WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Ghost Rider #4, by Ed Brisson, Juan Frigeri, Jason Keith, and Joe Caramagna, on sale now.
The Marvel Universe has undergone a massive cosmological power shift in the pages of Ghost Rider. One of the afterlife's mightiest rulers, Mephisto, has been unseated and captured by Doctor Strange, and Johnny Blaze, Marvel's most famous Ghost Rider, has taken his place as the ruler of Hell.
In the previous issue of Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch, the Ghost Rider of the '90s, confronted Johnny Blaze about the way that his taking over Hell was affecting him. Blaze seems as if he's slowly being corrupted and acting more like a villain each day. In response, Blaze tore the Spirit of Vengeance from Blaze and dropped him from the Brooklyn bridge seemingly to his death. Danny's ally, the Caretaker rescued him, but not before he had a vision of the past that introduced Necrosis, Ghost Rider's counterpart from Limbo.
In Danny's vision, he saw 1654's Ghost Rider, a Native American who rode atop a flaming horse, chasing down an enemy. While confronting his foe, the Ghost Rider says that he was able to track the villain by the trail of dead tribes that were left in his wake. Necrosis quickly lashes out with his sword catching the Ghost Rider in the chest and knocking him from his horse as a greenish-black substance spreads from the wound.
Necrosis makes it clear that he wanted to be found, and that he left the trail to draw the Rider in. As the Rider begins to succumb to his wounds and crumble into dust like he drank from the wrong goblet in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, Necrosis gives him a message for the Lord of Hell; he tells Mephisto to keep the Spirits of Vengeance out of Limbo, the domain of his master Belasco.
While this scene is short, it still offers a few interesting pieces of information about Necrosis. Necrosis appears to be a six-armed centaur, clad in a ghastly green armor of centaur, albeit a centaur with four arms which he uses to carry extra weaponry. He is dressed from the waist up as a sort of ghastly green knight with a featureless helmet. With a single strike from his sword, Necrosis kills a Ghost Rider in a way that makes him rot away in mere moments, consumed by "every corrupt thing" he has ever done easts him alive in a final move that's not unlike the Ghost Rider's Penance Stare.
Within the Marvel Universe, the darker half of the afterlife is divided into several sub-sections that are at constant odds with each other and all have slight differences. While Hell is more or less the regular Judeo-Christian version of the concept, Marvel's Limbo is an equally dark dimension that's usually ruled by dark, demonic sorcerers like Belasco or the X-Men's Magik.
Even though the encounter Danny sees happened centuries ago, it speaks to the continuing unrest that's slowly upsetting in the supernatural corner of the Marvel Universe. And whenever that unrest breaks out into full-on war, Necrosis will almost certainly have a role to play. Assuming that this Necrosis has nothing to do with the diseased WWII-era Captain America villain Dr. Necrosis, Necrosis still hasn't surfaced in the modern era just yet. But if Ketch's vision of Necrosis' power is any indication, Necrosis could give any of Marvel's Ghost Riders a lethal dose of their own medicine.