Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Damnation, doctor strange, Donny Cates, ghost rider, HRL, johnny blaze, marvel, nick spencer, Rod Reis, ron lim

Doctor Strange: Damnation Gets a Bunch of Tie-ins, Including Johnny Blaze: Ghost Rider #1?!

Published Mon, 04 Dec 2017 15:02:02 -0600

by Jude Terror

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What happens in Vegas, the saying goes, stays in Vegas. But the saying doesn't make any claims about what happens in Vegas staying confined to a single title, as an Amazon listing for the trade paperback collection of the upcoming Doctor Strange: Damnation appears to illustrate.

The mini-series sees Doctor Strange travel to Las Vegas and accidentally summon Mephisto, at which point he needs to gather a team of supernatural heroes to stop the villain before he sets up shop outside of a drive-thru wedding clinic and begins retconning people's marriages. Or something like that. The solicit for the first issue, hitting stores in February, is probably a little more accurate:

DOCTOR STRANGE: DAMNATION #1 (OF 5)
DONNY CATES & Nick Spencer (W) • ROD REIS (A/C)
Variant Cover by RON LIM
Variant Cover by TBA
CONNECTING VARIANT COVER by GREG SMALLWOOD
Trading Card Variant Cover by JOHN TYLER CHRISTOPHER

The city of sin gets its biggest sinner yet. When Doctor Strange raises Las Vegas up from its destruction during SECRET EMPIRE, he inadvertently opens a big door for the embodiment of evil, MEPHISTO! The devilish villain takes the city for himself and sets his sights on the rest of the world. It's going to take heroes from all over the Marvel Universe to defeat him, but there's nothing simple about fighting the lord of Hell.

We know that the team Strange gathers includes Ghost Rider, Blade, Iron Fist, and Moon Knight. One would assume we're talking about Robbie Reyes, who featured heavily in Marvel Legacy #1, but maybe not, as the Amazon listing reveals:

COLLECTING: DAMNATION 1-4, JOHNNY BLAZE: GHOST RIDER 1, DOCTOR STRANGE 386-389, IRON FIST 78-80, BEN REILLY: SCARLET SPIDER 15-17

For those keeping score, that means we can likely expect Ben Reilly to get involved in this too. It also means that we're not just talking about a 5 issue mini-series. In fact, if the Amazon solicit is to be believed, we're talking about a 4 issue mini-series instead. Additionally, it's tying in with some other ongoing series: Doctor Strange, Iron Fist, and Ben Reilly: Scarlet Spider. And perhaps most surprisingly, Johnny Blaze: Ghost Rider, a series that doesn't exist yet.

So it looks like Damnation has secretly become a stealth super-mega-crossover event (damn you, Nick Spencer). Not only that, but is it designed to launch a new Ghost Rider series? Or is that a one-shot? March and April's solicits may tell us more.

Let the speculation begin below! And also, thanks to the Little Bleeder who tipped us off to this one before deleting their tweet. We won't tell anyone you told us.