Donny Cates, Dylan Burnett, and Antonio Fabela's Cosmic Ghost Rider is chock full of craziness. In fact, its very premise may be the craziest thing about it: Frank Castle gets killed by Thanos and is imbued with the Spirit of Vengeance by Mephisto so that he can punish Thanos for the aforesaid killing. On his way to murdering Thanos, The Ghost Riding Punisher teams up with Galactus and is given the Power Cosmic to help him get the job done. Finally, Galactus and Cosmic Ghost Rider fail in their shared mission to defeat Thanos, who, in a final act of humiliation, turns Cosmic Ghost Rider into his slave. Every crazy thing outlined above is mere prologue for all the craziness that Cates, Burnett, and Fabela unleash in their five-issue miniseries. Since there is only so much crazy one list can handle, here are the top 10 crazy things that happen after all those other crazy things.
10 Cosmic Ghost Rider Makes A Huge Mistake
What if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler? Would you? Should you? Is the murder of an innocent child justified when it could prevent the murder of millions? It's a fascinating moral conundrum and the philosophical impetus for Donny Cates' miniseries.
Frank Castle gets the chance to go back in time and kill Baby Thanos, but when he arrives to do the deed, his tilted moral compass shows him another way. What if you could raise Baby Thanos to be a good kid? A better man? This is obviously a terrible idea. In fact, it's such a terrible idea that The Watcher Uatu shows up just to watch Frank make a total mess of it.
9 Cosmic Ghost Rider Goes Drinking With Baby Thanos
Different cultures approach the use of alcohol quite differently. For some, it's totally taboo. For others, it's just another way to enjoy life. Among those who imbibe, the age at which it is appropriate to do so varies with time and cultural norms.
Maybe the water was bad and fermentation helped Baby Thanos stay hydrated. Maybe he was teething and Frank was tired and just wanted the kid to go to sleep. Either way, it looks like negligent child care to me. Maybe that's acceptable on Titan, but Frank Castle was born in Queens. He should know better.
8 Juggerduck
There's no way to know if Donny Cates was sidling up next to Baby Thanos for a cold one when he decided that Howard The Duck would be granted the power of the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak, but it certainly qualifies as a crazy moment.
Juggerduck, along with Jubilee, Cable, Captain Marvel, and Iron Groot form the new Guardians Of The Galaxy, hopping through time in order to stop Frank. Dylan Burnett designs Juggerduck so he appears two-or-three-times the size of Cain Marko's Juggernaut. He is equal parts intimidating and ridiculous. We could all use a little more Juggerduck in our lives.
7 Thanos Needs A Diaper Change
We have all had those moments where we feel, you know, "less than fresh." By contrast, Thanos feels like a character who is not subject to the same little indignities that we humans endure. He is simultaneously always fresh and never fresh. He is not bound by the constraints of human hygiene. Here, we learn that it wasn't always that way. Thanos had to potty train just like the rest of us and had a few foibles along the way. The little murderer deserves some credit for handling it with as much understated dignity as he could muster.
6 Frank Castle's Wife Maria Is Alive
For several decades, characters including Uncle Ben, Jason Todd, and Bucky were thought of by the comic community as untouchable. They died and must remain dead. As we see now, those characters can be brought back to life in exciting and complicated ways, giving us new challenges for the heroes we love.
Yet, The Punisher's wife Maria Castle got no such love. Her death, along with the deaths of Frank's children, Lisa and Frank Junior, broke Frank Castle the Marine and created The Punisher. We get to see her alive and well in this series while The Punisher keeps on punishing, seemingly unchanged by this reversal of fortune.
5 Cable Fires Galactus Out of A Gun
The sheer physics of this is mind-boggling. Galactus is bigger than a planet. Cable is a really big guy, but he is still just a guy (with cybernetic and mutant genetic enhancements). Depending on where any given artist fits on the Liefeld scale of exaggeration, Cable's guns are somewhere between really big for a guy and bigger than a planet themselves.
Here, Dylan Burnett shows some restraint in exaggerating the size of Cable and his arsenal, but he holds nothing back when illustrating Nathan Summers going toe to toe with the Devourer of Worlds. It's a particularly unexpected and delightful moment in a mini-series full of them.
4 Donny Cates Tackles Nature Vs. Nurture
As The Office's Michael Scott once said to his nemesis Toby, "Why are you...the way that you are? I hate so much about the things that you choose to be." In Cosmic Ghost Rider, the role of Michael is played by Frank Castle and the role of Toby is played by Thanos. Donny Cates explores the true nature of nature wonderfully in this series. Was Thanos born evil? Did his circumstances turn an innocent child into a monster? Was there a little seed of evil inside him that would have died within him, but got just the tilling it needed to grow?
The most interesting question posed by Cates in this series is: If Thanos is destined to become The Mad Titan no matter what anyone, including himself, does, is he truly culpable for all the pain he causes? The philosophical underpinnings of Cates' work is a wonderful earthy contrast to the grandiose moments brought to life so vividly by Dylan Burnett and Antonio Fabela.
3 Cosmic Ghost Rider Punts On Life & Death
Despite Cosmic Ghost Rider's appetite to tackle the heady philosophical issues of nature versus nurture in his quest to fix Baby Thanos, when the little purple tyke wants to learn more about life and death and about his own mortality, Castle chickens out.
Having to explain to a child that everyone dies, even them, is a heavy burden. Despite the fact that shortly before this moment in the series Castle himself was poised to kill the lad, once his heart changed, he just couldn't tell Baby Thanos that Death comes for us all.
2 Thanos The Punisher
Just when you thought that The Juggerduck was the cherry on top of Cosmic Ghost Rider's craziest character mashups, we are blessed with Thanos The Punisher. It's a version of the character we didn't know we needed until his splash page introduction.
Thanos The Punisher brings into stark relief the folly of Frank Castle's mission. Even if Thanos could be saved by being raised in different circumstances, Frank Castle is near the bottom of the list of people who could provide Baby Thanos with the love and support he would need to overcome whatever darkness was inside him.
1 Cosmic Ghost Rider Punches A Baby
The first rule of childcare is: Don't Punch The Baby. Babies cry. They tantrum. They wet themselves. Sometimes they punch Cable in a bar. But once you take on the responsibility of caring for a baby and helping that baby grow into the kind of adult that is in no way interested in collecting Infinity Gems and destroying half of all life to impress a girl, you simply cannot punch that baby. Cosmic Ghost Rider messes up this most important babysitting gig almost immediately after taking the job, giving Baby Thanos the old "Right There, Fred."
Despite all of Cosmic Ghost Rider's amazing powers, we cannot condone this kind of violence. However, we must admit that in a series with as many crazy moments as Cosmic Ghost Rider, the title character punching a child sticks out as the craziest of them all.