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SIX KEYS TO A LITERARY GENETIC CODE

In essays on the subject of centricity, I've most often used the image of a geometrical circle, which, as I explained here,  owes someth...

Sunday, April 17, 2022

NULL-MYTHS: "GHOST RIDER VS. FRANKENSTEIN" (GHOST RIDER #10, 1952)




Given my enthusiasm for crossovers, I allowed myself to get my hopes up for this one. Yet even as I started the story, I was pretty sure that this Golden Age GHOST RIDER story was going to resort to the old "guy pretending to be a monster" schtick, and sure enough, that's all it was. But this encounter certainly had a lot more mythic potential than, say, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.



One amusing detail: the theory about how the monster escaped death references not the Mary Shelley monster, but the 1931 Universal FRANKENSTEIN film, wherein the creature is almost slain in a burning windmill. I guess the story's writer didn't want to bring in any of the other monster-slayings in the Universal Frank-series-- least of all, the one that really ended the series, where the lumbering horror perishes thanks in part to the efforts of Abbott and Costello.

The full story can be read at THE HORRORS OF IT ALL.


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