The Glow in the Dark Cover

The first comic I ever bought with my own money was Ghost Rider #15, the one with the glow in the dark cover.

Even if you weren’t reading comics in the early 90s, you’ve probably seen it. The flaming skull. The heavy blacks and the red Ghost Rider title. That eerie green glow. It was impossible to ignore on a rack full of brightly colored covers. I remember holding it in my hands and thinking it was the coolest thing I had ever seen.

Not long after that, I was buying each issue of The Infinity Gauntlet as it came out from the spinner rack at my local convenience store. I bagged and boarded everything. I stacked them carefully in long boxes. Like most kids at the time, I thought that comics might be worth something someday, but mostly I just loved the characters and the stories.

I had three local comic shops growing up. One was so packed you could barely move between the shelves. Another operated out of a church basement, where people were playing Dungeons & Dragons downstairs while service was happening upstairs. The third was newer and cleaner, with pull boxes and a weekly ritual that felt official. A friend’s uncle would take us every week so we could pick up our books and see what else had just come out. It felt like being part of a community.

Eventually, I stopped collecting. It wasn’t dramatic, it just got too expensive to keep up with multiple titles. Life shifted and interests evolved, but I never really stopped paying attention. I still follow the industry. I still notice new stories, new creators, big events. I just do it from a distance now.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing random 90s books pop up in Facebook groups, the kind of indie titles I remember seeing on the shelves but never buying. Some of them I probably wasn’t old enough to understand at the time. And I’ve found myself wondering what it would feel like to pick up a few of those now. Not to rebuild a wall of long boxes. Just to see.

A few months ago, I tracked down a copy of Ghost Rider #15 again. Not because it’s valuable, spoiler alert – it isn’t – but because I wanted that cover back. It’s framed now, hanging on the wall in my office.

I was honestly surprised to find that after almost thirty-five years, it still glows in the dark.

I don’t stare at it every day. But every once in a while, I’ll turn off the lights and see that faint green glow still hanging there. A small piece of the 90s refusing to fade completely.

I have a local comic shop now. I don’t have a pull box. I don’t go every week. But when I stop in, it still makes me smile. The long boxes are still there. The new issues are still on the wall.

Maybe I don’t need to recreate the 90s. Maybe it’s not about rebuilding a collection or chasing value. But I am curious what it would feel like to flip through those old back issues again… to pick up a few books I once passed over and see what’s still there.

The glow in the dark cover still glows.

And somehow, that feels right.