Ghost Rider #6

Ghost Rider #6

Well, the art by Clayton Crain was wonderfully spooky. It had all the right details, the perfect aura of depression and magic, and it created a world both bizarrely supernatural and oddly attractive.

Also, Miss Catmint was a great character I wouldn't mind seeing more of. I'm not sure how she's going to get off the top of that building, but she'll likely manage. She has guts and verve.

But the story for this series - ugh. Garth Ennis on cruise control AND asleep at the wheel. This gets my vote for the most gratuitous high profile comic of the last 5 years. Without giving away the ending, I will say that it renders the entire story more or less pointless. Yes, it allows Ghost Rider to find a bit of pleasure from his torments in Hell - but otherwise it maintains the status quo set up at the beginning.

Also - most of the characters were pointless. Only Hoss and Ruth really had much to do - it was their tale. Malachi and the other Angels do a few things, but after the first two issues of the series, they barely register on the radar until a near pointless cameo at the end. The Preacher who blew up a church adds nothing to the tale either - he could have been eliminated from the plot entirely and not a thing would have changed. He seems to be in the script for one masochistic scene only. And it's a rather trite one.

And then there was the ultimately irrelevant gratuitous character: Ghost Rider. Even worse than Batman in the Batman Returns movie, Ghost Rider becomes a cameo in his own comic book - ultimately irrelevant and generally ineffective.

The story seems like one left over from a rejected Hellblazer or Preacher script. Nothing that happens matters, everything is reset, and heaven and hell are *yawn* just as bad as each other.

The clearest thing I can say about this comic is that it was predictable.