Contributed by Ronald Byrd

Melissa Maro is a political science major at Reardon College in the Bronx and a classmate of Danny Ketch, host body for the Spirit of Vengeance called the Ghost Rider. Melissa befriends Danny but rebuffs his initial flirtation, saying that she doesn’t “like boys.” Melissa has also organized an urban action group in her neighborhood to promote action against drug dealers and corrupt police officers, which makes her a target of the supernatural crime boss Snowblind. One of Snowblind’s underlings hires some thugs to kill Melissa, and they shoot down Melissa and Danny when the pair are riding back to the Bronx on Danny’s motorcycle. The Ghost Rider emerges and rushes Melissa to the hospital, then takes vengeance upon her attackers. However, Melissa’s wounds render her comatose. She was not mentioned again until her reappearance from limbo in Venom: Sign of the Boss #1. Maro, Danny Ketch, and Eddie Brock were taken hostage during an attack on dictator Franco Santera (which he had pre-arranged to gain political sympathy) while he was giving a speech in the United States. Supervillain Teraknid appears on the scene with a grudge against the dictator and plans to kill him and his wife, only to be stopped by Venom.

Melissa was introduced early in Ivan Velez, Jr.’s stint as Ghost Rider writer, but if he had any long-term plans for her, he abandoned them, and the character appears abandoned again. Oddly enough, Darkhold, another horror book of the nineties, also had a lesbian character who was rendered comatose and never heard from again. See the entry for Victoria Montesi.

Contributed by Ronald Byrd

Victoria Montesi is the only child of Monsignor Vittorio Montesi; the Montesi line was long ago designated as the guardians of the Darkhold, a tome of ancient black magic which has the potential to summon the Elder God Chthon to wreak havoc upon the Earth, but Victoria, half-American, disbelieves her father’s claims and takes up work as a doctor in Rome, where she lives with her lover, karate instructor Natasha “Nash” Salvato. However, when pages from the Darkhold are distributed to unsuspecting mortals by a demonic dwarf and Nash is rendered quadriplegic and comatose following an explosion intended to kill Victoria, Victoria joins with occult expert Louise Hastings and Interpol agent Sam Buchanan to recover the pages as the Darkhold Redeemers. After some months of such adventures, Victoria’s life takes an even worse turn when it is revealed that she is in fact Chthon’s daughter, created when the sterile Vittorio used magic to guarantee himself an heir, and she is mystically impregnated with Chthon himself; Sorcerer Supreme Doctor Strange kept Victoria in mystic stasis for a time to delay Chthon’s rebirth into the Earth dimension, and he was ultimately able to prevent it. When last seen, Victoria was being spirited away by the Midwife, a creation of Chthon’s who nevertheless rebelled against her master’s rebirth and sought to help Victoria recover from her ordeal; what has become of her since then, as well as whether or not Nash ever recovered, is unknown.

Except for a period when she briefly possessed demonic abilities obtained from a Darkhold page, Victoria Montesi had no superhuman physical powers, although as the daughter of Chthon, she no doubt had the potential to manifest such powers; her half-demon nature granted her visions directing her to the missing Darkhold pages. She also possessed a reasonable level of fighting skill, much of it learned from Nash. Montesi first appears and is confirmed as lesbian in Dark Hold #1.