DEFENDERS DIALOGUE

This week sees the release of a new Marvel Masterworks edition spotlighting the "Six-Fingered Hand" era of my Defenders run with Don Perlin and Joe Sinnott. I wrote an introduction to the book and you can read it right here. Enjoy!

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Comic books can be time portals, windows into our own past. If I pick up an issue of, say, Fantastic Four that I read when I was in Junior High School, just staring at Jack Kirby’s art, reading Stan Lee’s cover copy, transports me back through the decades. It’s as if a very specific chemical drops in my brain and the world around me recedes: I’m suddenly feeling exactly the way I felt when I was eleven or twelve years old, encountering the FF for the first time. I shed my present-day self and become that Marvel-obsessed kid who so joyfully fell, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into the wondrous universes that those two master magicians created.

I had a similar experience rereading the Defenders stories collected in this volume, only instead of being swept back to childhood, I was swept back to the 1980s, to my early days at Marvel. Each story called forth a time, both in my creative and personal lives, that was decades in the past, and I reconnected with, became, the young writer I was then: not a master of the comics universe like Stan and Jack, but a callow, enthusiastic wordsmith, doing his best to master a discipline that was still new to him.

I’d broken in to comics at DC, writing for the various anthology books, working with superb editors like Paul Levitz, Jack Harris, and the late, great Len Wein—I think of them as the professors at my personal comic book college—learning the fundamentals of the craft. Under their tutelage I moved, slowly and carefully, from eight pagers to my first book-length stories; from horror tales with twist endings to stories featuring childhood icons like Batman, Aquaman, and Hawkman. I even created a couple of series of my own—"I…Vampire" for House of Mystery and "Creature Commandos" for Weird War Tales—but my creative bicycle still needed sturdy training wheels: I had so much to learn.

I’d sent some samples over to Marvel, which eventually landed in the lap of then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. Jim—who I’d also interviewed for a comics-centric piece I wrote for The Soho Weekly News (I was a journalist in those days, too; when you’re a freelancer, you’ve got to keep as many doors open as possible)—saw something in my work and was open and generous with feedback, insight, and encouragement. Shooter was an intimidating figure—unusually tall and very commanding—with a long resume in the business (he’d started writing comics professionally when he was 13!). He was also a superb editor with a deep understanding of story, who was able to communicate that understanding with force and clarity. He became the next professor in my comic book college experience and, for that, I am forever in his debt.

Under Jim’s watchful eye, I worked on a few fill-in issues (I recall an Iron Man story that I later repurposed as a Captain America tale, an Avengers issue that vanished into oblivion, and a Doctor Strange story, featuring the obscure villain Tiboro, that eventually made it into print), hanging on Jim’s every word and incorporating his wisdom into my work. I had a very simple rule in those days: The editor is always right. I wanted to learn, wanted to grow, and I certainly wasn’t going to argue with someone who knew far more than me about the medium. As Paul Levitz once told me, “You can’t break the rules until you’ve learned the rules”—and if I was going to make comics a career that lasted, I had to learn them all.

Jim kept throwing me interesting side-gigs, too: I wrote plots for French Spider-Man stories, crafted detailed biographies of all the Marvel characters for…well, it’s been so long I’ve forgotten what the purpose was. I also spent a couple of weeks in Stan Lee’s office—Stan was in California—watching an animated television series and writing up notes on the lead character, a Spider-Man rip-off, to aid Marvel in a lawsuit. And if you don’t think being paid to hang out in Stan Lee’s office and watch cartoons was a dream job, what are you doing reading this in the first place?

Jim eventually offered me a freelance contract, a chance to become a full-fledged Marvel writer. At the same time, Len Wein asked me to come on staff at DC as his assistant. It was an excruciatingly difficult decision—if anyone had told me a year earlier that both major comics companies would be offering me that level of work, I wouldn’t have believed them; I hardly believe it now—but my new-born son eventually made the decision for me. I realized the freelance contract at Marvel would allow me to continue working at home, making my own hours, which meant I’d always be there to help raise Cody. Being a homebody and family man by nature, I reluctantly turned Len down, said yes to Jim—and it’s a decision I’ve never regretted.

The first series Jim assigned me was Conan. I was a massive fan of both Robert E. Howard’s original tales and Roy Thomas’s brilliant work on the comics. How, I wondered, could a terrified newbie like me follow in Roy’s formidable footsteps? The answer? I really couldn’t. Oh, I did my very best on the book, perhaps trying too hard to emulate the estimable Mr. Thomas, but I don’t think I ever escaped his shadow.

My next assignment, though, was right in my wheelhouse: Jim handed me Defenders—“Because,” he said, “I know how much you like Doctor Strange.” Correction: I didn’t just like Doctor Strange, I loved the guy, he remains near the top of my comic book character pantheon; but it wasn’t just Doc that had me excited. Defenders had long been one of my favorite Marvel series (you can find a heartfelt missive from Young JMD on the Defenders #27 letters page). It was, from the start, odd, offbeat, and idiosyncratic—especially during the brilliant and iconoclastic Steve Gerber’s tenure on the book (working with an artist who would, a decade or so later, become one of my all-time favorite collaborators: Sal Buscema).

I could write an entire essay about Gerber’s work and the huge impact it had on me. The man was a genre unto himself, a creative force of nature, a mold-breaker. He stepped into the Marvel Universe, looked around at the towering structures that Lee, Kirby, and Steve Ditko had erected, bowed in deference to their collective genius, and then—with his work on Man-Thing, Howard the Duck, and, of course, Defenders—started kicking those towers down with ferocious glee, charting the future of the medium in the process.

The writers that came after Steve on Defenders—David Anthony Kraft and Ed Hannigan—had followed Gerber’s lead, making the book both genuinely odd and deeply personal, and I looked forward to making my own mark on the series, forging my own vision. But was I up to the task?

Looking back on the first year of Defenders collected here, I see a writer who hadn’t mastered his craft yet—not by a long shot—but one who was passionate, pouring heart and soul into these stories. Who fell head over heels in love with the book’s weird, unsettling cast of characters. And I could feel that love—there’s that chemical dropping in my brain again!—as I reread the adventures of Doc, Daimon, Patsy, Kyle, Val, Isaac, and all the rest.

One of the wonderful things about writing Defenders was that the series was always flying under the radar, its members perceived as second and third tier characters. That meant I could get away with things I never could if I was writing Spider-Man or Avengers; that I could make these oddball heroes my own, peel apart their psyches, rebuild them from the ground up without worrying that some editor from down the hall would poke their head in my editor’s office and say, “Hey! You can’t do that with Devil Slayer!” (The truth is, there are no second and third-tier characters; they’re simply perceived that way. Every character has the potential to be great.) I was exploring different creative corners, experimenting—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—unleashing my imagination, trying to find my own unique voice: a voice that wouldn’t crystalize till I wrote Moonshadow a few years later. But it’s safe to say there wouldn’t have been a Moonshadow without the creative freedom afforded me while I was writing Defenders.

My era of Defenders was soon defined by its combination of super-heroics and the supernatural. I’d like to say it was a Grand Plan, but the truth is it was just a happy accident. Having spent my DC apprenticeship writing so many horror tales for their anthology books, the mystical themes just sort of…spilled over. Before I knew it, I was neck-deep in demons, vampires, and gargoyles. But that element gave the book a unique tone, separating it out from other super-team books, and allowing me to dive into the more metaphysical and philosophical corners of the MU.

Happy accidents indeed: Defenders #100—which brought together all the plot seeds I’d (apparently) been sowing since my first issue—made it seem like I had a Grand Master Plan for what came to be known as “The Six-Fingered Hand Saga,” but I was making it up as I went along, letting the story and characters lead me where they wanted to go (which, I’ve learned over the years, is the best way to do things: You want your story to rear up, like a wild horse, and surprise you; you want your characters to do things you’ve never expected). That it somehow came together in that anniversary issue is as much a testament to luck as it is to talent.

It's also a testament to two men whose contributions to Defenders were just as important as mine: Don Perlin and Al Milgrom. Al was as supportive, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable an editor as I could have asked for. A skilled writer and artist in his own right, he was always there to advise and guide, allowing me to forge my own trail, tell stories in my own unique way—but ready to pull me back if I was in danger of stepping off the edge of an unseen creative cliff. Despite the fact that Al had far more experience in the business than I did, he never treated me like The New Guy: He treated me like a fellow professional, with respect and camaraderie.

Don Perlin had been in the business even longer than Al—he started in the late 1940s, working with the great Will Eisner along the way—but he never let the difference in our age or experience come between us: never talked down to me, never pulled rank. In fact, Don was such an enthusiastic collaborator, so bubbling with creative energy, that it sometimes seemed he was the wide-eyed new recruit, not me. We’d talk on the phone regularly and soon became friends: two kids from Brooklyn, separated by three decades, but united by a love of comic books. If you’re working on a monthly series, you hope for an artist who’s a skilled visual storyteller. Don was certainly that, as this volume attests—but he was also a warm, genuine human being. To paraphrase Mary Jane Watson: I hit the jackpot. (We also hit the jackpot with the legendary Joe Sinnott, who inked the majority of stories in our first year, bringing Don’s pencils to life in the way only Joe could.)

In the end, though, it’s not about the creators, it’s about the characters: the tortured and tormented Son of Satan, whose divided psyche was endlessly fascinating…Isaac Christians, the sweet-souled old man trapped in a hideous gargoyle’s body…Patsy Walker, in search of love and meaning but stumbling through Hell along the way…Kyle Richmond, the poor little rich boy whose personal life was one tragedy after another…Devil Slayer, the haunted war veteran who would be even more important to the series in the months to come. Misfits, losers, and loners who had no business being together but somehow formed a loving—if highly dysfunctional—family, with Stephen Strange as their spell-chanting father figure.

Comic books, as I said, can be time portals, windows into our own past, and Defenders remains a hugely important part of my past. I look back on those days collaborating with Don and Al, teleporting through dimensions with Marvel’s one and only non-team, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity Jim Shooter gave me all those years ago. The stories in this collection were an important step on my road to becoming the writer I am today. I hope they entertain you and, perhaps, touch your hearts and make you look at the world with new eyes.

Just as Defenders did for me.

©copyright 2024 J.M. DeMatteis