Marvel Cancel Ghost Rider & Black Panther Comic Series

Updated: There is a ninth cancellation. Black Panther has now gone too. Over the last couple of weeks, Marvel has announced the cancellation of several of it's series'. One more has made a trip to the chopping block today with the announcement that the recently relaunched Ghost Rider will finish it's run with issue #9. Announced by Comic Book Resources, this marks the eighth series to be cancelled by the company in the last month. Of the eight series, X-23, Alpha Flight, and Iron Man 2.0 are ongoing series' that are very early into their runs (Alpha Flight was recently upgraded from an eight issue mini-series to an ongoing before being cancelled, its last issue being issue #8), the All-Winners Squad mini-series was downgraded from eight issues to five (the last issue ends with a cliff hanger that will never be resolved), and two more miniseries, Victor Von Doom and Destroyers, weren't even released yet (Victor Von Doom was due for release the end of November and Destroyers was to be released in February). It won't be the last we'll see of some of these characters, however, as X-23 and Ghost Rider will be part of the 'Venom' mini event in February, and War machine, lead character in Iron Man 2.0, is a supporting character in the Invincible Iron Man series. Marvel Editor-In-Chief Axel Alonso has cited 'budgetary mandates' as the reason behind the cancellations. The strangest thing coming out of all of this is with cancellation of Ghost Rider, Marvel has no comic in place to tie-in to the upcoming Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, released in American cinemas in February. A big tie-in is common place when a movie based on a comic property is released, but save a special one shot reprinting classic Ghost Rider stories, it seems Marvel have no such plans.