This is "Look Back," a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2020 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, we take a look at the November 1995 debut of Ben Reilly as Spider-Man in Sensational Spider-Man #0 by Dan Jurgens and Klaus Janson.

As I mentioned last month, during the October 1995 Look Back, Spider-Man and Scarlet Spider had recently discovered that it was Spider-Man who was the clone of the original Peter Parker, and that Scarlet Spider (who had taken the name Ben Reilly) was the ACTUAL Peter Parker. With his wife's pregnancy now safe and Ben the "real" Spider-Man, Peter decided to retire as Spider-Man and leave New York City under the watchful eye of the Scarlet Spider and move to Oregon.

However, in the aforementioned October 1995 comic books, Ben had a hard time living in New York City with no official work history (as Ben Reilly was a fake name, after all) and a face that was identical to popular New York City photojournalist, Peter Parker. The most significant problem, though, was that some bad guys had created a holographic version of the Scarlet Spider that had went on a murderous rampage and turned the entire city (with J. Jonah Jameson's help, of course) against the Scarlet Spider. This was worse than when Jameson turned the city against Spider-Man because here, the whole city actively DID see the Scarlet Spider doing some terrible stuff. It is hard to go back from that, especially since Scarlet Spider was still a new hero to the people of New York City, so he did not have the trust factor that Spider-Man did.

So Ben is in a pretty bad state. Barely employable and no superhero identity. He was bemoaning his bad luck while visiting the grave of Aunt May when he accidentally bumped into Mary Jane's Aunt Anna...

So...yeah, as you might have imagined. It is really hard to explain to your wife's aunt why you're in New York City while your wife is in Portland and you're looking super disheveled. And, as noted, Ben's money problems were also riding up on him, which bit him in the ass when he was short a little over a buck at the coffee shop, but the owner of the shop nicely spotted him the money (she called it a "loan" to make Ben feel better)...

A now inspired Ben realized that he was at the bottom and he was going to work his way back up. He developed some new web fluid (including some new takes on his old web shooters) and a brand-new costume, which he debuted in an awesome double-page splash by Jurgens and Janson (colorist Gregory Wright also kicked ass on this issue)...

After fighting a new bad guy (who was tied into one of Spider-Man's old rogues, Mysterio - with a new 1990s look), we discover that Ben has now cut his hair short and died it blond and went back to pay the coffee shop owner back. She was so impressed that she offered Ben a job and he agreed.

Ben visited the graves of Aunt May and Uncle Ben and he celebrated his new life, with him no longer standing in the shadow of his clone, but striving to live a new life as the one, true Spider-Man.

Now, obviously, it was pretty clear to everyone reading this at the time that this was unlikely to last as a long term status quo, but at the same time, damned if Jurgens didn't sell the HELL out of this status quo. He really made it feel like we were at the start of a brand-new era in Spider-Man history, as unlikely as it seemed to be to last. The coffee shop regulars would be expanded in future issues, but even in this issue, we meet a few of them and it WORKS. And the mysterious lady obsessed with Ben (who we learn is the daughter of the Burglar)? Also good stuff. Armada wasn't an amazing villain, but it was nice to see Mysterio back.

All in all, this was as good of a start to an ill-advised attempt to reboot Spider-Man with a new character as you possibly could have had. Jurgens deserves a TON of credit for making it work as well as it did (and obviously, so, too, do the Spider-Man writers who did such a good job making Ben seem like a great guy worth rooting for in the previous two years).

If you folks have any suggestions for November (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.