So I kind of made it my mission to say, 'Okay, how do we make him even more interesting? How do we add layers? How do we raise new questions? How do we tease some of the answers that we've plotted out that aren't in this, as an info dump, but might be brought up later?' So, making him tied to the Grid, making him a lot older than we thought he was, making him a being made of Morphin energy, tying him to Rita's history. That the story should be an introduction, it should be the first hopefully of many Phantom Ranger stories, and if we took the helmet off here, it would kind of take the wind out of the sails, right? He stops being interesting as soon as you know who he is.

'I think if I'm remembering correctly, early on Dafna and I both agreed and kind of said at the same time that we don't think we should take the helmet off, at least now. In the issue we learn that the Phantom Ranger is actually not a person per say but is a being made up entirely of Morphin Energy, so we had to ask if that was always the plan or if at some point an actual person was under the helmet. He's a courier.' And that's kind of where the base idea for the one-shot came from.' (Photo: BOOM! Studios) So, this guy is the transporter of the Power Rangers' universe. And yeah, that to me, is like, 'All right. And the thing that stood out to me most was in two of the 10 episodes he shows up in, he delivers Zords to the Power Ranger teams, right? In Turbo he delivers the Rescuezords, and In Space he delivers the Delta Megaship, I think. So, what we had to do is kind of think about what we'd seen already and kind of boil him down to the most core concept of the character. So, we had a much blanker slate than I thought. And after watching the 10 episodes the Phantom Ranger appears in, the seven in Turbo and the three in In Space, and realizing that this character is really, really undefined, like almost no personality, very, very little dialogue, the backstory comes from one of those 10 episodes, and it's pretty slight. 'There was initially early a three-hour jam session with Dafna and Gwen Waller, the assistant editor, and I, where we kind of talked about who the Phantom Ranger was, how they could fit into what's going on in the present books, and just what the shape of the story would be. I realized that there is no way to make everyone happy, so I'm just going to focus on telling the best story I can to introduce this character in a big way and set them up for stories for years to come hopefully.' 'There's no way you can please everyone, and weirdly after saying that out loud, it was freeing. 'When I was first talking to Dafna in our meetings kind of jamming on the story, I said to her that this is Power Rangers' Game of Thrones, right? This is where all the fan theories are, this is the thing that so many people are connected to, and they've lived for so long with the idea of what they want it to be that there's never going to be a story that we're going to come up with in these meetings that'll check every box for every person,' Gogol said. So it was pretty freeing, while also anxiety-inducing.' 'I keep using the word canvas and the word runway to describe the opportunity because there's not a whole lot established about the character.

'I do think Phantom Ranger is this giant question mark in Power Rangers history, and one that's had 20, 24, 25 years to kind of stew in its own fan theories, which is at the same time anxiety-inducing, but also really interesting as a writer because there's a lot of opportunity there,' Gogol said.

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