Comics fan Cage is 'one of them' 

Not unusual, you say, for a guy who once ate a live cockroach for a movie and makes pronouncements, as he does on this day, about having a vision when he was nine that comics would one day dominate the mainstream?

No, I mean Cage is actually discussing the definition of weirdness.

"I was trying to find something really weird which would be like levitating in circles," he says, explaining his performance in next year's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. "I looked up in the dictionary that the word weird literally means to turn -- to turn around."

Less abstract? The clear desire by Cage as well as directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor to distance themselves from the critically-maligned 2008 original that was based on Marvel's demonic anti-hero.

"This is Spirit of Vengeance -- it's not a sequel," Cage says.  "When I made the first one, I wanted it to be like a Grimm's fairy tale -- scary but still something that children could enjoy. Like that first trip to the principal's office where you made a mistake and you're in trouble but don't give up."

Spirit of Vengeance, he adds, "will go into the wonderful bliss of the nightmare imagination."

Cage, of course, is a well-known comics fan himself -- and he describes himself as "one of them" when discussing the Comic-Con crowd. What comics has he recently read?

"I was into Planet Hulk -- I thought that was pretty inspired stuff," he says. "I went back in time and looked at Batman vs. Predator. I just had to see who won that battle. It was kind of a tiebreaker, but they usually are. I think Batman won, which is a bit of a stretch."

kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca