Ghost Rider and Wolverine in Weapons of Vengeance: Reading Order

Ghost Rider Wolverine: what Weapons of Vengeance sets up

Marvel announced the crossover in January 2023, and the pitch was simple enough to fit on a poster: two of its loudest anti-heroes, one writer, one artist, four issues. Benjamin Percy was already writing both Ghost Rider and Wolverine at the time, so the event folds his two runs into a single story. It begins in Ghost Rider/Wolverine: Weapons of Vengeance Alpha #1, with art by Geoff Shaw and a cover by Ryan Stegman. The announcement said the issue would go on sale in August 2023, and Marvel's own listing for it gives a publication date of August 9, 2023.

Anyone searching for ghost rider wolverine news usually wants to know two things: what the story is about and in what order the issues go. The story is built on two timelines. In the present, both men are on the run for different reasons, and their paths cross when they come up against an old foe, a branch of the Weapon Plus organization. In the past, the same two characters meet for the first time, back when Wolverine had only just joined the X-Men and Johnny was still learning the rules of his transformation. Marvel pitched that first meeting as new material that had never been shown.

Percy's own summary of the setup is the tidiest one. Wolverine investigates the possibility of a new Weapon Plus program, one that experiments with the arsenal of Hell, and ends up conscripted as a weapon of vengeance. The only person able to stop him is Johnny Blaze. In other words, the hero who usually hunts the people who made him is turned into a tool by a program of the same kind, and the man whose curse is vengeance is the one who has to put him down.

The creative team

Percy supplies the script, and he framed the project in musical terms in the press release. Wolverine is metal, he said, and so is Ghost Rider, and together their adamantium and chrome make heavy metal. He compared the pairing to bands such as Metallica and Iron Maiden touring together, with himself writing the sheet music and Shaw turning it into pyrotechnics. It is an unusually direct statement of tone from a writer, and it tells readers what to expect: loud, fast and a little over the top.

Shaw handles the interior art. The announcement described him as an artist known for his work on Thanos and Guardians of the Galaxy, which makes him a cosmic-scale draftsman moving into a street-level horror story. Stegman drew the main cover for Alpha #1.

Weapon Plus in plain terms

Weapon Plus is the umbrella program in Marvel's comics behind a string of attempts to build the perfect living weapon. Its best-known entries include the super-soldier project that produced Captain America and the Weapon X program that bonded adamantium to Wolverine's skeleton, a story told in Barry Windsor-Smith's 1991 serial in Marvel Comics Presents. A new Weapon Plus branch that draws on Hell instead of science is a natural escalation: it turns the program's old trade in bodies into a trade in souls.

That is also why Logan is a good fit for the plot. He is the program's most famous survivor, and any hint that it has restarted pulls him in without much persuasion.

Johnny Blaze and Logan, two different kinds of old

Johnny Blaze is the older character on the page. Ghost Rider first appeared in Marvel Spotlight #5 in 1972, a stunt rider who made a deal with the devil figure Mephisto and now shares his body with a spirit of vengeance. Wolverine arrived two years later in The Incredible Hulk and went on to anchor the X-Men. Weapons of Vengeance leans on the gap between them. The first meeting is set when one was a rookie X-Man and the other a man still working out what he had become, and the present-day story catches both as seasoned, tired and hunted.

Weapons of Vengeance reading order

Order as stated in Marvel's January 2023 announcement.

Is the Weapons of Vengeance crossover worth reading?

The structure is the best argument for it. Instead of a dozen tie-ins scattered across a month, the story is a tight run of four chapters, two of which sit in books Percy was already writing. A reader who follows only one of the two series does not need to buy anything else to see how the plot lands. The cost is the usual one for a crossover: Alpha #1 spends a lot of its length introducing the pieces, and one published review of the issue called it mostly setup, with more weight on Wolverine's side of the story than on Johnny's.

What the project does have going for it is a clear hook. Both leads are characters whose fans like their violence stylized, and Shaw's art suits that. A story that opens with a first meeting nobody has seen before also gives newer readers a place to start, because it explains why the two men react to each other the way they do. You do not need decades of Ghost Rider lore to follow a fight between a man with claws and a man with a burning skull.

Readers who care most about continuity should note one thing in advance. The crossover is built on Percy's own versions of the characters, so it makes the most sense next to his Ghost Rider and Wolverine issues. Treat it as a short, self-contained event with a loud soundtrack, and it delivers what the announcement promised.

Sources

• Ghost Rider, Wikipedia — character history
• Wolverine (character), Wikipedia — character history