[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Ghost Rider: Final Vengeance #1.] “Over the eons, I have found many forms of vengeance,” narrates the Spirit of Vengeance named Zarathos. “Johnny Blaze is merely the latest.” It was the demon Mephisto who bonded the spirit to Johnny Blaze, transforming the cursed motorcycle stunt cyclist into a demonic force for good: the Ghost Rider. But after the heroic hellrider and the mystic Talia Warroad defeated the occultist Stefan Skaar, and Ghost Rider purified the lost souls Skaar recruited into the Cult of Mephisto, the demon vowed vengeance. “Your time as the Ghost Rider is about to come to an end,” Mephisto said on the final page of December’s Ghost Rider #21.
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This week’s Ghost Rider: Final Vengeance #1 (legacy #265), by writer Benjamin Percy and artist Danny Kim, is the end of the road for Johnny Blaze. Mephisto, who once enslaved Zarathos,summons the demon to a tunnel in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and then separates the Spirit of Vengeance from his human host.
“I follow Mephisto the same way that Johnny follows me — the same way that the bike follows him,” Zarathos says. “And so I know we were sent here for a reason. It is time for me — Mephisto commands — to move on. To find a new vehicle that doesn’t resist me. Someone whose veins will run cleanly with sulfurous oil and hellfire. It is time to kill the engine of Johnny Blaze.”
Zarathos burns through the world, possessing thousands of souls as he seeks his new host. “Where there is danger, or anger, or fear, or unrest, or desperation, I am there,” Zarathos says, his punishing heat transforming the innocent and the guilty into demonic forms with flaming skulls. His search spans the universe.
In a tomb beneath the dungeons of Asgard, Zarathos possesses the decapitated corpse of the sorcerer Skrymir the Frost Giant and battles Thor until his enchanted hammer Mjolnir knocks the demon loose once more. Zarathos finds another vessel in Danger, the physical manifestation of the X-Men’s Danger Room. With Orchis hunting the remaining mutants still in hiding on Earth after their mass exile from the planet at the Hellfire Gala, Zarathos turns Danger into a Ghost Rider. She unleashes her punishment on humans: Danger infects thousands of devices with malware poisoned with Zarathos’ demonic code, the virus spreading a damnation gaze that causes chaos and widespread death. Still unsatisfied, Zarathos turns to a Brood hive in space, and plans to have the alien drones descend upon humanity like a biblical plague. His thirst for flaming vengeance still unquenched, Zarathos considers more hosts still: the ancient alien dragon Fin Fang Foom, and Sergei Kravinoff’s cloned offspring, the Last Son of Kraven the Hunter.
Zarathos finally finds his new host in Chicago, where a hooded figure conducts a ceremony from inside a pentagram. “After so many strobe-like flashes of hellfire… so many punishing glimpses inside the hollows of other skulls… I know where to go,” Zarathos says. “A kindred soul who has no concerns about innocence, no sense of moral compass, no compunction about the slaughtering harvest to come. I have at last found my new host… IN THE HOOD.”
The new Ghost Rider is Parker Robbins, a.k.a. The Hood, a supernatural supervillain who has wielded his mastery of the mystic arts to battle the Avengers, Doctor Strange, and other heroes as one of the most prolific magic users in the Marvel Universe.
The Hood clashed with Johnny Blaze in October’s Ghost Rider Annual #1, when the villain surfaced in Salem and tried to summon the Halloween spirit — the spirit of Samhain — and its dark energies contained within a book called the Hallow Gospels. The Rider, Talia, and Elsa Bloodstone thwarted the Hood’s plans to turn every day into a hellish Halloween… but now, Parker Robbins is back with a vengeance.
Ghost Rider: Final Vengeance #1 is on sale now from Marvel Comics.
