Dated yet relevant, that's the magic of comics right there.

I was going to take today off (although, "today" is really a couple of days ago, since I usually post a couple days in advance) and just read some comics--in this case, the full run of Ghost Rider 2099. But, what the hell, let's throw out a couple of scans and a couple of thoughts on it.

It's funny: while it's certainly not the worst 2099 book, it's probably not the best one either. It's not as consistently good as Peter David's Spider-Man 2099, and it's not as future-arific as Warren Ellis' Doom 2099 issues. Some of the future-speak tries too hard, and since this is the future as seen from 1994, some aspects are already painfully dated: "I was carrying five hundred megs of hot data in a Latverian bio-implant." What, was your iPod broken or something? Unless it was 500 megs of pixs of Doom Gone Wild, I really don't see how that could be valuable...I didn't get the chance to look it up, but I think you can get a Star Trek flash drive with more memory off the back of the box of Cheez-its. Perhaps "megs" are what currently would be mega-giga-megabytes.

But, there's a lot that works, too. Ghost Rider 2099 held up better than most of the 2099 line in the art front: The first issues had art by Chris Bachalo, and later Kyle Hotz and Ashley Woods would take the reins. And writer Len Kaminski hit on issues that are still coming up today, like the effects of a corporately-controlled news media, for one:


OK, not a very subtle example there, but it would come up more than once in the series. Anyway. Out today, reading comics. Be back soon.