Time for my legally-mandated quinquennial (or so) posting about Ghost Rider.

So I’m sure you all remember this comic:

Released at the height of comic book gimmickry, this comic (by Howard Mackie, Ron Wagner and Mike Witherby) featured a cardstock “pop-up” foldout in the center of the book, which was a fairly unusual addition in comics at the time. And what was on said fold-out, you may ask? Well, something particularly lurid it seems, according to the original solicit in Diamond Previews:

Now that sounds all the world like we’re gonna see the actual act of Danny’s throat-ripping, as depicted in the most mature of formats, the pop-up page. And as expected, such a classy turn of events got quite the press, like this featured push in Wizard Magazine #8:

…which emphasizes the depiction of said throat-ripping in the pop-up.

Then there’s this front page headline in Comic Buyer’s Guide #950. BREAKING NEWS: THROAT-RIPPING:

As you see there, Marvel’s own sales director says this nigh-infamous pop-up “will make a Chicago butcher house look mild.” My Chicagoan readers, please let me know how carnage-filled a typical butcher house in your city is, compared to butcher houses in, say, Fairfax, or Portland. Any Portland. (EDIT: reader Matthew points out the connection that didn’t even occur to me…some English major I am.)

Anyway, what we’re being told here is that the throat-ripping we are about to behold in that pop-up in Ghost Rider #25 is gonna be something else. I mean, the butcher house comparison at least implies the pop-up’s gonna be a bloody mess, right?

Well, hang onto your flaming skull-emblazoned booty shorts, because here is a pic I took of comicdom’s most terrifying pop-up:

Ummmmmmmm, I don’t think this delivered what we were promised. There’s definitely some throat-action going on here, with the bad guy whose name I didn’t bother remembering has Ghost Rider by his. And there’s Danny, flat on the ground, post apparent throat-ripping.

The actual throat-ripping scene itself — and as an aside, I want to let you know that this is the most I’ve typed the words “throat-ripping” on my site, at least since the last time I wrote about dealing with comic distributors — appears on the page before the insert. Like so:

It’s…marginally more tasteful than what we were told to expect, I suppose. You know, as throat-rippings go. But as I recall at the time, the general feeling, at least around our store, was that Marvel may have had cold feet about something quite that brutal being depicted in what is essentially a gimmick common in children’s books, and thus did a last minute change to the art and story and pop-up.

I do not know if that was the case…and frankly, thinking about that now, I suspect that wasn’t the case. One possibility is that the lead time in producing this gimmick-laden comic would have precluded last-second changes to the final product, and I don’t recall Ghost Rider #25 was particularly late.

The other is that the content was being oversold, or that the promotion was being misinterpreted. But the original solicit, provided by Marvel, does say

“Blackout rips Dan’s throat out — a shocking turn of events depicted in an awesome, die-cut, 4-page pop-up center-spread!”

Oh, right, “Blackout,” that’s his name. But that’s pretty clear about what that pop-up was supposed to show. Not “Dan lying on the ground with his throat ripped out,” but actual, Stan Lee-approved throat-ripping, live and in color. (But in fairness to the sales guy, “bad guy fighting a leather-clad flaming skull dude in a cemetery” is probably much more extreme than what’s going on in your typical butchery, regardless of city.)

Ultimately, I don’t know what happened. Whether it was one thing then changed to another thing, or it was always intended to be like this and things just got exaggerated in the advertising, or what. But we were told one thing, and we got what we got.

This bit in Comics International #19 notes that speculation was afoot for this comic…not something I remember at our shop specifically at the time, but given the state of the comics market then, I don’t doubt it:

I like the incredulity of “a hot pop-up book.” I mean, like I sort of noted above, this gimmick is straight out of children’s books. Several comic book gimmicks came from children’s publishing. Hell, I had books with lenticular images when I was a child.

I don’t know if that speculation ever came to anything, as here in this dealer ad from Comic Buyer’s Guide #955, a few short weeks after that shocking headline feature, we got a guy just giving ’em away:

Speculator who got burned, perhaps? “What am I going to do with these 10 cases of Ghost Rider #25? Or those two cases of Magneto hologram cards, for that matter?”

This entire post came about because I just got to thinking about it again after pricing up a copy of this comic the other day. I have it at $4.50 in VF, by the way. You made $1.75 on that $2.75 investment!
 
 

Special thanks to Kwakk.info‘s ‘zine datebase, and Longbox Heroes’ library of ancient Previews! By the way, become a paid member of the Longbox Heroes Patreon so you can hear my contributions to their “Previewing the Past” podcasts!