Ghost Rider #3 Review

Written by: Ben Percy
Art by: Cory Smith, Brent Peeples, Roberto Poggi
Colors by: Bryan Valenza
Letters by: VC’s Travis Lanham
Cover art by: Kael Ngu (cover A)
Cover price: $3.99
Release date: June 1, 2022

Ghost Rider #3 finds Johnny Blaze hiking the highways and byways of Oregon where he encounters a series of deadly, supernatural forces who hunt for innocent souls on a lonely stretch of road.

What’s It About?

Ghost Rider #3 should be renamed “Supernatural Things Happening At Random” because that’s what this issue is all about. Remember, issue #1 started the series off with promise by showing us where Johnny Blaze has been hiding for a long while. Issue #2 showed readers Ghost Rider would lean into the gory shock horror, possibly with a monster-of-the-month motif. Now in issue #3, the writing went off the road and into a ditch.

Picking up from the last issue, Johnny Blaze wanders the highways as a lonely hitchhiker. He encounters a stretch of road in Oregon where darkness consumes unsuspecting travelers. We don’t get to see exactly what, why, or how this happens except through a succession of surreal events that aren’t explained and don’t appear to have any connection with each other.

For example, Johnny is picked up by the driver of an old sedan infested with flies. The driver soon tries to shoot Johnny and add him to his collection of dead bodies in the trunk. Who is this killer, and why is he collecting bodies? Unknown. Why did Johnny get in the car when something is clearly wrong? Unknown.

The killer happens upon a deadly accident between a family car and a semi-truck carrying sheep. When and how did the accident happen? Unknown. What does the accident have to do with anything? Unknown.

Johnny gets out to look for survivors, and the killer tries to run Johnny down. Before he can succeed, another truck with a fanged grill smashes head-on into the killer’s sedan before turning toward’s Johnny. Where did this “evil” truck come from? Unknown. What does it want and who’s driving it? Unknown. The truck tries to run Johnny down, but he evades it long enough to turn into Ghost Rider and take over the crashed truck from the first accident. I’d love to say Ghost Rider defeats the “evil” truck with his flaming ghost ruck, but you never see it happen. Johnny simply wakes up the next day believing the situation has been resolved.

Random event after random event after random event. During two side plots, we learn a little more about Talia Warroad’s youth and we learn the Council of Night magicians is somehow interested in Ghost Rider’s whereabouts. Neither development is clearly connected to Ghost Rider, for now.

About The Reviewer: Gabriel Hernandez is the Publisher & EIC of ComicalOpinions.com, a comics review site dedicated to indie, small, and mid-sized publishers.

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Bits and Pieces

Ghost Rider #3 ran off the proverbial road in this issue. There are creepy horror elements, but random events happen with no explanation or connection to each other. It’s as if Percy pulled horror concepts out of a hat and smushed them together without consideration for telling a story.