New Book on Hero Ghost Rider is Complete Waste of Paper

We have Nicholas Cage to blame for, among countless other transgressions, the utterly useless new book Ghost Rider: The Visual Guide, for without his upcoming Ghost Rider movie this hastily produced pile of public relations pablum would never have even been conceived, much less actually published. This type of slickly produced, expensive, hardcover volume has become common in recent, though usually reserved for heavyweight heroes of the Superman/Spider-man class rather than third-rate, third-tier, twice-cancelled losers like Ghost Rider.

None of these "ultimate guide" style books are worth the twenty or more dollars that the money grubbing publishers expect gullible fanboys to shell out for them, but Ghost Rider: The Visual Guide is especially worthless. To one, such as myself, who has wisely avoided reading the Ghost Rider comics, this book is an incoherent mess, and I suspect that even those die-hard fans who've followed the character through his various incarnations over the past thirty-plus years would be hard pressed to make heads or tails of this morass.

The book is heavily illustrated with panels from the Ghost Rider comics, but taken out of the context of the stories of which they were but a small fraction, they make no sense whatsoever. The jumbled clumps of text interspersed amid the pictures provide none of the needed context, failing to gel into any sort of coherent timeline of the character's muddled history.

One can only hope that the movie that Ghost Rider: The Visual Guide is meant to promote ends up making more sense than this piece of crap.