Yet More Marvel Cowboys - Ghost Rider: Part 1

OLD-TIME FANS TEND TO THINK OF GHOST RIDER as an obscure, short-lived cowboy character from Marvel's late 1960s expansion period. Unless you were born ten years later and think of the character as a motorcyclist with his head on fire. But what might not be quite so well-known is that the character first appeared in the late 1940s as the creation of a completely different publisher.

Though Dick Ayers drew all the Ghost Rider stories, somehow ME managed to get Frank Frazetta to draw a few of their covers.

The first Ghost Rider began as a backup feature in ME's (Magazine Enterprises) Tim Holt comic, which was a licensed title starring then popular western movie actor Tim Holt. Initially the character US Marshal Rex Fury posed as the timid, cloth-peddling Calico Kid and did his best, along with his comedy Chinese sidekick Sing-Song, to disrupt the criminal elements in the old West. 

The first two pages of the first Calico Kid story from Tim Holt 6 (May 1949).

After running in Tim Holt for five issues, ME's publisher Vincent Sullivan told Ayers, "We’re gonna have him be a different character. You think up the costume. We wanna call him the Ghost Rider, and he’ll have clothes that glow in the dark and all that ..." Though some sources credit writer Ray Krank and Dick Ayers with creating the Ghost Rider identity, Ayers himself said that it was mostly Sullivan's idea. Ayers elaborated on the story in an interview with Roy Thomas for Alter Ego. "Vin would come in and sit down and describe what he wanted in The Ghost Rider. He told me to go see Disney's Sleepy Hollow - Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman - and then he told me to play the Vaughn Monroe record, 'Ghost Riders in the Sky'."

In his first appearance in Tim Holt 11 (Nov 1949), The Ghost Rider didn't sport his trademark blank white facemask ... no explanation was given for his change of character or the ghostly theme.

"And then he started talking about what he wanted the guy wearing." The white costume came from either Sullivan or Ray Crank. "I don't know which one it was, Vin or Ray, thought that one up," Ayers told Alter Ego, "but I know they thought of the white and also said it glows in the dark, so we had to think of what made it glow. All we could think of was phosphorescence or phosphorus. And even the horse, we had to have him painted with phosphorus." Don't try this at home, kids.

Rex Fury had a lot of fun scaring the chaps off cowboys all over the West. Especially effective was the "talking through a log" routine.

Pretty much from his first appearance in Tim Holt 11, The Ghost Rider started acting like a supernatural being, a schtick was later adopted by DC's The Creeper. Using simple tricks, Rex Fury tried to make his enemies think he was an unstoppable spirit of vengeance. It seemed to work quite well for him.

Over the first few issues of the run in Tim Holt, The Ghost Rider fought rustlers, fake indians and a gang who'd installed a weak sheriff to there'd be no one to stop their robbing. As the series progressed, The Ghost Rider's opponents became spookier, as he battled (fake) supernatural menaces in stories like "The Screaming Skeleton" in Tim Holt 20 (Nov 1950), "The Haunted Hangman" (issue 27, Dec 1951) and "The Headless Horsemen" (issue 28, Feb 1952) - and even faced a fake Ghost Rider in Tim Holt 25 (Aug 1951).

Iron Mask in Tim Holt 32 (Oct 1952); Iron Mask in Kid Colt 110 (May 1963); The Brain in Tim Holt 32; The Brain in Kid Colt 7 (Nov 1949).

A little later, Both Tim Holt and The Ghost Rider faced some opponents who were a bit super-villainy, like Iron Mask and The Brain. Interestingly, villains with the same names would also show up in the Silver Age run of Kid Colt - Outlaw, covered in this blog last time. Even more of a coincidence, Dick Ayers was the inker on the cover art for the Kid Colt Iron Mask issue. Coincidence? Perhaps ...

The last Ghost Rider story was in Red Mask 50 (reprinted from Ghost Rider 2) where, presumably to comply with the new Comics Code rules, a nose and mouth were added to the character's usually blank face.

The series continued through the rest of the Tim Holt run until ME changed the title of the book to Red Mask with issue 42 (Jun 1954). The last Ghost Rider story was in issue 50 (Jul 1955), though the Red Mask book continued until issue 54 (Sep 1957).

Ghost Rider 1 (Aug 1950), art by Dick Ayers.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Ghost Rider got his own book. With the first issue cover-dated August 1950, concurrent with Tim Holt 19, the series lasted 14 issues, with the last dated around October 1954 (which have been the same month that Red Mask 44 came out). Quite why ME decided to change the parent book's title from Tim Holt to Red Mask isn't known, but my best guess would be it was so they wouldn't have to pay the movie actor to use his name any more.

After starting out as a funny animal cartoonist for the Pines publishing house, fledgling artistic genius Frank Frazetta got some of his earliest dramatic work drawing Ghost Rider covers for maverick comics publisher Magazine Enterprises.

But with the solo series, editor Ray Krank was free to feature The Ghost Rider in increasingly macabre situations on the covers of the spin-off series. After a glorious run on issues 2 - 5 by a young artist called Frank Frazetta the subsequent cover art, by Ghost Rider regular Dick Ayers, became more and more outlandish.

The steadily spookier covers on Ghost Rider might have had something to do with the rise of EC Comics in the early 1950s. But it also sort of makes sense to have a character called Ghost Rider at least appear to battle supernatural menaces.

It started off with a bunch of guys in white sheets - more Klan than spooks - and a brainy midget, but by issue 7, we were getting giant winged snakes, zombies and murder in the wax museum. Issue 8 gave us a haunted hotel, a haunted girl and dope-smoking murderers. These all turned out to be fakes (except for the dope smokers), the sort of stuff that Scooby-Doo and the gang would be up against in the cartoon series of the 1960s.

How did Vin Sullivan not get sued by Universal Pictures for his Frankenstein rip-off in Ghost Rider 10? Maybe the top brass at Universal didn't read comic books.

Ghost Rider 9 (Oct 1952) gave us a flying vulture man, a walking dead man and a town that seemed to be possessed by demons. Issue 10 went all-out with The Frankenstein Monster, a giant lizard man and a tiger demon. Things calmed down a little in Ghost Rider 11 (Mar 1953) with just a beautiful witch, a haunted portrait and snoopy reporter to deal with.

Ghost Rider 12 (May 1953) was the last of the horror covers on the title. The last two issues - still a little edgy - were more traditional in their subject matter.

The last couple of issues toned down the horror elements on their covers. By this time the anti-horror movement, spurred by Frederic Wertham's campaign in the newspapers and magazines of the period, may well have made Vin Sullivan a little cautious. That said, the supernatural shennanigans continued inside the book, at least for issue 13, with talking skeletons and a native American demon. With Ghost Rider 14 (undated, but probably early 1954), the final issue, things took a slightly more sedate turn, as though Publisher Vincent Sullivan was thinking about a new, safer direction for the character ....

Nevertheless, even after the cancellation of The Ghost Rider's own title, the character continued to battle his way through a horde of fake supernatural menaces in the pages of Tim Holt (and its continuation Red Mask) right the way up to issue 49 (May 1955). Then, with the effects of the anti-comics campaign really beginning to bite, the last Magazine Enterprises title Red Mask was cancelled with issue 53 (May 1956).

It would be ten years before The Ghost Rider would once again rise from the grave to terrorise bad guys across the West, this time at Marvel Comics under the sponsorship of Stan Lee's assistant editor Roy Thomas.

Next: Marvel's Ghost Rider (no, the other, other one)