In honor of Batman Day (yes, there is such a thing), here’s an edited and updated version of a piece I posted a few years back, looking back at my history, both personal and professional, with the Dark Knight…
My new novella—a supernatural thriller called The Witness—is on sale today, courtesy of the fine folks at Neotext Publishing.
Dan Green has passed away. Dan was one of our finest inkers, as well as a brilliant illustrator in his own right, as evidenced by his work on our Doctor Strange graphic novel, Into Shamballa. Dan was also an old friend—his daughter, Galen, and my son, Cody, grew up together and remain friends to this day—and he will be profoundly missed by all of us who knew him.
Back in 2018 I was interviewed about working with Dan on Shamballa. Here’s what I said about that unique collaboration.
The amazing Todd Nauck and I take a deep dive into our Magneto mini-series with Jace of the Comic Source podcast. You can watch, and listen, below:
Magneto #1—with art by the Todd Nauck, colors by Rochelle Rosenberg, and letters by Travis Lanham—is out today. Join us for a deep dive into the Dostoyevskian depths of Erik Lehnsherr's soul as he attempts to rebuild his life, and his psyche, as leader of the New Mutants. We also introduce a brand-new villain, born in the fires of Magneto's villainous past: Irae, Queen of Wrath. It's a four issue series with a 30 page kick-off. Hope you come along for the ride! (And, if you're interested, you can read our first reviews here and here.)
Had a wonderful talk about the writing life and the creative process with the brilliant Mark Waid and the fine folks at the Brazilian Fan of Heroes podcast. You can watch it below.
Captain America #750 is out now. Happy to have made a small contribution to this celebration of one of my favorite characters. Writing Steve Rogers again, after all these years, was like having a reunion with an old and dear friend. Sara Pichelli's gorgeous art was the icing on the birthday cake.
I had an interesting chat with the fine folks from the Previously On X-Men podcast, discussing Iceman, X-Factor, creative collaboration, the value of great lettering, and other fun things. You can listen below. Enjoy!
The collected edition of Spider-Man: The Lost Hunt is on sale now...featuring a powerless Peter Parker. a very pregnant Mary Jane, a threat from Spider-Man's past, and the secret origin of Kraven the Hunter! Art by Eder Messias & Belardino Brabo, Kyle Hotz, Marguerite Sauvage, and more.
Very happy with the way this one turned out. Hope you all enjoy it!
My old friend Shelly Bond recently Kickstarted a wonderful book—Fast Times in Comic Book Editing—that looks back at her career working on DC'S classic Vertigo line. She asked me to write an essay about my Vertigo experiences and you can read it below.
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Karen was seventeen then, just out of high school. I was an ancient twenty-one, part of a rambunctious group of Brooklyn friends—imagine the Giffen-DeMatteis JLI without super powers—that had been together since… Well, I first met them in high school, but some in the group had literally been together since nursery school. A couple of my buddies had met Karen and two of her closest friends at a party and the three new recruits were effortlessly absorbed into our quirky confederation. I could write an entire essay about that magical summer—among other things, Karen and I got to witness Bruce Springsteen’s jaw-dropping performance at New York’s Bottom Line, a week or so before Born to Run was unleashed on the world—but I’ll save that for my autobiography.
Karen quickly became a dear and treasured friend and, in the course of that friendship, I became her guide into the weird world of comics. (I was the only one in our group addicted to superheroes and muck monsters and sorcerers supreme. My friends tolerated, but really couldn’t fathom, my obsession.) This was a period when I was playing music gigs both solo and in rock and roll bands at night and writing feverishly during the day, mailing out a stream of short stories to magazines (remember those?) and being rejected on a regular basis. (Karen, even then, would read my work and critique it: our shared destiny was clearly written in the stars.) I was also writing music reviews and interviews for a variety of newspapers (remember those?)—but I also dreamed of a career writing comics. That dream came true when I sold my first script to DC in December of 1977—it was purchased by an infuriatingly young, and infuriatingly brilliant, editor named Paul Levitz—and it came crashing down during the infamous DC Implosion in June of ‘78.
But ten or so months later the doors to DC reopened and I started getting regular assignments, working with Paul, the always-enthusiastic Jack Harris, and the late, great Len Wein. As I was gaining a foothold in the business, Karen was wrapping up a journalism degree at Brooklyn College (I’d attended BC as well, although I probably spent more time on the quad playing guitar than I did in class) and, soon after graduation, she was out in the Real World job hunting. Around the same time, the aforementioned Mr. Levitz told me he was looking for an assistant to help him with his duties as DC’s editorial coordinator (that meant he was responsible for making sure the trains ran on time) and I instantly thought of Karen. I sang her praises to Paul, he told me to send her up to meet him, and the rest is, quite literally, history.
This should be the part where I take credit for Karen’s success—but I can’t. Yes, I opened a door for her, but the truth is she could have flamed out and been fired in a few months, or hated the job and quit, or stuck around and gone on to an utterly unremarkable career. But Karen, being Karen, took the opportunity and ran with it, becoming, with alarming speed, an incredibly skilled editor with a voice unique in the industry. And she did it all on her own.
The timing, though, was perfect: Karen was about to launch Vertigo, Art was welcomed back to the DC fold, and a number of the Touchmark books—including Mercy, a graphic novel I did in collaboration with artist Paul Johnson—became part of Vertigo’s first wave.
The next wave brought us Shelly Bond.
I was working on my second Vertigo project—a mini-series called The Last One, about an immortal, gender-fluid being, exhausted by their immortality—when I first encountered Shelly. The experience was similar to meeting Karen, in that there didn’t seem to be any great transition: one day Shelly wasn’t there, the next she was—and it felt as if she’d been there forever. She wasn’t just a faceless assistant getting coffee and making copies, she was a smart, enthusiastic collaborator: an integral part of the creative process from the start.
It wasn’t long before Shelly, deservedly, became a full editor, and she was soon overseeing one of my all-time favorite projects, Seekers Into The Mystery, the two of us juggling multiple artists (Jon J Muth, Michael Zulli, Glenn Barr, Jill Thompson, John Bolton. What a line-up!) and building an idiosyncratic, deeply personal storyline. Shelly always gave me the creative freedom I needed to tell my story in my own way: She wasn’t the kind of editor who sliced and diced every plot point and sentence, trying to leave her mark on the book. But she was always there to offer wise counsel and, if she saw me going off the rails—and we all go off the rails periodically, no matter how talented we are (or think we are!)—she always pulled me back and got me on the right track. If the phone rang and it was Shelly, telling me something in my script wasn’t working, I listened and, as soon as I hung up, I got to work fixing the problem.
(Shelly also oversaw the reprinting of Blood: a tale and Moonshadow—both of which had originally been done for Marvel’s groundbreaking Epic Comics line—and edited the Moonshadow sequel, Farewell, Moonshadow, which I still consider one of the finest pieces of writing in my entire career. It also featured some Jon J Muth’s most beautiful art.)
Vertigo, for me, was very much a family affair—quite literally, since my son, Cody, did two memorable internships there, one for Karen and one for Shelly. My wife, Diane, and I were married just a few months after Vertigo started and our daughter, Katie, was born in ‘94 (if memory serves, Neil Gaiman and his wife had a baby on the same day and Karen B gave birth on that date a year later. That must have some profound cosmic significance, although I’m not sure what!). These was the times before email and texting devoured most of our communications, when your editor would call you regularly, sometimes two or three times a day, and you developed a genuine relationship (or learned, early on, that you shouldn’t be working together). Yes, we had endless discussions about story and art, but we also discussed the ups and downs of our lives. We weren’t just business associates, we were all friends.
Shelly and I kept in touch for a while but, as happens, life and business carried us off in different directions (in Shelly’s case, it carried her across the country). But here we are, all these years later, uncorking a bottle of warm memories and toasting to the Vertigo days that were.
And, I hope, the even better days ahead.
©copyright 2023 J.M. DeMatteis
Had a great time talking to Professor Terence Dollard for his PBS show Comic Culture and you can watch it below.
Way back in 2010—seems like a century ago, doesn't it?—I wrote an essay for Rob Kelly's wonderful anthology, Hey Kids, Comics! and published an excerpt here. Came across the essay this morning, and thought it would be fun to post the entire thing. Enjoy!
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Portals to Other Dimensions—Ten Cents Each!
I've said this before, and it's true: I don't remember ever not reading comic books. I can’t say for sure who first exposed me to them, but I do recall a married couple that lived in my apartment building (the kind of adults you’d expect to be reading comics in the late 50's and early 60's: smiley, rotund, slightly odd people) and they had a treasure trove of comics—stacks and stacks of them—they’d often share with me. I also remember a cousin giving me what must have been twenty or so comics (to my young eyes, they seemed more like twenty thousand). There was something deeply satisfying in spreading them all out on the floor—like a four-color carpet—not to be read, but to be stared at, studied, absorbed to the deeps of my soul. I enjoyed comic book covers as much as I enjoyed reading the stories. I could sit there, in a quasi-hypnotic state, and study the illustrations for hours: they were like cosmic portals, opening up doorways to other dimensions; colorful parallel universes far preferable to the one I inhabited.
My family didn’t have much money—we were lower middle class, my father worked for the New York City Parks Department (he was the guy who raked the leaves and shoveled the snow) and my mother was a switchboard operator for the New York State Parole Board—but I never felt materially deprived. My parents were always incredibly generous. And they generously indulged my passion for comics.
I have very vivid memories of being six, seven years old and taking walks with my father on summer evenings after dinner: We'd head for the local candy store, which—in Brooklyn, at least—was its own magic world, with a long soda fountain inevitably presided over by an elderly Jewish wizard who could magically conjure egg creams (if you’ve never had one, you have my sincere condolences); more comics, newspapers and magazines than you could count; every gloriously trashy candy bar in existence; and an odd assortment of toys, from Duncan Yo-Yos to that lost ancient artifact, the Pensy Pinky. My father would buy a newspaper for himself and a comic book for me. A comic was ten cents in those days—which was probably more than my dad’s New York Daily News cost—but it was still a bargain. (When my best friend, Bob Izzo, was going to the hospital for minor surgery—I think he was having a mole removed—his mother gave him an entire dollar and he bought ten comic books. I was paralyzed with envy.)
I was seven when, after three decades, the price jumped from ten to twelve cents: I walked into the candy store with my mother one afternoon and Eva—the not-to-be-trifled-with wife of the egg cream making wizard—was in shock, ranting about this outrageous price hike. My mother was equally irate. “Twelve cents,” she gasped, “for a comic book?”
You can’t put a cover price on that.
© copyright 2023 J.M. DeMatteis
