Marvel Super Heroes

[oenglish]

I'm not usually chronology-centric, but this one just bothered me and I had to do some digging...

Essential Ghost Rider 3 is really wonky in its placement of the story in M/SH3 11 (between GR 63 and 64), to the point that it just kicks you right out of the flow of the book. In that issue, Red Fowler knows Ghost Rider's identity, Johnny and GR are actively fighting each other, and Johnny uses the name Zarathos, all things which were not yet the case or had not yet been learned in the regular GR book. The MCP is slightly better in that placing it after GR 65 allows Red to now know Johnny is the GR, but the other two things are still out of place.

The real problem is that after 65 the book goes into a long string of stories which either don't have Johnny in the right place (the circus), or just don't allow time/space for the Marvel Super Heroes story. M/SH3 11 identifies itself as "before GR 80" and is clearly close to that point, but that loack of an appropriate space causes placement problems. But... in issue 79, Johnny returns to the circus. Page 7 (as numbered) sees him go off to bed after his previous adventures; page 8 starts with "afternoon" and goes on. Can I suggest to you all that a day be inserted there wherein Red and Johnny run off on a "vacation" to blow off some steam - that M/SH3 11 belongs between pages 7 and 8 of GR2 79? That's true to the Blaze-GR conflict then going on, allows Blaze to know the name Zarathos, and given the characters in MSH it means that only two changes need made - for both Ghost Rider (Blaze) and Red Fowler you take M/SH3 11 from between GR2 65 and GR2 66, and place it into the middle of GR 79.

Thanks for listening - like I say, I usually don't worry about chronology stuff, but that Essential placment was so awkward that I literally though I'd got a bad copy of the book and was missing a chunk of pages- I had to go check the book's index to figure out that it really was designed that way, and then felt compelled to eventually buy the rest of the GR run to try to make sense of it.

--- Mark