This is "Look Back," a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2019 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I'll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.

Today's special fifth week edition examines the March 1990 debut of the new Ghost Rider by Howard Mackie, Javier Saltares and Mark Texeira.

It's funny, when you look back on Ghost Rider's success, you can see how it totally makes sense. The anti-hero market was burgeoning at the time and Howard Mackie cleverly tied Ghost Rider in beautifully with that Punisher and Wolverine ethos that was so big at the time.

However, that's only obvious when you think back on it. At the time, it was a total longshot. After a hot start (pun unintended), the original Ghost Rider series sort of just plodded along (sales-wise, that is. I thought it was a good series) until it was canceled in 1983. So Ghost Rider had not been around for seven years. That's a long time. And it wasn't like everyone was saying constantly, "Hey, where's Ghost Rider? When are we going to get a new Ghost Rider?" Marvel, though, felt that the property was worth reviving, albeit with a new spin on the idea, so no longer would Johnny Blaze be Ghost Rider.

The other part about the book being longshot was that the creative team was relatively unknown. Howard Mackie had been an assistant editor at Marvel for a number of years, and as a result, he wrote a number of the types of books that assistant editors wrote. You know, lots of fill-ins and stupid licensed comics. He finally got a regular gig with the Hawkeye feature in Avengers Spotlight. Obviously, then, he was not some huge name that you use to launch a series.

Similarly, after appearing in New Talent Showcase a few years earlier, Javier Saltares didn't have a ton of credits. Mostly fill-ins, with his most recent work before Ghost Rider being a Wonder Man serialized story in Marvel Comics Presents.

Mark Texeira would have been the closest to a "hot" artist of the three, but that was back when he was penciling. For a while there, he was a hot artist in the mid-1980s, working on Warlord and Hex for DC and launching Psi-Force for Marvel with Archie Goodwin. But by the late 1980s, he was mostly inking.

So the story wasn't selling on any hype about the creative team. So why DID it work so well?

I think the answer is twofold.

First off, Mackie, as I noted earlier, smartly tied it into the world of the Punisher with giving Dan Ketch a very similar origin to Frank Castle. Dan is out with his sister when they stumble onto a mob deal and Barb is mortally wounded...

and with the bad guys hunting them down to make sure they don't say what they saw, Dan finds the haunted motorcycle and becomes Ghost Rider...

And that's the other side of things - Saltares and Texeira do an AMAZING job on the art for the book. The cover is brilliant and stands out and Mackie gives Saltares/Texeira multiple opportunites to cut loose.

Mackie, meanwhile, makes Ghost Rider a formidable figure, including the introduction of a new power for Ghost Rider, his "Penance Stare," which was a clever bit. It reminds me a bit of the Michael Fleisher and Jim Aparo Spectre...

Ghost Rider has an air of danger around him, like when he basically tosses the cops out of the picture...

Look at this splash page! Wow!

Finally, another thing that Mackie did well was to work in the world of Wilson Fisk AND some ninjas (ninjas are always welcomed) into the world of Ghost Rider. This is not a horror book, this is firmly within the Marvel Universe and it grounded the drama so well by making it a "realistic" sort of series (and the over-sized first issue gave Mackie room to deal with some Machiavellian dealings by Fisk and Deathwatch, the guy who mortally wounded Barbara earlier).

This was not just an outstanding introduction to the Ghost Rider concept, it introduced mysteries that would keep you coming back for more. And the art, of course, was outstanding (Texeira quickly regained his early mid-1980s "hotness" from the series, while Mackie and Saltares both became in demand creators).

If you folks have any suggestions for April (or any other later months) 2010, 1995, 1970 and 1945 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.