Warning! This article contains minor spoilers for Savage Avengers #21
Two of Marvel’s deadliest off-shoot Avengers members are teaming up to battle the forces of evil. Those malevolent forces stem from the early pages of Savage Avengers, in which a wicked and seemingly ageless sorcerer is attempting to conjure demons to take over the world. Conan the Barbarian has made it his mission to stop the corrupt wizard before his sinister goals are reached. Conan’s immediate future is one filled with potentially battling hordes of demons, and so he will need the help of someone who is an expert in demon hunting, the former King of Hell himself, Johnny Blaze AKA Ghost Rider.
In the preview for Savage Avengers #21 by Gerry Duggan with art by Patch Zircher and Java Tartaglia, fans are thrown into the psyche of Conan the Barbarian as he is in the middle of a nightmare depicting himself being destroyed by the evil wizard and his current arch enemy, Kulan Gath. Conan awakes from his terror in the middle of the floor inside the Hellfire Clubhouse after he was given permission to stay by Emma Frost at the request of Wolverine. The Cimmerian curses Gath, challenging the sorcerer to face him in person rather than torment him in his dreams.
While the preview for Conan's latest tale of high adventure is itself more or less uneventful, the cover of the Savage Avengers issue says it all. Fans of the series know that Gath has dark and otherworldly powers, including those of summoning. As the savage Conan draws ever closer to finding the sorcerer, Gath’s best course of action would be to call upon demonic slaves to ravage the attacker before any damage can come to him, though Gath may not be counting on Conan joining forces with the likes of Ghost Rider to end Kulan’s threats against humanity once and for all.
The last time fans saw Ghost Rider was in his unceremonious series finale and King In Black tie-in issue, King In Black: Ghost Rider #1. In the finale, Ghost Rider decides to relinquish his title of the King of Hell and hand it back to Mephisto, making Ghost Rider a demonic street level vigilante as he was when fans first fell in love with the character. Once Ghost Rider teams up with Conan the Barbarian, he will be off on his first on-panel mission since giving up his poisonous crown in a storyline that will assuredly be brutal and as savage as the title suggests.
While neither Conan nor Johnny Blaze’s Ghost Rider have been full-fledged members of the Avengers, both have been members of Avenger-affiliate groups before in the past. Conan has been a member of the relatively newly formed Savage Avengers for some time and Ghost Rider was at one point a reluctant member of the Mojoworld hit reality show: Avengers of the Supernatural. Overall, however, the two anti-heroes have gone their own ways in life, brutally dispatching any threat that is foolish enough to challenge them, usually in the realm of the supernatural. While throughout most of their respective comic history the two have remained centuries apart, Conan the Barbarian and Ghost Rider are now about to join forces to eliminate sorcerer controlled demons, the perfect combined undertaking for the two deadliest Avengers. Savage Avengers #21 will go on sale June 2.