GHOST RIDER

In the mid-1800s, a young Apache woman named Kushala watched United States cavalry slaughter her tribe, and her cry of rage was answered by the wrong heaven: a Spirit of Vengeance possessed her on the spot. The soldiers who killed her family burned so completely that not even ash remained — only their spirits, which stayed behind to haunt her. From that day she rode as the Demon Rider, the Ghost Rider of her century, introduced in Doctor Strange and the Sorcerers Supreme Vol. 1 #1 (2016) with her origin told in issue #3.

What Kushala did next separates her from every leather-clad Rider who followed. Instead of fleeing the thing inside her, she went looking for teachers — travelling, studying many different forms of magic, and learning control from mentors including the Tongva medicine woman Auntie Jessa. The student of vengeance became a master of the mystic arts so complete that she rose to Sorcerer Supreme of her era, a title she holds at the same time as the flaming skull.

Marvel's own history of the character states the record plainly: Kushala is the only known host to have successfully tamed her Spirit of Vengeance, bending it to her will rather than merely enduring it. When Merlin and Doctor Strange recruited Sorcerers Supreme from across time to battle the Forgotten, she answered the call from the 1800s — and the mission stranded her in the present day, a nineteenth-century Supreme with hellfire in her shadow and two centuries of catching up to do.