He was based in Montana? I call shenanigans, nothing has ever happened there...

I don't even know if Hasbro is doing more Legendary Riders figures, but I had been hoping for western themed ones, with horses. There's probably a dozen reasons not to do the Ghost Night Phantom Rider, though. Ghost Rider #50, "Manitou's Anger...Tarantula's Sting!" Written by Michael Fleisher, art by Don Perlin.

Last month, the Ghost Rider was caught in a dam explosion, and the ensuing floodwaters would wipe out a Commanche burial ground and a small town. It doesn't wash away Johnny Blaze, as he's confronted by a medicine woman, who seems to dial from old to young as she sends him back to western times, where Johnny promptly catches two arrows from the local tribe. For the first of multiple times this issue, Johnny uses his surprisingly effective stuntman training, to dismount a Commanche and then try to escape on his horse, but gets trapped in a box canyon. He is saved by the sudden appearance, as if from nowhere, of the Night Rider--that's kind of his gimmick, sure, but what was he doing out there? We then get a recap and possibly modernization (slightly, if so) of Carter Slade's origin: shot by outlaws and left for dead, saved by a medicine man who had a vision of a shooting star, that he used to trick out Carter as a masked hero. While Johnny recuperates, Carter leans into his cover story, that there's no such thing as the Night Rider, it was your imagination.

Later, when Johnny is well enough to visit the local cafe, Carter starts to ask about his odd clothes--mislettered as old there! But they're interrupted by the Tarantula and his gang blowing up the bank! (An unplanned theme this week!) The Tarantula looks like another Marvel western character, the Black Rider, except with a spider on his hat and a cat-of-nine-tails whip. Oh, and a Mexican accent that strikes me as phony. Johnny uses that stuntman training to rescue a child from a burning building in ludicriously acrobatic fashion: maybe he trained with Cirque de whatever, too.

Together Night Rider and Ghost Rider stop Tarantula, which includes foiling his on-the-fly kidnapping attempt of an Indian girl--the medicine woman from before, when she was young. Johnny warns her and the Commanche medicine man, that in a hundred years or so, some jerks were going to blow up a dam; they remedy that by sending Johnny back just before the explosion, so the Ghost Rider can stop it and hellfire-blast the perps. This is probably a time paradox, but they had magic and the Great Spirit on their side, so it's probably not jacking up the timeline.

Not only has "Phantom Rider" gone through a few names--first to differentiate him from the more popular Ghost Rider, then after somebody realized 'Night Rider' could have a very negative association in some parts of the country. No, not the one from Mad Max, that was Australia, I swear...The Phantom Rider legacy was also badly bemirched by the later version, Carter's brother Lincoln, who sexually assaulted Mockingbird There's been another Phantom Rider since, but like Hank Pym slapping Janet, the stain has stuck. Oh, and while the later versions of the Rider were more closely associated with the Initiative team for Texas, the Rangers; the original was based out of Bison Bend, Montana! Both it and the dam in this book seem to have been drawn with absolutely no reference to anything actually in Montana, a state that's only in the Marvel Database as it refers to the lariat-wielding member of the Enforcers. (He worked his way up to being the Kingpin's right hand man? I again call shenanigans.) And now I just killed a bunch of time reading about Montana's Initiative team, Freedom Force? Neat they had a seemingly reformed Equinox, since I've been a fan forever, but that's a secondhand name...