork either because we're back to Nathan Stockman, who's set up a rotating shift with Todd Nauck. Stockman's work is goofy to a fault, robbing the final sequence of any dramatic tension. Sure, it's a comedy series, and he's trying to sell the silly parts, he just goes too far in that direction when the plot veers off into serious territory. He does do well on the Ultimates sequence, doing a fairly decent job of adapting Bryan Hitch's artwork and filling it full of the candy gags.
All in all, this is a Ghost Rider comic that still barely features Ghost Rider, hangs its hat on really bad retreads of old stories, and can't decide when it should be funny and when it should be serious. This is flawed from front to back and I cannot wait for this series to be finished.
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| Facepalm. |
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