At the end of last Saturday’s Tomb of Dracula #47 post, I promised you that the next installment of this blog would feature “the strange, sad story of Ghost Rider #19.”  But, as anyone out there who already knows some version of this tale is well aware, its origins go back well before the May, 1976 publication of the comic whose Gil Kane-Frank Giacoia cover appears at the top of this post.  To begin with, this specific issue presents the conclusion of a multi-part storyline that had kicked off in Ghost Rider #17; but beyond that, the ongoing plot lines that find their (more or less) ultimate resolution in this arc extend back at least to Ghost Rider #8 (Oct., 1974)… and, arguably, all the way back to the feature’s debut in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug., 1972).  And seeing as how we haven’t discussed any issues of this series since July, 2023, when we hit the high points of Ghost Rider #1 and #2 in the context of covering the debut of spinoff character Daimon Hellstrom, the Son of Satan, in Marvel Spotlight #12 (Oct., 1973), we’re going to have to do some catching up to properly set the stage.  So let’s get to it, shall we? 

As you may recall, the basic premise of the “Ghost Rider” feature, as established by the initial creative team of writer Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog, involved the very poorly advised decision by a young motorcycle stunt-rider named Johnny Blaze to barter his soul to Satan for the life of his mentor and father-figure Crash Simpson, who was slowly dying of cancer.  Naturally, once the deal was struck Satan double-crossed our hero, arranging for Crash to die violently in a cycle stunt gone wrong before his disease could take him.  The Devil then proceeded to claim his fee in the form of turning Johnny into the Ghost Rider — an emissary of Hell whose head was a flaming skull and who wielded the powers of a demon.  But Satan was stymied in his efforts by Roxanne Simpson — Crash’s daughter, as well as Johnny’s beloved — the purity of whose devotion for Johnny prevented the Lord of Hell from taking complete ownership of the stunt-cyclist’s soul.  Instead, Johnny would become the Ghost Rider only at night, and would retain his autonomy — allowing him to become, as MS #5’s cover proclaimed, “the most supernatural superhero of all!”

That claim notwithstanding, throughout the remainder of GR’s Marvel Spotlight run, as well as for the first few issues of his own title, his exploits tended to emphasize the “supernatural” aspect of the series over its “superhero” elements, with most of his adversaries being connected to the feature’s ongoing Big Bad, i.e., Satan, in one way or another.  That began to change following the departure of Friedrich as writer (for the record, Ploog had ceased drawing the feature after its fourth installment), as relative newcomer Tony Isabella came on board as the book’s new regular scripter beginning with issue #6.*

As Isabella told the late David Torsiello (better known to longtime readers of this blog as our much-missed commenter “crustymud”) for a Ghost Rider retrospective published in Back Issue #95 (Apr., 2017):

Before I started scripting the issue, I reread all of Gary’s work on the character.  I realized I couldn’t duplicate his wild mix of motorcycles and sorcery.  I didn’t have the affinity for that sort of story for an ongoing series.  So, with editor Roy Thomas’ okay, I added more superhero elements to the title.

Of course, Isabella couldn’t simply drop the Satanic subplot from the series with no explanation; it was too baked-in to the overall concept.  Johnny Blaze either needed to defeat the Devil once and for all (obviously a tall order) or find some other way of getting Old Nick out of his hair for an indefinite period.  Things ultimately came to a head with issue #8, as Satan showed up in person to claim full ownership of Johnny’s soul,  Still blocked by the pure love of Roxanne Simpson, the Lord of Hell found a way to trick the young woman into willingly renouncing her protection of her boyfriend by revealing that her own dearly departed dad, Crash, was being tormented in Hell — and she could only free him by betraying Johnny.  Faced with this impossible choice, in the next issue Roxanne opted to save her father, and formally renounced her protection of the Ghost Rider… only to have Satan tell her he’d been lying the whole time, and Crash Simpson’s soul had never been in his possession at all.  Oops.  Still, the deed was done, and it was hard to see how Johnny Blaze was going to get out of this one.

Indeed, Tony Isabella herself wasn’t sure how to get the hero out of the fix she’d written him into.  As she recalled in 2020 for her introduction to Marvel Masterworks — Ghost Rider, Vol. 2:

Ghost Rider #8 was a pivotal issue for my run.  It’s the issue where I figured out what I wanted to do with Johnny.  It took what seemed like an inescapable dire fate on the last page of the story, a fate that, when I plotted the issue, I had no absolutely no idea how to resolve in Johnny’s favor.

 

Enter one of the greatest comics writers of my generation: a one-of-a-kind genius named Steve Gerber.  Steve was one of the most generous writers I ever worked with.  He was open to ideas from other writers, such as when I suggested that he team the Thing with the Guardians of the Galaxy in Marvel Two-In-One.  He was also giving of his own time and talent to his fellow writers.  And, man, did I need him when it came to figuring out what to do in Ghost Rider #9.

 

…At the end of issue #8, Johnny was on his way to eternal damnation.  Satan had tricked Roxanne Simpson, our hero’s pure-of-heart girlfriend, into renouncing her protection of the now-doomed Johnny.  It was an exciting cliffhanger, but, as stated previously, I had no idea how to resolve it.  Which is when Steve looked at me and said, “Why don’t you have God save him?”

Boom!

Fifteen pages into GR #9’s 18-page “The Hell-Bound Hero!”, the Ghost Rider has managed to vanquish Satan’s servant Inferno, a one-eyed demon who had earlier mind-controlled the populace of San Francisco into attacking our protagonist — unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that victory is going to matter much in the end (art by Jim Mooney and Sal Trapani)…

Here again is Tony Isabella, writing in her Masterworks intro:

Marvel had more than its fair share of Satanic figures, including Satan his own bad self.  But, unless you want to talk Thor and his Nordic bunch, we didn’t have much from the other side.  That changed with Ghost Rider #9.

 

Johnny was saved by a “friend” who stood between him and Satan and announced Satan had no further power over our flaming-skulled hero.  I never explicitly identified this friend, but he was Jesus Christ — a historically inaccurate Caucasian Jesus sometimes called “Hippie Jesus” by my Bullpen buddies, but the son of God nonetheless.  The reader response was over-the-top positive.

Speaking as one of those original readers, I was definitely one of those who responded positively.  At the time, your humble blogger was still a devout Southern Baptist, and while I didn’t think it was likely that Jesus Christ would show up in the flesh in a modern American city, I would have had to admit I thought it was at least possible (much in the same way that while I believed in the real-world existence of Satan as an actual spiritual entity, I doubted he’d ever corporeally manifest as a horned, red-skinned humanoid).  There may have been a niggling voice in the back of my mind that questioned some of Isabella’s storytelling choices from a doctrinal standpoint (according to my received belief system back then, while the intercession of Johnny’s “friend” might have saved his bacon for the moment, unless he eventually accepted Christ as his personal Lord and Savior he was still going to go to Hell when he died… just like every other non-believer in the world, regardless of whether or not they’d ever made a literal deal with the Devil) — but, overall, I very much appreciated the writer’s effort to provide balance in Marvel’s fictional cosmology through bringing a representative of “the other side” into the mix.

For Tony Isabella, this plot twist ultimately had significance beyond the initial “get Johnny out of Hell free card” moment.  Again, here’s the author:

This “friend” allowed me to make Ghost Rider my own.  Overwhelmed by guilt at almost damning her beloved, Roxanne left to figure out who she was.  Left without the motorcycle stunt show that had supported them both, Johnny became a wandering hero, not unlike Kid Colt and the Rawhide Kid in the Western comics I loved…  I was excited about these new possibilities that were now open to me because of Steve’s suggestion.

Ironically, the same “new possibilities” that so excited Tony Isabella were mostly a turn-off for my younger self.  As a horror comics fan, I’d been invested in Johnny Blaze’s battle against the Devil, enough so that I’d kept with the series even when it took what I considered to be a downturn in visual appeal following the departure of original artist Mike Ploog.  I was, however, much less interested in following Johnny’s exploits as a modern-day, super-powered cowboy — and so, Ghost Rider #9 proved to be my jumping-off point.  Between the release of that issue in September, 1974, and of GR #17 in January, 1976, my only encounters with the character came via his appearances in other titles — e.g., his team-up with the Thing in Marvel Two-in-One #8, his one-off outing with “The Legion of Monsters” in Marvel Premiere #28, and (last but not least) his ongoing gig in The Champions — a super-team title (written by Tony Isabella) where the Ghost Rider’s role as a founding member helped cement his new status as being more a standard superhero than a horror-type character.

Meanwhile, over in the regular Ghost Rider series, Isabella and her collaborators were getting the titular hero involved with some well-established non-supernatural denizens of the Marvel Universe, including the Hulk and the Trapster (as well as one ghost, that of the World War I hero the Phantom Eagle).  Issue #13 saw Johnny Blaze take a job in Hollywood as a stuntman for Delazny Studios, where he encountered not only a reformed former foe of Daredevil called the Stunt-Master, but also DD’s ex-girlfriend Karen Page — who, as you may remember from one or more of our old posts, had left her secretarial job in New York after breaking up with Matt Murdock and moved to L.A., where (of course) she had immediately found success as a screen actress.  Along with Karen and the Stunt-Master, Johnny Blaze picked up a few other new supporting cast members courtesy of his latest gig, including Karen’s stunt-double Katy Milner, and a nice young married couple named Wendy and Richard Pini — yes, that Wendy and Richard Pini, though they were portrayed here as studio employees, rather than the comics-fans-soon-to-turn-pro they actually were in 1975 (for the record, the Pinis’ signature project, Elfquest, would ultimately debut in 1978).

All of these new players would figure into Ghost Rider #14-15’s two-part adventure featuring the return of the Orb (a villain who’d been first introduced in Marvel Team-Up #15 [Nov., 1973], where GR had co-starred with Spider-Man).  In the second half of this story, the Orb wounded Katy Milner and captured Karen Page, but was ultimately taken down by the Ghost Rider.  A furious Johnny Blaze was prepared to beat his defenseless foe to death, but was brought up short by the intercession of Karen Page and… someone else (art by Bob Brown and Don Heck):

We should note here that while this is the first “real” appearance of Johnny’s “friend” since issue #9, he’d been mentioned and shown in flashbacks several times in the interim.  Clearly, Tony Isabella hadn’t forgotten about the character — or, for that matter, about Satan.  And so, following a fill-in story by other creators in #16, Ghost Rider #17 saw the “friend”‘s prediction about our hero’s soon getting his chance to beat the Devil once and for all come to fruition.  (And just in case you’re wondering, the other impending showdown alluded to on the page above — the one against the Greek god Pluto — would be chronicled in Champions #3 [Feb., 1976]).

Writing in her Masterworks intro, Isabella described her intentions for the three-part storyline beginning in #17:

Ghost Rider #17-19 were intended to be the conclusion of the story I had been working toward since I introduced the “friend” over a year earlier.  Johnny would be tested as never before, risking all to save a loved one, even at the cost of his own soul.  Ultimately, when all seemed lost, he would accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior, albeit not in so many words.

 

Aware of this development’s sensitivity, Johnny’s salvation would be written in non-denominational Marvel-speak.  The result would be his defeating Satan once and for all, or for at least as long as I was writing the book.  It would make the final transition of Ghost Rider from a supernatural super hero book to a super hero book with very occasional supernatural overtones.

 

I was thinking of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Stuntman with Johnny as a white-hat cowboy in the gray world of Hollywood.  The only nods to his being a born-again Christian would have been the addition of a minister to the cast and a very occasional church scene.  Otherwise, it was going to be crazy stunts, human interest and super villains.

Ghost Rider #17 was also where your humble blogger jumped back on board Johnny Blaze’s ride, metaphorically speaking — mostly, I think, because of the cover’s featuring the Son of Satan (whose series I’d continued to follow through its Marvel Spotlight run and on into its own title) — that, and its promise that, at least for this one issue, GR was going to be getting back to fighting the hordes of Hell, as I preferred.

As the story begins, Johnny Blaze is reporting to work at Delazny Studios, only to be told that the television program he works on has temporarily shut down, in part because of Katy Milner’s “serious” injury.  This doesn’t make sense to our hero, who knows that the Orb’s bullet merely “grazed” Katy — so he calls up his new pals, the Pinis (art for this and the next two issues by Frank Robbins and Vince Colletta):

This is probably a good place to mention that, as of issue #13, Johnny Blaze transforms into the Ghost Rider in the presence of danger, rather than at nightfall.  Got that?  OK, so — for all of GR’s Satan-spawned powers, exorcism is not really in his wheelhouse; however, he does know a very good exorcist, and thus proceeds to put in a call to Daimon Hellstrom.  By the time this issue’s special guest star arrives, however, Katy Milner’s entire hospital room has been transformed into a Hellscape, and our heroes are required to violently subdue the multiple demons who’ve been possessing the young woman before they finally manage to reach her bed…

The story continues into issue #18, as Johnny Blaze finds “The Salvation Run!” filled with a variety of obstacles that, illusory or not, mess mightily with his head.  Among them are the figures of his estranged girlfriend, Roxanne Simpson, and her late father Crash, followed by a number of his enemies from past adventures… and that’s not even the worst of it.  Rather, this is:

Johnny may still be unwilling to give his “friend” the name he knows belongs to him (as is Tony Isabella).  But in depicting this individual being crucified, our storytellers have made it even clearer than before who we’re dealing with here.  It’s virtually impossible to imagine any reader of 1976 not “getting it” at this point, no matter how obtuse they might have been up to now,

The Ghost Rider proceeds to take out the villains one by one, until only the native American sorcerer named Snake-Dance is left…

The sudden appearance of the Thing is rapidly followed by those of GR’s other super-friends, including Spider-Man and the full roster of the Champions.  By the time Spidey strings him up in a web, and the Black Widow turns him back into his human, powerless form of Johnny Blaze, our hero’s spirit has been pretty well crushed.  Which is where we find him on the opening splash page of Ghost Rider #19…

Wait, what’s this now?  Johnny’s “friend” was nothing but a trick of Satan all along?  That… can’t be right.

While I don’t know for sure that this happened, it’s easy for me to imagine that, back in May, 1976, my eighteen-year-old self paused here, then flipped back three pages to confirm that the script for this issue had indeed been credited to Tony Isabella — presumably the same Tony Isabella who’d written the two previous chapters of this trilogy, not to mention the story in GR #9 that had introduced the “friend” in the first place.  Something had clearly gone very wrong — but what?

Here’s Isabella’s account from her 2020 Marvel Masterworks introduction:

It [i.e., the entire “friend” plotline, culminating in Johnny Blaze’s “salvation”] was approved by three different editors: Roy Thomas, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman.  They all knew where I was going with the story.  They were all on board with this plan.  Alas, Marvel in those days was frequently a place of chaos, and, in that chaos, my well-crafted plan was upended.

 

An assistant editor was grievously offended by my tale.  Taking it upon himself, he pulled it from production and rewrote it to both change my ending and pretty much all of the key Johnny/Satan bits from my entire run.  I know this to be true because the individual in question told told me to my face what he was doing.

 

I’m not going to dwell on that beyond stating my opinion that the rewritten story makes no logical sense.  Disappointed fans have been asking me what happened for over four decades.  I shrug my shoulders and tell them what was supposed to have happened.

Perhaps due to the exigencies involved in writing for an official Marvel Comics publication, Isabella has been circumspect here in not revealing the identity of the “assistant editor” involved in rewriting her story; however, in several other venues, including a comprehensive article written in 2000 that’s available online here, she’s been clear that the person in question was the late Jim Shooter.   A note in the letters column of Ghost Rider #19 thanking Shooter “for stepping in with a scripting assist this issue” pretty well confirms that identification.

For the record, Shooter himself acknowledged his role in the incident on a number of occasions, including in the comments section of a 2011 post on his personal blog, and also in a 2016 video interview — though, as might be expected, his version of events doesn’t completely align with Isabella’s.  We’ll get into the “she said/he said” of the matter later in this post — but for now, let’s go ahead and see how “Resurrection”, as published, ultimately played out…

The rejuvenated Ghost Rider makes the most of his unexpected chance, but he’s still outclassed by the “archdemon” who calls himself the Challenger.  After three pages of so of valiant resistance, it appears that Johnny Blaze’s number has finally come up…

In Jim Shooter’s rewriting of Tony Isabella’s original resolution, instead of being saved by Jesus Christ, the Ghost Rider escapes Satan’s power… how, exactly?  Per his own musings, Johnny Blaze doesn’t quite understand what’s just happened — and neither do we readers.

OK, maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but there’d been a little romantic tension going on between Johnny Blaze and Karen Page in recent issues; the two had even shared a kiss at the end of issue #13.  But in #17, during a rare moment of downtime while waiting for Daimon Hellstrom to show up at the hospital, Johnny had come to realize that he was in fact a “one-woman man“, and that woman was Roxanne Simpson.  Unfortunately, he’d had no chance yet to discuss this with Karen, and thus… ooh, awkward!

Actually, it’s a lot worse than awkward, as the distraught Karen flees from the distressing sight of Johnny smooching another woman right into serious personal jeopardy, in the form of an old Daredevil villain named Death’s Head — who, in addition to be Karen’s father, is supposed to have died back in DD #57 (Oct., 1969).  This all goes down in a two-page “Prologue” which, along with closing out this issue, sets up a crossover between Daredevil #138 and Ghost Rider #20 — a crossover that was originally conceived by Tony Isabella but was in the end written by Marv Wolfman, as Isabella left GR after this issue, and would soon thereafter be out the door at Marvel Comics completely.  (For what it’s worth, your humble blogger bought both parts of the crossover but remembers very little about them; in any event, their contents are largely irrelevant to our present discussion.)

And now, with GR #19-as-published behind us, let’s return to the question of why and how Jim Shooter –at this time a 24-year-old comics pro who, prior to coming to work for Marvel in late 1975, was best known for his writing for DC Comics in general, and for DC’s “Legion of Super-Heroes” in particular — became involved in altering the conclusion of Tony Isabella’s Ghost Rider storyline in the first place.  The following first-person account comes from Shooter’s 2016 video interview (please note that your humble blogger has lightly edited YouTube’s auto-generated transcript in the interest of readability, as well as made a few minor abridgements [indicated by ellipses]):

I was the brand-new associate editor, and and I was it was my job to edit all these books that were coming in, and look at the plots, look at the scripts, look at the pencils, try to head off any major catastrophe mistakes, so we weren’t correcting things finished and lettered in the production department.  So, I don’t know how soon after I started doing this, but an issue of Ghost Rider comes in — I guess it was scripted and penciled at that point, maybe even lettered.  So I read it, and I read some back issues just to find out what was happening, and Tony Isabella had been doing this storyline where several times a figure who appeared to be Jesus Christ, who seemed to be Jesus Christ, would show up and kind of almost magically rescue Ghost Rider or whatever.  He identified himself as “a friend”, and a lot of it was fairly blatant that this was Jesus Christ.

 

Well, in this issue which was the wrap up of that storyline, this first issue that came across my desk, in the end it turns out it really was Jesus Christ, and that between him and Ghost Rider they chase the Devil away, and God grants Ghost Rider his powers by divine intervention, so he can keep being the Ghost Rider.  And it basically established that the Marvel Universe is a Christian universe.  And I thought that didn’t sound right [laughs] so I mean like I didn’t really have enough authority to really, just, you know, I wanted Marv’s approval before I did anything about this.  So I went and I showed this to Marv and he was outraged and I’m thinking, like, didn’t you see this coming?  No, apparently not.**

 

So I guess I called Tony, and I said, “You can’t do this, Tony.”  Apparently Tony had become born-again or something, I don’t know.  Anyway, for some reason he wanted this and he wanted it badly, and I finally said, [you] can’t do this.  I said if you won’t fix it, I will.  When God comes down and grants you your powers, that’s not just the acknowledgement of Christianity — that is, this is a Christian universe.  There is a God, [there is] Jesus Christ, they’re running everything.  It was ham-handed; let’s put it that way.  It was like having on panel in a Marvel comic book proof that all other religions are false [laughs], and it just didn’t seem like some place we should go in a Marvel comic book.  And so, like I said, with Marv’s blessing… I fixed it.

 

And what I did was I changed the ending of the story.  I had some redrawing done, rewrote the ending of this story to make it that this whole thing with Jesus Christ was actually a deceit perpetrated by Mephisto and it was all false.  It was all set up for Ghost Rider, and it was Ghost Rider himself who overcomes Mephisto and retains his powers because he’s still the demon, the Spirit of Vengeance, and you know, try to make it make sense in the Marvel Universe, and that’s the way the story ran…  That was my training when I was at DC.  [Editor] Mort [Weisinger] explained it: look, you’ve got all kinds of readers all over the world, all kinds of people, all different.   You can’t just exclude this group, or alienate these guys…

Any third-party attempt to adjudicate between Isabella’s and Shooter’s conflicting accounts of this incident is constrained by one unfortunate fact; Isabella’s original script for Ghost Rider #19 is not only unavailable, but evidently no longer exists.  (In her 2000 article “No Heaven for Superheroes”, Isabella wrote, “I’ve never been able to turn up a copy of my original script for ‘Resurrection.’  It was probably lost in all the relocation I did back then.”)  That said, Isabella has consistently asserted that the language she used to describe Johnny Blaze’s salvation by Jesus Christ was (in the words of her Marvel Masterworks introduction) “non-denominational Marvel-speak”; Shooter, on the other hand, characterized the script as establishing “that the Marvel Universe is a Christian universe” (though, to the best of my knowledge, he never claimed that Isabella’s text actually included the names “Jesus” or “Christ”, or even “God”).

But even if we’re unable to subject these competing claims to a thorough forensic analysis, there are some observations worth making based on the facts that we do have. For me, perhaps the most salient has to do with what else was going on in Marvel’s comics of this time — most particularly, what was happening in Tomb of Dracula, a title both written and edited by Marv Wolfman.  As we’ve discussed in a couple of recent posts (including the one immediately preceding our current entry), Wolfman and his artistic collaborators, Gene Colan and Tom Palmer, had very recently launched what would ultimately prove to be a twenty-six part story arc, involving Count Dracula’s attempt to pose as Satan and establish his own church, while also taking a wife and siring a son.

Much of this took place under the watchful eye of a painting of Jesus (who was never identified by name, but didn’t need to be — at least, not for anyone familiar with the traditional depiction of Christ in Western religious art), which Dracula tried in vain to remove from the deconsecrated church in which it hung…

One issue later, on the occasion of Dracula’s wedding to the beautiful Satanic cultist Domini, we got a strong indication that Dracula’s seeming helplessness against what appeared to be a mere pictorial representation of the Son of God wasn’t just a momentary fluke…

OK, so a couple of tears falling from a painted eye could be taken as simply a bit of artistic license on our storytellers’ part.  But then, in the very next issue,  we have the following full-page splash, which comes in the midst of the mystic rite by which Dracula and Domini intend to conceive a child:

Surely there can be no doubt as to who is being referred to on this page as “the one who simply watches“, or “he“, even if his name is never spoken.  And to be absolutely clear: these are the words of the story’s omniscient third-person narrator, so subjectivity doesn’t enter into the equation.

Later in the story, it’s strongly implied that “he” offers forgiveness to Domini’s estranged father, who tries to stop the conception rite via a murderous rampage.  And, on the story’s final page, Domini is shown to be thinking to herself that “he” has interfered even more directly in the rite itself, so that in nine months, the son she bears “will not be the Devil’s son at all.”

For the record, this issue was released to newsstands on May 4, 1976 — just one week ahead of Ghost Rider #19.

As I’ve already noted, these three issues of Tomb of Dracula were the opening chapters of a lengthy storyline that would extend virtually to the end of the title’s run.  I’m loath to get too deep in the woods of a narrative that I expect to be covering in some depth over the next couple of years, so suffice it to say that the story could hardly be said to become less religious as it progressed.  And that religious theme evidently remained important to Marv Wolfman, long after he’d stepped down as Marvel’s EIC — enough that he was willing to go toe-to-toe with the Comics Code Authority over it.  As he related in an interview conducted in July, 1978, and published in The Comics Journal #44 (Jan., 1979):

I have not had an issue, almost, go by, since I introduced Domini into the storyline that I haven’t been censored by the Code in one fashion or another.  The entire “Dracula-speaking-to-the-Christ-painting,” there is not one line of copy in any of those pictures of Dracula and the painting, that was what I wrote.  I did all the rewriting, but that is not the initial copy…  And not that anything was in there that should have been censored; every single one of them was Dracula realizing as he’s speaking to the picture of the Christ that he’s losing and that he was being defeated and that there’s no way for him to fight.  And as I’ve tried to point out more than once to this Code, it’s perfectly permissible to show Hell and Satan and damnation, but you can’t show God winning.

Wolfman went on to describe how the Code had objected to the very name of the character Domini (which came from a Latin word meaning “of the Lord”), adding:

But then again, one of the strange reactions I received in speaking with [Code administrator] Len Darvin, whom I happen to like, I just think that his job is a job that should not exist, is that I’m Jewish and he’s Jewish and he’s telling me that it would offend Catholics.  Now one of my friends happens to be a very religious Christian and I usually checked out things with him first because my knowledge of the Christian religion is probably one step below my knowledge of Judaism, which isn’t great…***  Anyway, he approved of everything, and I’ve gotten letters from priests who’ve agreed with what I’ve written. I spoke with some other religious people who are comic book fans and they have all felt I was handling the Christian religion positively, and yet, one Jew is telling another Jew, “That’s not good.” I couldn’t argue with him, because you couldn’t point that out.  It just doesn’t work.  It just doesn’t work at all.  It bugs me, ’cause I’d like to do a religious storyline and with Dracula I think it’s vital that religion be mixed into the storyline…

I don’t know about you, but these don’t sound like the sentiments of someone who, as an editor, would have been “outraged” by another Marvel writer using Christian elements in a story, in the manner described by Jim Shooter.  Unless, perhaps, Tony Isabella really did go to extremes in her script for GR #19, unambiguously identifying Johnny Blaze’s “friend” as Jesus Christ, and describing Johnny’s salvation experience with the very specific, sectarian sort of language you’d find in, say, a vintage Jack T. Chick tract.

But let’s give Shooter the benefit of the doubt, at least for a moment, and assume that this is what Isabella did.  If so, the question becomes: was the right way to handle the situation to rewrite the script for “Resurrection” so extensively that it retroactively upended everything else Marvel’s readers knew about the “friend”, going all the way back to Ghost Rider #9?  Couldn’t the story have had a resolution where this mysterious character had a role in securing the hero’s deliverance, without getting into any explicit “born-again” business?  Something like what had gone down before in GR #9 — or what was going down at this very same time over in Tomb of Dracula?  It’s hard for me to imagine anyone arguing seriously that Shooter’s “fix”, whether approved by higher-ups at Marvel or not, was the only way to deal with this problem caused by Isabella’s script — assuming, again, that there even was a problem.

In 2000, Isabella wrote:

I did not then and do not now feel this story was in any way improper. In a comics universe where Satan exists, even the non-Christian reader should be able to accept the presence of a force opposing the Adversary.  My own beliefs notwithstanding, I looked on this as mythology, not theology.

Fifty years after the fact, that assessment sounds about right to this non-believer.

Back n 1976, of course, my disappointment with the outing of Johnny’s “friend” as a Satanic deception was more personal, and probably more deeply felt — and that was without my having any inkling of what Isabella had planned for the future.  Would I have continued reading Ghost Rider if the character had indeed become a born-again, churchgoing Christian (however vaguely that might have been indicated)?  It’s possible — although, since I’d already given up on the character once, when Isabella first began steering the series in a more conventionally superheroic direction that, by her own account, was only going to become more focused, I have my doubts.  Maybe if a more appealing (to me) artist had succeeded Frank Robbins as the book’s regular penciller, I’d have given it another chance, but that’s not how things went down.  (For the record, both parts of the crossover with Daredevil that immediately followed Ghost Rider #19 were drawn by a young up-and-comer named John Byrne, but he didn’t stick around.)

As for Tony Isabella, you could say that she landed on her feet; since, soon after leaving Marvel Comics she (with artist Trevor Von Eeden) would create DC Comics’ first African-American superhero to star in their own title, Black Lightning — an achievement which, if only in terns of its historic significance, arguably puts the bulk of her Marvel work in the shade.  (Whether or not the author herself sees that as a reasonable tradeoff all these years later, I have no idea.)

Taking a wider-angle view from that same historical perspective, this episode can be seen as a portrait-in-miniature of the general anarchy that prevailed at Marvel Comics in the early-to-mid-1970s.  Fostered in part by an editorial structure that required a single staff person to oversee the contents of as many as forty color comics in a given month, a sense of creative freedom encouraged freelance writers and artists to take big swings, often with impressive results.  Unfortunately, that same anarchy also appears to have resulted in an extravagant number of blown deadlines, requiring the emergency use of reprints and fill-in stories that made no one happy; it may also have allowed certain novice editorial staffers a freer hand to shape the contents of Marvel’s books than they might have had if their bosses hadn’t been so overstretched, though that’s pure speculation on my part.

More specifically, the way the episode ended can be taken as a harbinger of things to come, as Marvel’s editorial staff tried to get a stronger handle on things.  That process would only come fully to fruition in 1978, when the editor-in-chief position passed to one Jim Shooter.  But the ongoing efforts had an impact on the company’s heretofore freewheeling ways well before that, with Tony Isabella’s departure from Marvel followed in short order by that of another writer, Steve Englehart… though that, naturally, is a topic for another post — one that’ll be coming your way ten short days from now.

 

 

*For those not already aware of this fact, the writer known to comics readers for over half a century as Tony Isabella came out as transgender in February, 2025.  In a 2/11/25 blog post, Jenny Blake Isabella announced her intention to write under both the names “Jenny Blake” and “Tony Isabella” going forward, noting that she did not consider the latter to be a dead name and would (at least for the time being) continue to present at conventions and autograph fans’ comics as “Tony”, as well as let her credits for her earlier work stand as originally published.  Bearing that in mind, I’m referring to her as “Tony Isabella” in this historically-oriented post, while also using her present-day, authentic pronouns.

**To the best of my knowledge, the only public statements Marv Wolfman has ever made concerning this matter were in his sworn testimony given in 1999 in Wolfman vs. Marvel Characters, the case in which he unsuccessfully sued Marvel for ownership of the character Blade.  At that time, Wolfman said he didn’t remember the Ghost Rider incident at all, but also said that if Shooter had brought a matter involving “the words of Jesus Christ” to his attention, it would have been “a very very incredibly minor thing that I would have made a decision in about an eighth of a second or gone to Stan [Marvel publisher Stan Lee]...”  (Wolfman’s complete testimony was published in The Comics Journal #236 [Aug., 2001] and is available online through subscription.  Relevant excerpts are also available via a 2016 blog post by R.S. Martin.)

For the record, Jim Shooter claimed in his 2011 blog comments that Stan Lee was himself aware of the Ghost Rider situation and that he, as well as Wolfman, considered it “inappropriate” to have the hero “redeemed by Christ in the flesh, on panel.”

***Many issues prior to the beginning of the “Church of Dracula” storyline, in Tomb of Dracula #27, Wolfman had established that the Jewish Star of David was just as efficacious against vampires as the Christian cross or crucifix, strongly suggesting that both religions were equally valid, at least where the power to oppose supernatural evil was concerned.