Ghost Rider: Meta: Robbie and Eli at the Junkyard

[rokhal]

Title: Robbie and Eli at the Junkyard
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1900
Summary: Robbie's second night as a Ghost Rider...what was he thinking?

 

 

 

In All-New Ghost Rider Issue 1, Robbie dies and is resurrected. Confronting the fact that something weird is going on, and figuring out what he is, stretches between issues 2 and 3.
 

 

Day 1 of being some kind of possessed, car-themed revenant: Robbie wakes from what he assumes is a bizarre nightmare of becoming the Ghost Rider and driving his car through a personnel carrier full of soldiers who'd just shot him to death, notices one of his eyes has turned unnatural orange, decides he must have pink-eye, and gets himself and his brother to school. He has a normal day, except that the black eyes he got yesterday afternoon have inexplicably vanished. He never visits a doctor or gets drops for his “pink-eye,” because it's not bothering him and he has to get to work.

Robbie has done a bang-up job at ignoring supernatural weirdness so far. This stops when he sees the Charger.
 

“I could've sworn...” What, Robbie? He'd already decided that last night was a nightmare; of course the Charger is un-burned and free of bullet-holes. Maybe the Charger is parked in a different position from where he left it, but he was at school all day while the shop was open; it could have been moved. What's left is, he could have sworn he's just seen/felt/perceived something unnatural. Something more unnatural than his eye or his overnight healing.

He keeps staring at the Charger all day, even though there is nothing obviously supernatural about it. Certainly nothing that's an obvious threat to him.

We do not know what goes through Robbie's head in this panel—though the wiggle-lines in the background suggest he might be entranced or hypnotized. But we've seen Robbie respond to a crisis—Gabe getting robbed, helicopters crashing the street race. Robbie acts, he doesn't freeze. We've also seen him ignore weirdness and carry on with his day, just this morning. But something about the Charger knocks right through his defenses, and he can't shrug it off.

Entranced or not, he's not completely hypnotized. He's not pacified. He stares at the Charger with confusion and suspicion.

Nonetheless he gets out of bed later that night, compelled by an urge to drive it.

 

Felipe Smith is extremely sparing with thought boxes, even for Robbie, our laconic POV character (except for Robbie and Eli's inner dialogue, which serves a different purpose.) This is all we get (ever?) of Robbie thinking to himself.

“I'm losing it. I'm losing my shit. I gotta...I gotta take it for a ride.”

So we know he's gotta take it for a ride, but we're left to wonder why.

“I'm losing my shit.” Is Robbie starting to realize that what he'd experienced last night was real? Or is he “losing it” because he finds himself longing to get back in the car and drive it, even though he knows this is a stupid idea?

“I gotta take it for a ride.” Is he surrendering to a compulsion, or trying to figure out if last night was real and what is drawing him to the car?

One thing I think this does demonstrate, is that becoming the Ghost Rider cannot be a wholly negative experience for Robbie. That is not the face, or the thoughts, of someone psyching themselves up to do something they dread.

So he returns to Canelo's through the unlocked side window and pulls the Charger out through one of the bay doors, just as Grumpy's henchmen arrive to retrieve the Charger in the dead of night, because Grumpy is an impatient dumbass. They shoot him, and instead of just experiencing a painful jolt of adrenaline and a chest full of bullet-holes, Robbie reflexively transforms into the Ghost Rider.

Then, he, um. Charges the goons. Crushes one guy's hand while grabbing his gun. Punches him through the window of their car. Snaps the other guy's knee. Some hypotheses here: 1. Robbie was in control, he just underestimated his own strength and is now very confused, 2. Eli took control briefly, and that's why he uses a more balanced suite of moves here (disarming, disabling, punching but with the whole body) or 3. some combination of the two. At the end of it, Robbie definitely remains in control; he stops attacking when he sees the goons are disabled and lets them get away. Then the Charger begins to interact with him, physically. It opens its door to invite him in, and he drives it (it carries him?) to a scrapyard where they can have privacy.

As the Ghost Rider, Robbie (?) has no expression. Other Ghost Riders tend to be drawn with stylized human skulls that are manipulated, using shadows, angles, or straight-up distortion, to have expressive faces. Noble Kale, especially, had facial expressions and detailed thought-boxes. Robbie gets neither, which leaves us with a sense of unease: this is not recognizably Robbie. We can't see Robbie in it; it doesn't move exactly like Robbie. Maybe the tense posture, but it's exaggerated, it's not quite right—does Robbie stand so square through the hips and back? Does Robbie hold his hands in tight claws at his sides? We're not sure. Robbie is a bit awkward, but the human-ness, the fluidity of his posture and attitude, is gone. We do not know what he's thinking here. We can't even be sure that it's Robbie.

We can just watch Robbie, or whoever this is, get in the car and drive away.

When Robbie gets out, we finally see Transformation Panic.

You know Transformation Panic. When the MC wakes up with a lobster claw for an arm, or fangs, or a robotic heart, or, uh, one orange iris, and proceeds to flip the fuck out. Robbie bolts out of the car and tries to rip his helmet/skull off, because by this point he appears to have realized that I don't think this is a suit, where the fuck is my real body, LET ME OUT—but when his flesh comes back, he allows himself just a second of staring down at his hands to make sure they're really there, before it's back to investigating the problem.

Robbie got himself up out of bed in the middle of the night for answers, so by god, he is going to get answers IMMEDIATELY.

He turns to the Charger, an inanimate object that obviously contains some sort of intelligence and which Robbie somehow knows to be responsible for his transformation and asks, “What are you?”

You may notice that Robbie is still focused outside himself. He ignores his eye and his healing; he focuses on the car. He moves on from his brief transformation into a super-strong fire monster with no skin on his head or eyes in his skull; he focuses on the car. Even though we know that the car, the ghost haunting the car, is the root of these events, Robbie's refusal to acknowledge that he himself is also supernatural now, is strange.

The ghost haunting the car immediately calls him on it.

Cue issue 3.

In Issue 3, Eli Morrow tries to jerk Robbie around, but Robbie is too jaded, crabby, and sleep-deprived to indulge any of this. Robbie is about to leave, I guess take the bus home from the salvage yard at three in the morning, but then Eli runs Robbie over. Maybe he thinks Robbie will be more tractable as the Ghost Rider, or maybe he's just resentful that Robbie got the better end of the resurrection deal and wants to burn off some steam. Eli ostensibly does this to demonstrate that he can't harm Robbie.

This is Eli's sales pitch: Don't ask specifically how I intend to help you, just trust me, I'm a magical talking car. I can't leave you and I can't hurt you. I know, because I've already tried really hard to do both those things and it didn't work. Working with you is in my best interest because our destinies are forever bound. So, friends?

This is a terrible sales pitch. It's an especially terrible pitch to offer Robbie. Robbie is a pragmatic and impatient ISTJ. Robbie wants examples. He wants numbers. Eli has none of these, because while the Ghost Rider's powers are cool, they don't lend themselves to get-rich-quick schemes that don't hurt innocent people, and anyway, Eli's real plan is probably more like “I gradually replace your personality with my own until I finally take you over and then I become a supervillain.”

We never see the moment that Eli's sales pitch actually persuades Robbie.

But Robbie thinks about it. He thinks about something.

Then he lets Eli scoop him back into the car, and laugh with his body, and they drive away...

I still don't know what Robbie was thinking. A lot is up to interpretation with him: Eli talks a lot, but Robbie is more sparing with his words and closed up about his intentions when possible.

We know what Robbie does with this power in the future, to improve his and Gabe's life: he street-races, and he steals Gabe's chair back.

“It's nice not to worry about getting shot.”

“This car is incredible. Driving it, when I'm...that thing, feels incredible. I just want something for myself.”

“Eli's kind of a dick, but it'd be stupid to turn down powers like this, even though I can't think of a way to make money with them right now. Some day this could keep us from being kicked out on the street.”

“I bet I could take Gabe's chair from Guero like this and no one would ever know it was me.”

We're left to wonder why exactly Robbie decided to work with Eli. It's implied, or at least Eli seems to think, that Robbie could have chosen to walk away.

The most obvious reason to get back in the car is that Robbie wanted the power—whether he knew what he'd use it for or not. And who can blame him? His best plan to escape a life of poverty for Gabe and himself was to win $50,000 in an illegal street race, and he couldn't even protect Gabe from getting robbed. As far as Robbie knows, working with Eli is far from the shadiest thing he's ever done, not if he can somehow use this to help Gabe.