Number 237
Ghost Rider and the League of the Living Dead!
Oboy! Zombies! Voodoo! Corpses coming out of graves! Dead men shooting down living men, turning them into other dead men! It's all from ME Comics' Ghost Rider #7, 1952, drawn by the great Dick Ayers and his cousin Ernie Bache.
Even though the ending is a bit of a copout, the novelty of the setting, framing a hackneyed Western-rancher-scaring-off-other-ranchers-to-get-their-land story by using voodoo and walking green corpses is irresistible.I first saw this story in Bill Black's 'zine, Macabre Western #2, back in the early '70s. It was printed on blue paper using magenta ink. I'm not sure what that color scheme was intended for, maybe just to make it look attractive and different. Black's comics, magazines and fanzines have always been very well designed. Black changed Ghost Rider's name to Haunted Horseman so as not to bump up against Marvel Comics, who by then had the name on another character. I think Haunted Horseman is a pretty good name, at least as good as Ghost Rider.When I saw the issue of Ghost Rider #7 with the story I jumped at it, and it became the first issue of Ghost Rider in my collection.
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The Pappy CD collection is pretty good, although I don't buy a lot retail, but instead haunt thrift stores and secondhand outlets for deals. Heh-heh. I said haunt, boils and ghouls! I found this wonderful Christmas CD of the Cryptkeeper doing songs like, "Deck The Halls With Parts Of Charlie," "I Wish You'd Bury The Missus," and "Twelve Days of Cryptmas," among several others. It makes me feel the…sniff…sniff…Christmas spirit, and in the tender glow of that loving, warm feeling, to all of those Pappy's readers I've made angry or mad in the past 12 months, well, I'd like to bury the hatchet. In your heads!
I'm not mad, just glad for all of the cool stuff that you've shared with us and here's happy holiday wishes that the trend will continue long into 2008.
ReplyDeleteAxes down, please! lol
Good post today... now you've got me thinking of doing a week of horror westerns over at The Horrors of it All, I know there's plenty of pre-code stories with this wild genre mix.
ReplyDeleteHave a great holiday Pappy!
Pappy... Unaccustomed to blogs and chat as I am, I'm compelled to write and thank your voluminous efforts to expose the great artwork of the Golden Age. Much of which is largely obscure, as your postings here confirm. Perusing your postings over the last year has been amazing and full of discovery... and to those who only find approval in narrative ingenuity, I say good luck there. For comics are objects, artifacts and visual art firstly, and to study the composition of panels suffices for reading, sez me...
ReplyDeleteThanks for this one, Pappy. The ME Ghost Rider was the best of all, and this is one of the better stories I've seen from the series. Hoping for more!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments, guys. It is gratifying to know I'm not doing this in a vacuum.
ReplyDeleteRudy, the reason the stuff I show is obscure is because I can't really show material that is still protected (often fiercely) by copyright holders. I do try to sneak something through occasionally but I'm safer running the older stuff that I'm pretty sure is in public domain. Not everything I show is great artwork, great stories or great anything else, but it's all part of the overall history of the comics, and I really don't think there is any part of comics history that shouldn't be of interest to someone in some way. Or maybe it's just me.
Karswell, I'm sure if anyone can find those mixed genre horror stories it'll be you.
Chuck, thanks as always for the support. I'm not lacking for material and will probably be posting for quite a while longer. It's the scanning and preparation that takes the time.
Darkman90, with the aforementioned in mind, I do have some more Ghost Rider stories coming up at some point, but I can't tell you exactly when because I've got to scan them and prepare them.
I appreciate all of you and your feedback is important to me.
Pappy