This character is 100% a rip-off.
Schoolteacher Carter dons a ghostly white costume
to mete out justice as the Phantom Rider, Spirit of Vengeance in the Old West.
Yes, the packaging really does just call him "schoolteacher Carter," not even bothering to include his last name. Pay your copyeditors, Hasbro. Marvel's version of the character was Carter Slade, a schoolteacher from Ohio who moved out west so children living there had a chance at an education. He was swiftly caught up in a fight between a farmer's family and wealthy cattle rancher Jason Bartholomew and was left for dead by Bartholomew's men, who were disguised as Natives. Nursed back to life by the local Comanche community and given a special luminescent dust that would make anything it was applied to glow in the dark (thereby allowing him to pretend to be a ghost), he protected the innocent citizens of Bison Bend, Colorado.
Now, you probably immediately recognized the "left for dead, healed by an indian, and concealing his identity to get revenge" story as the exact same origin of The Lone Ranger - heck, the guy Lone Ranger was after was even named Bartholomew, too! But that's not why we call this a rip-off.
In 1949, a company called Magazine Enterprises was publishing a comic based on cowboy actor Tim Holt. In issue 6, a backup story introduced "The Calico Kid," a nebbishy little nobody who, like Clark Kent turning into Superman, would throw off his disguise and become brave federal marshal Rex Fury when the need arose. It wasn't much of a feature, and so in issue 11, some criminals disguised as Natives caught the Calico Kid
and seemingly killed him, whereupon he had the idea to get himself an all-white, phosphorescent costume and pretend to be a ghost. Originally more of the same generic "Western" stories Calico Kid had been in before, just with a new gimmick, he eventually started dealing with Scooby-Doo-style monsters (aka, normal people in disguise) before moving on to actual mystical creatures. This new version of the character proved very popular, and just like Marvel in the '90s would boost a title's sales numbers by having Spider-Man or Wolverine guest appearances, Magazine Enterprises in the '50s would toss their new star into any book that needed it, which is how he appeared in over 200 stories before the new Comics Code meant the effective end of horror as a genre.
Magazine Enterprises went out of business in 1958,
and due to the way copyright worked at the time (requiring an active renewal), its characters soon entered the public domain. As soon as that happened, in 1967, original artist Dick Ayers just redid the character wholesale, now for Marvel. His civilian identity was changed, but the costume, the glowing gimmick, and even the supranym were all retained, which is how Marvel got its first Ghost Rider. (The name was later changed for obvious reasons.)
Phantom Rider gets a new, fully masked head with a cowboy hat, but otherwise uses that tall body they're so in love with right now, which is unfortunate on two points: one, a man living in the late
19th century wouldn't just casually be this big, and two, Phantom Rider wore regular pants, not spandex. It almost would have been better if they'd used the Star-Lord/AIM body, since that would have at least looked like clothes (even if it still would have been weirdly tall). They did give him western-style boots and gloves, which is a plus, and the gun belt to hold his six shooters looks pretty cool. Know what would have been even better, though? New feet, to give his boots spurs. Or if that was too much, maybe a piece that fit between the foot and the shin to simulate that, the way shoulder pads fit between the arm and body? I trust the artists and craftsmen who work on this line could have come up with something.
In the comics, Phantom Rider used a lot of tricks to make himself seem supernatural: decoys, lantern projections, etc., but the simplest one was that the inside of his cape was pure black, so by wrapping it around himself (or even just parts of himself), he could seem to disappear. Okay, fine. But this toy's cape is pure white, just like the rest of him.
We know Hasbro knows how to paint half a cape, because they did exactly that for Moon Knight. So this is a mistake, right? Well, no: because despite the cape canonically being black on the inside, artists throughout the character's entire history have drawn it as though it were white on the inside right up until the moment it needed to be something else. So paradoxically, it somehow would have been more incorrect to paint him the right way. Weird, huh? The toy gets dark circles around the eyes, and silver apps on the belt - all the way around, not just on the front. But come on: how do you make a toy of a character whose gimmick is "he glows in the dark" and not make him glow-in-the-dark?! That should have been so simple!
The figure is armed with his two guns,
silver with white grips, and has his trigger fingers out to hold them. The barrels are hollow to allow you to use any of the ML gun smoke effects if you like. There are also a pair of fists, and a single gesturing left hand. The articulation is typical for this body, though any figure with a molded cape will obviously have some problems with posing, no matter what.
Marvel Legends Series 15 is one that includes a Build-A-Figure: the Executioner. Phantom Rider has the left leg.
Marvel's version of the glow-in-the-dark cowboy did not achieve the same level of popularity as Magazine Enterprises', so his comic was cancelled after seven issues. But Marvel recognized the name was too good to let go, and so that's how Johnny Blaze inherited it a five years later. However, with Johnny running around as Ghost Rider, Carter needed a new name whenever it came time for flashbacks or reprints - it was only the movie that let them be intertwined. Marvel's first attempt was "the Night Rider," which is unfortunately a KKK term, and thus was really bad for a character wearing a white cloak and mask, so that was later changed to Phantom Rider (though all three names are used somewhat interchangeably by characters). This is a decent action figure, though it would have been better if it had been made from GitD plastic. Really, though, what I'm most thinking now is that I need to figure out where to find a 1:12 scale horse for him to ride.
-- 03/02/26
What secondhand character is Marvel's best? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
|
