Ghost Rider Tops Box Office, Disappoints Critics

Well, Ghost Rider topped the US box office over the weekend, pulling in (according to some reports) nearly $45 million. The critical reviews are a bit less enthusiastic, though... I had a feeling they would be.

I mentioned this before, but I want to remind people that Ghost Rider's real popularity came about in the 1990s, when vengeful, leather-clad characters were all the rage. This is the title which propelled one Mark Texiera to fame. This was the time of Wolverine and Punisher, then later Spawn - they were all hellish, brook-no-bullshit, loose cannons who had no compunctions about killing in order to make a point. It was the 1990s.

At any rate, the whole concept was silly, which is why I never got into it, but Mark Texiera (Tex) was a brilliant artist, so if you should come across some of those 90's-era Ghost Riders for a fair price (you might wait a few months from now), they're worth checking out. Still, a lot of the reviews I've read have dismissed Ghost Rider as unrecognizable - not a Spider-man or Superman or the like - and one even referred to the character and title as a "B"-title, but this isn't really the case. If you talk to anyone who collected comics back in the 90's, Ghost Rider is far from "unrecognizable" - even if, like me, you didn't care for the character or collect the title.

I haven't seen the film and never really had any intention to, but the reviews are solid and overwhelmingly congruent: it's, at best, "fair-to-middlin."

I told you so.