By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
As announced at the San Diego Comic-Con this year, Ghost Rider is joining the cast of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with the launch of Season 4 on Sept. 20. But if anyone is expecting to see Johnny Blaze – or Nicolas Cage, who played the character in two movies – they’re going to be disappointed.
The Ghost Rider sharing screen time with Agent Coulson and the gang is Roberto “Robbie” Reyes, the latest character calling himself “Ghost Rider” to headline a Marvel comic book. Played by Gabriel Luna (True Detective), Reyes has only appeared 14 times in Marvel Comics, 12 of them in his own book, All-New Ghost Rider (2014-15).
That lack of longevity is one of the reasons that Reyes was tapped instead of one the better-known Ghost Riders. “People are familiar with Johnny Blaze. Robbie Reyes is a new iteration of the character,” executive producer Maurissa Tancharoen said on hollywoodreporter.com “There's not a lot of material on the character so it gives us a lot of room to have our take on it.”
Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb also told THR how Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was really a show about family, and how Agent Coulson is a caring father figure to this ragtag band of blah, blah and blah. You know, every TV show in the world says it’s really about family, so commence with the eye-rolling.
Still, there is an important family angle to Robbie Reyes, at least in the comics. There, Reyes is a young mechanic trying to stay out of the gangs of East L.A. while taking care of his developmentally disabled brother Gabe. However, he enters a street race to earn some fast money and ends up murdered – then is resuscitated and possessed by a ghost in the vehicle, who called himself “Eli.” Eli brings with him the traditional Ghost Rider powers, turning Robbie’s muscle car into a flaming vehicle of vengeance.
As it turns out – Spoiler! – Eli had been a Satanic serial killer who had been shot by the police a while back, who is now a ghost hungering for more blood. Talk about bait and switch! But after Johnny Blaze shows up to drop some exposition, Reyes learns to co-exist with Eli, and only uses his GR powers (and Eli’s blood-lust) against those who deserve it.
How much of that origin makes it into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t revealed in the information ABC has provided to entertainment media so far. But Gabe is included in the cast, played by Lorenzo James Henrie of Fear the Walking Dead. And Loeb implies that a lot of that back-story will be included, telling THR, “Robbie's story, in its inception, is the story of an older brother who's looking after his younger brother.”
Another interesting angle about the comic book origin of Robbie Reyes is that he was killed for what was in the trunk of his car, which were drugs used by a certain Dr. Calvin Zabo to transform into the supervillain Mr. Hyde. As all S.H.I.E.L.D. fans know, Zabo/Hyde has been an important part of the show for the last few seasons, played by Kyle MacLachlan. It seems unlikely the writers will be able to resist the Hyde connection for long.
There are yet more interesting comics angles about Season 4 that do indeed come from ABC. For example, the network tells us Dr. Holden Radcliffe is going to invent Life Model Decoys.
Radcliffe (John Hannah) was introduced last season as an expert on artificial life, which should come in handy with LMDs. Introduced in the comics in 1965, LMDs are artificial copies of existing people, usually used as decoys or body doubles. They’re such exact duplicates that they can fool fingerprint checks and retinal scans. Nick Fury has used LMDs for decades to stay alive, but other agents and superheroes have used them, too.
And is it possible that an artificial intelligence that looks exactly like an existing person might go rogue and do some terrible things? Ohhhhhh, yeah. In the comics, one LMD (of Fury’s brother Jake) became the supervillain Scorpio, while in the miniseries Nick Fury vs. S.H.I.E.L.D. (now excised from official Marvel history), LMDs killed all the top leaders of the organization and replaced them.
Currently, Dum Dum Dugan – the member of the World War II Howling Commandos played in the movies by Neil McDonough – is still alive (ish) in the Marvel Universe as an LMD. It was long thought that Dugan had survived all these decades thanks to an experimental serum called the Infinity Formula, but he had actually died some time ago and been replaced by an LMD, one who just thought he was the original. Only Nick Fury knew the difference until recently, and even now it’s unclear whether the LMD is simply a robot who mimics Dugan, or if Dugan is still alive, only with a full-body prosthesis.
So. yeah, LMDs might present a challenge or two.
But it won’t be Phil Coulson’s problem. According to the end of last season (which ended with a six-month leap ahead), the demise of Hydra means S.H.I.E.L.D. can come out of the shadows again. But with Phil Coulson officially dead, he can’t remain as director. Instead, Coulson has been demoted to agent and a new director will be played by actor Jason O’Mara (Complications).
According to deadline.com, the new director has “Marvel roots going back to the 1940s,” which doesn’t tell us much. Marvel – called Timely Comics in the ‘40s – published a zillion characters back then, with most of the ones not named Captain America justly forgotten. That is to say, it’s unlikely that the character played by O’Mara is really The Phantom Reporter (Daring Mystery Comics), or Master Mind Excello (Mystic Comics).
But the fact that we don’t know his name indicates that there is something to reveal, so he might be one of the better-known Timely characters who didn’t fade away. He’s unlikely to be Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner, a sea king who debuted in 1939 (two years before Aquaman) and has been published off and on ever since. But he could be Jim Hammond, the original Human Torch, also from 1939 – not only is that character still around in the comics, not only does he have fire powers to offset Ghost Rider, but he is a synthetic man, an artificial intelligence just like the LMDs. Thematically, he seems like a given.
But, of course, the Director could be some other character – even another Ghost Rider. There have been a lot of them.
Most people are familiar with the Johnny Blaze character, first introduced in 1972 (and later in the movies) as a guy who made a bad deal with what he thought was Satan and ended up carrying the Spirit of Vengeance around. Johnny was replaced in the comics in 1990 by Danny Ketch, a young kid from Brooklyn whose fiery avatar looked pretty much the same, although Danny had a different ghost to carry around (the Spirit of Judgment). Next up, in 2011, was a Nicaraguan woman named Alejandra, another flaming skeleton (who filled out her biker leathers in a more curvy fashion), followed by Reyes in 2014. Any or all of those Ghost Riders could show up, with or without a flaming head.
But even as Marvel pushed the Ghost Rider mythos forward, it also pushed it retroactively into the past. It has now been established that multiple Ghost Riders can exist in different cultures at the same time, and have existed in the past going back to dawn of civilization. Heck, in the first Ghost Rider movie (2007), we met a Ghost Rider from the Wild West who rode a flaming horse, played by Sam Elliott (and his mustache, which really should be given separate billing).
Which leads us to yet another Ghost Rider, one who originally had nothing to do with Marvel. In 1949, a publisher called Magazine Enterprises created a Western character called Ghost Rider who glowed in the dark and fought supernatural terrors in the Old West. That character was eliminated by the Comics Code of 1954, which wiped out virtually all horror books.
But after the copyright expired, Marvel Comics picked up the character and his look in 1967 for another Western Ghost Rider who wasn’t supernatural at all. This “Rider of the Night Winds” scared Old West gunslingers silly with magic tricks, sleight-of-hand and phosphorescent dust. The Western Ghost Rider has had a great many faces behind the mask, although he’s called Phantom Rider now to avoid confusion with the modern characters.
So, yes, any of those Ghost Riders could show up, too. While most of them weren’t ghosts when they started, they sure are now!
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Replies
.... a new director will be played by actor Jason O’Mara (Complications).
Jason O'Mara has been voicing Batman in most of the recent DC animated movies.
Cool!
Season 4 starts this week, Tuesday Sept 20.
I have read that the new Director is Jeff MACE but how much the character will retain of the Captain America/Patriot backstory remains to be seen.
On the show Mace is Life Model Decoy.