WRITER: PAUL SCHEER, NICK GIOVANNETTI | ARTIST: GERARDO SANDOVAL | PUBLISHER: MARVEL COMICS | FORMAT: SINGLE ISSUE | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Destroying history makes a nice change from Marvel’s usual go-to-trick of straight up killing everyone. But then, Frank Castle already did that, back in Garth Ennis’s messy but effective Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe. Then again, this isn’t the Frank Castle readers all know and love – and hasn’t been for several thousand millennia.
After dying (again) as the Punisher, and making three separate deals with Mephisto, Galactus and Thanos to become both Ghost Rider and Galactus’ galactic herald, Castle is now Cosmic Ghost Rider and… as a result of spending thousands of years alone on a scorched Earth, completely insane. It’s a long story, and one we would recommend readers catch up on if they have any hope of understanding Cosmic Ghost Rider Destroys Marvel History.
But for now, Cosmic Ghost Rider is trapped in the past, and decides to pay a visit to his family, prior to their death at the hands of mobsters. Posing as his own uncle, Frank drops by the Castle household, where he promptly lands a babysitting gig with Frank Jr. There he tells tale of his own antics through time, starting with his becoming a founding member of the Fantastic 4. Wait, what?!
What this amounts to is really just a handful of sketches with the Cosmic Ghost Rider inserted into situations and team-ups where he has no place being, popping up throughout history like some sort of cosmic snarky Forrest Gump. This is the most overtly comedic Cosmic Ghost Rider book yet, and writers Paul Scheer and Nick Giovannetti take full advantage, barely even pausing to let Frank Castle (with his distracting The Witcher-esque mop) shed a tear at finally being reunited with his family.
Fans of Deadpool should dig the writers’ irreverent, almost (but not quite) fourth-wall breaking style and the snappy, non-stop pacing, which delivers joke after joke, without pausing for breath. Which is to say, this isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. With Cosmic Ghost Rider, Marvel have added yet another zany ‘mad’ motormouth to their ranks. Frankly (heh), it’s exhausting, especially in this time when comics insist on shoehorning Deadpool and (over at DC, his sister-in-snark) Harley Quinn into every franchise and team-up book they can find anyway.
Cosmic Ghost Rider is sumptuously illustrated and jam-packed with amusing references to Marvel history, but it lacks the wit and inventiveness of Cosmic Ghost Rider’s previous outings, already diluting the character with overexposure. It looks good, it raises a smile here and there, and it even ends on an effective cliffhanger, but the joke is already wearing thin.
