AN UNLIMITED RETURN

Had a fun reunion with my old friend, writer/producer Stan Berkowitz, talking about our Justice League Unlimited episode "The Return" with our charming hosts Susan (Wonder Woman) Eisenberg and James Enstall. You can listen to the Justice League Revisited podcast right here.

BOO!

Happy Halloween! Before Orson Welles produced his classic "War of the Worlds" radio drama, he launched the Mercury Theater with this memorable production of "Dracula." Enjoy...and don't eat too much candy today!

AUSTRALIAN SIGNALS

I took a (cyber) trip to Australia to talk to David Finn of the Signal of Doom podcast about John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob Dylan...and, oh yeah, comic books. You can listen to it right here.

BLAZING SKULLS

There's a new Marvel Masterworks collecting the Ghost Rider run I did with artist/co-plotter (and all around great guy) Bob Budiansky. I wrote an introduction to the collection and you can read it below. (Seems appropriate just a few days before Halloween, doesn't it?)

In the early 1980s, not long after I’d started working for Marvel Comics, my phone rang and it was Tom DeFalco—soon to be not just one of my favorite editors but favorite people—asking if I wanted to take over the writing duties on the Ghost Rider book from the great Roger Stern. My answer, unsurprisingly, was a wildly enthusiastic “Yes!”—not so much because I loved Ghost Rider (if I was making a list of my favorite Marvel characters at the time, GR would have been near the bottom. A guy with a flaming head who rides a motorcycle? It just didn’t appeal) but because, as a freelancer, always on the lookout for more work, always eager for new challenges, the offer of another regular gig was too good to pass up. (I probably would have responded with an equally-enthusiastic “Yes!” if Tom had offered me Millie the Model.) I’d already auditioned for Tom, working on a couple of GR fill-ins (featured in the previous Ghost Rider Masterworks) illustrated by my Defenders collaborator, the late, great Don Perlin, and I assume that’s what landed me the gig. But doing a few fill-ins and signing up for a lengthy run are two very different things.  

 

As mentioned, I wasn’t a massive Ghost Rider fan. Oh, I’d read the early issues, and I was especially enamored of the stories illustrated by one of the true masters of the form, Mike Ploog (what a thrill it was, many years later, to collaborate with Mr. P on Abadazad and The Stardust Kid), but I hadn’t really followed Johnny Blaze’s adventures after that—so I took a deep dive into the recent issues by Stern and Bob Budiansky. Roger, of course, never failed to deliver an engaging story. Budiansky’s work was new to me, but his ability to provide crystal clear storytelling and expressive emotions—all wrapped in the requisite shadows, fog and bone-chilling mood required for a book steeped in the supernatural—was impressive.

 

Still, Ghost Rider was, like many a Marvel title in the early 70s, when the tight grip of the Comics Code had been considerably loosened, a horror book, and I wasn’t exactly a horror enthusiast: Oh, I’d watched all the requisite movies as a kid—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and the rest (it probably says a lot about me that, growing up, my favorite spooky movie wasn’t any of those but the comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which played endlessly on local New York television)—but my taste in the fantastic ran more to tales of everyday people whose lives take a left turn into the mysterious and magical: I was more a child of Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling than Bram Stoker and Stephen King (both of whom I’d read and enjoyed). But during my apprenticeship at DC Comics—where I broke into the business writing for their line of monster-centric anthology comics—I discovered that I had a knack for the horrific. I wrote numerous tales of blood-suckers and beasts, creating the ongoing I…Vampire and Creature Commandos features along the way. And I saw that the line between Serling and Stoker was thinner than I’d imagined. Horror didn’t have to be in your face blood and gore (although a good shock now and then could serve the story well), it could be a doorway into the unexplored shadows within the human psyche and the human heart. I was surprised to discover how at home I was in those shadows, with those creatures of the night.

 

I shouldn’t have been: I’ve always been fascinated by duality, in the world and, more significantly, in each of us. “Good and evil,” Dostoyevsky wrote, “are so monstrously mixed up in man.” All of us contain the purest of angels and the most maniacal of demons, the spires of Heaven and the pits of Hell, and our lives can often be a tug of war between those twin forces, as we seek a way to balance and, perhaps, transcend them. Tales of the supernatural offer an opportunity to literalize that war, and explore the paradoxes within the duality that so obsessed me: Even a demon has an angel in their heart somewhere, and even angels might be tempted by the darkness. That’s a formula for compelling stories, and a character like Johnny Blaze, who is literally at war with his inner demon, was—in the masterful hands of Stern and Budiansky—a genuinely compelling character.

 

Reading through the terrific work that Roger and Bob had done together—I couldn’t have asked for a better foundation to build my stories on—I saw that the relationship between Blaze and the demon Zarathos (a name Bob and I cooked up together. More on that later) was a doorway into both the psychological and spiritual aspects of our nature. All the themes I loved, as both a writer and a human being, were there for exploration. And, suddenly, I wasn’t just excited by the opportunity of a new gig, I was excited by the metaphysical worlds I could explore, the intriguing tales I could tell. 

 

I was now officially a Ghost Rider fan. 

 

All very heady and philosophical, right? But mainstream comics also have to offer big action and larger than life characters. The tug of war between Blaze and Zarathos supplied the ruminative meat, but Blaze’s supporting cast, from the denizens of the Quentin Carnival to the strange and deadly antagonists who rose up to challenge the Ghost Rider, provided the energy and fun.  Adding to that fun was the fact that Bob Budiansky and I were co-plotting the book. I was a little cautious at first, I’d never co-plotted with an artist before, but I soon learned that Bob has a first-rate sense of story—as he later proved with memorable runs writing Transformers and Sleepwalker—and, within our first few issues, it became clear that we shared the creative chemistry absolutely necessary for a comic book to work. That chemistry can’t be created, it can’t be forced: It’s either there or it’s not. I’ve been in situations where I’ve written a solid script, the artist has done excellent work, and yet the final story falls flat. It’s missing some spark, some creative combustion that’s beyond words. Never a problem with Budiansky.

Working on Ghost Rider with Bob was a wonderful experience. No egos, no arguments: We’d get on the phone and spend an hour or two throwing around ideas, I’d go off and expand those ideas into a fully fleshed out plot, Bob would pencil the story, bringing it to life in his unique and powerful way, after which I’d supply the finished script. It was a joyful partnership—I don’t recall any major disagreements along the way—and Bob and I soon became not just collaborators, but friends.

 

Together we deepened the Ghost Rider mythology, digging into the how and why of the nameless demon who lived inside Johnny Blaze (he wasn’t anonymous for long: I still have a clear memory of the two of us bouncing names back and forth, like a game of tennis, till we came up with Zarathos)…created the soulless man named Centurious, who proved pivotal to Johnny’s story, both past and future…set Blaze against the tragic, tormented Steel Wind and the mysterious Sin Eater…developed the manipulative Freakmaster (a character mentioned, but never clearly seen, during Roger’s run)…and brought in classic Marvel characters like Mephisto and Nightmare. One of my favorite stories in this collection is GR #78, “The Empire of Sleep,” in which the Lord of the Dream Dimension takes us on a tour of every dark corner in Blaze’s psyche. It also features one of the oddest scenes I’ve ever written (and one I still love): Doctor Strange, Doctor Druid, and Daimon Hellstrom engaged in a heated game of jacks. Another of my favorites in this collection, Ghost Rider #76, was plotted and drawn by Don Perlin, who came up with an idea that was simple, exciting, and emotionally powerful: Johnny Blaze and Zarathos—now separated by Mephisto—in a race for their ultimate freedom, riding motorcycles, side by side, through the bowels of Hell.

Budiansky and I were zooming along at high speeds, too, but our collaborative motorcycle soon slammed into a brick wall when word came down from On High that Ghost Rider was cancelled. (In those days at Marvel, if a book dipped below 100,000 copies a month, it was on the chopping block. Today, a book consistently selling in the 90,000 range, as GR did, would be a runaway best seller.) But there was good news, too: We were given significant advance notice, allowing us the time to create a Grand Finale that would write an end to the saga of Johnny Blaze and Zarathos, giving Johnny and his true love, Roxanne Simpson, the “happily ever after” we thought they deserved. Bob and I were determined to complete Johnny’s tale in a way that respected the character and his history and I think the two-part tale in Ghost Rider #80 and 81 did just that. A definitive conclusion is something that rarely happens in comics and I remain grateful we were given the chance. 

 

It's astonishing to me that our Ghost Rider run is now more than forty years old—“time,” as Bob Dylan observed, “is a jet plane, it moves too fast”—and, despite the fact that comics have jumped through many stylistic hoops since the early 80s, I hope these stories still entertain, excite, and perhaps enlighten just a little. One thing time hasn’t changed: the warm memories of working with Tom D and Bob (and a tip of the hat to inkers Dave Simons and Kevin Zuban and letterers Joe Rosen and Diana Albers, all of whom added immeasurably to these tales). And deep thanks to Johnny Blaze and Zarathos for allowing us to hop onto their flaming motorcycle. 

 

It was a quite a ride.

SEND IN THE CLONES

Another clip from the recent St. Louis Galaxycon, this time from a Spider-Man panel: First comes a question about the 2023 mini-series Spider-Man: The Lost Hunt—and then we dive into the origins of the controversial Clone Saga. That's John Beatty, Bob Hall, Christopher Priest, and moderator Chris Irving on the panel with me.

HAIL GIFFEN!

Here's a little clip from a Justice League panel at the recent St. Louis Galaxycon, where I sing the praises of the late, and truly great, Keith Giffen. On the panel with me are Kevin Maguire, Alan Davis, Christopher Priest, and our host, Chris Irving.

FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET

Here's another new interview for you: This time I'm talking all things Superman (and much more!) with the fine folks who host the Men of Steel podcast. Up, up, and away!

INTO THE OMNIVERSE

I chat with one of my favorite podcasters, the erudite Eric Anthony of the Omniverse Comics Guide podcast, about...many things—and you can listen below.

BROOKLYN DREAMING

Tomorrow sees the release of Dark Horse's new hardcover edition of Brooklyn Dreams. I wrote an introduction for the occasion and you can read it below.

In the mid-1980’s, I was writing a very strange, and deeply personal, space saga called Moonshadow for Marvel Comics’ groundbreaking Epic imprint.  Moonshadow was the project that cracked me open as a writer, allowing me to step outside the confines of the Marvel and DC universes and be myself.  For the first time I wasn’t “writing comic books,” I was just writing, exactly the way I wanted to, telling exactly the story I wanted to.

 

Moonshadow was, in many ways, an autobiographical work, but the autobiography was filtered through the phantasmagoria of Moon’s adventures.  It was my life, shoved into the deepest waters of my unconscious and then yanked up from the depths:  flapping like a fish, dripping with imagination and allegory.  One of the reasons I recast my life as a work of fantasy was because I always viewed existence itself as a work of fantasy.  I believed then—and believe even more now—that the best way to truly capture this fathomless, hallucinatory, profound, absurd and joyfully sacred thing we call Life is through stories of the fantastic.  So-called “realistic fiction” often spends so much time dwelling on the details of the “real world” (something I maintain doesn’t even exist), studying that ashtray in the corner of the room or that childhood trauma in the corner of the mind, that it misses the infinite layers and levels of psychic and spiritual wonder we walk through, and interact with, every day.  Put simply:  If life is a dream—and I believe it is—you’d better write a dream.  If life is a fairy tale—and, again, I believe it is—then you’d better write a fairy tale. 

 

So why, then, did I write Brooklyn Dreams?  It, after all, presents itself as the true-life adventures of a thinly-veiled version of myself, struggling through adolescence amidst the chaos and euphoria of an extraordinarily dysfunctional Brooklyn family:  not a spaceship, ghost, magic book or super-hero in sight.

 

Despite my belief that tales of the fantastic are often the best doorways into the truth of our lives, I’m a great admirer of authors who can create stories about the allegedly real and then push so deep into the soil of that world that they come out the other end in Wonderland.  My literary hero, Dostoyevsky, could do that.  J.D. Salinger.  Isaac Bashevis Singer.  And, of course, my other literary hero, Ray Bradbury.  What?  You say Bradbury is a science-fiction writer?  Well, yes, he’s been justifiably celebrated for his extraordinary, and extraordinarily poetic, tales of outer and inner space; but my favorite Bradbury book, one of my favorite books of all time, is Dandelion Wine:  a simple novel that tells the simple tale of a single summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Douglas Spaulding.  Only it’s not simple:  Bradbury fixes his X-ray eyes on the mundane aspects of Doug’s life, sees right through them and exposes the magic and wonder, the cosmic terror and cosmic joy, hiding beneath the surface.

 

As I finished work on the final issue of Moonshadow, I wondered if I could do the same with a coming-of-age saga of my own. 

 

Of course, I didn’t grow up in the well-scrubbed, All American Green Town of Bradbury’s youth.  I grew up in the far noisier, messier and wildly unstable terrain of Brooklyn, New York, in an era—the late 1960’s and early 1970’s—when questioning the nature of reality was the order of the day.  As much as I adore Dandelion Wine—it’s forever imprinted on my consciousness, swimming in my bloodstream—I saw my gestating story as a fusion of Woody Allen’s Radio Days and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.  Mel Brooks meets Be Here Now.

 

I’d already attempted something like it, albeit on a small scale, with Moonshadow.  Every issue included sequences that I referred to as “Brooklyn Interludes”:  stories—some fabricated, some pulled directly from my own experiences, most of them a collision of the two—that detailed the life of Moon’s mother, Sheila Fay “Sunflower” Bernbaum.  I loved writing those sequences, loved exploring the world of Sheila’s Brooklyn childhood, conjuring the spirits of her lunatic relatives.  With Brooklyn Dreams I wanted to bring my own childhood, my own lunatic relatives, directly onto the stage, turning those interludes into the main act.  Using the eyes of youth to expose the miracles hidden beneath the Brooklyn streets.   

 

Whether I succeeded or failed is up to the reader to decide.  One thing I think is beyond dispute, though, is the brilliance of Glenn Barr’s illustrations.  I remember the book’s original editor, Mark Nevelow (who later turned the project over to Andy Helfer and Margaret Clark) showing me Glenn’s samples and my astonishment as I realized that this was the style I’d been envisioning for Brooklyn Dreams all along.  I’d been seeing pictures in my head and there they were, in front of me:  I knew immediately that I’d found my artist. 

 

No matter what I asked of Glenn—and I asked plenty—he always rose to the challenge and, more often than not, not only met it but transcended it.  His work was a breathtaking mixture of realism and cartoon, New York apartment buildings and surreal inner landscapes.  Somehow—and in the end, it’s the will of the gods, we really had nothing to do with it—Glenn and I fused our visions seamlessly and the result was one of the most satisfying collaborations of my career.  (A fellow writer once told me that he’d always believed that the best graphic novels were birthed by a single creator, that a writer-artist team could never approach that kind of unified vision.  Brooklyn Dreams changed his mind.  And that’s a compliment I still treasure.)  Writing the original four-volume series was both exhilarating and terrifying:  I’d never exposed myself so nakedly in my work and I often felt like I was tottering on a high-wire, one trembling step away from falling.  But, with a little luck and grace—and the safety net of Glenn’s illustrations—I made it across to the other side.

 

Every writer has favorite literary children.  Looking back over a more than forty year career, I can think of two or three other works that mean as much to me as Brooklyn Dreams.  I can’t think of any that mean more.  

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis

COSMIC CURMUDGEON: IN PRAISE OF KEITH GIFFEN

The Hero Squared Complete Collection is out now from Boom! Studios and I wrote an introduction—singing the praises of my much-missed friend and collaborator Keith Giffen—that you can read below.

It’s been nearly two years since he passed away, but I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Keith Giffen is gone. Keith had his share of health issues in his later years, but he was such a feisty, tenacious guy I was sure he’d outlive us all. “Someday,” I once told him, “the Earth will be an apocalyptic hellhole, all of humanity will be gone, but you’ll still be here, sitting in the rubble, smoking a cigarette.”  

Keith, as anyone who worked with him can attest, was one of the most brilliantly creative humans ever to work in comics, the Jack Kirby of my generation of creators. He was a curmudgeon with a heart of gold. An extraordinarily generous collaborator. And, as my wife observed, “He was like a character out of a Keith Giffen story.”

 

The curmudgeon part was half-real/half-performance art. (He could launch into cynical and hilarious monologues about the state of the world that were as good as anything you could find on an HBO comedy special.) The heart of gold was evidenced by his generosity to his friends in the business: Keith was the kind of guy who—if he heard you were hurting for work—would pick up the phone, call an editor, and say, “Hey! Why aren’t you using so-and-so? What’s your problem? Give ‘em work!” He was also a champion of new talent, happy to kick open doors of opportunity— that might otherwise have proved immovable—on their behalf.

 

We were thrown together on our original Justice League run (and thanks to our brilliant editor Andy Helfer for doing the throwing) and the way we worked on JLI was pretty much how we continued to do it straight through to the end: Keith would create the plot—he’d draw them out, crafting little mini-comics, each one a masterclass in visual storytelling—after which I’d sit down to dialogue, often writing the first thing that came into my head. Sometimes what I wrote hewed closely to Keith’s story and sometimes I created entirely new plot lines and character relationships that had nothing to do with what Keith had done.

Someone else might have taken offense—“How dare you alter my brilliant creative vision?!”—but Keith always encouraged me to follow my muse. He, in turn, would build on what I’d done, always surprising me with his extraordinary leaps of imagination. It was like a game of tennis: We’d hit the ball back and forth and, as we played, the stories evolved into something more than either of us could have ever achieved on our own. I don’t know if that kind of creative relationship would work for other people, but it certainly worked for us, pushing us both to be better. 

Despite the fact that JLI and its many spin-offs were a huge success, I don’t think any of us—including the inimitable Kevin Maguire, whose art was so important to our initial success—realized just how special our creative union was. It was another job—a fun job, but a job nonetheless—and, when our League ran out of steam after five years, we moved on and didn’t look back.

 

It wasn’t until ten years later—when Keith, Kevin, and I reunited for our Eisner-winning Formerly Known As The Justice League—that we all went, “Hey…we’ve got something special here.” The three of us did more Justice League together, as well as a short Metal Men run I’m extremely fond of, and a Defenders mini-series for Marvel.

Keith and I made sure to keep working together with regularity after that, right through to our Scooby Apocalypse series that ended in 2019. (It wasn’t the project that mattered most to me when I worked with GIffen, it was the collaboration itself. I would never have done a Scooby Doo series with anyone else: Scooby Apocalypse evolved into a gig that I absolutely loved and that’s all down to the fun the two of us had putting it together.) We created a significant body of work over the course of thirty-plus years, but my favorite Giffen-DeMatteis collaboration remains the book you’re holding in your hands right now: Hero Squared.

 

The original idea for Hero Squared was Keith’s, but, once I’d enthusiastically signed on, we talked regularly, and in-depth, about the series, discussing the characters, the stories, where we wanted them to go; but, because our approach remained as anarchic as it was back in the Justice League days, our conversations didn’t necessarily reflect what ended up on the page. Once Keith started plotting (and, for part of H2’s run, he dispatched with the mini-comics and wrote what was, essentially, a guide draft. I eventually convinced him to go back to the mini-comics because I found that method more liberating), the final product might have nothing to do with what we’d talked about. I, in turn, continued my tradition of playing with the scripts: adding layers to our oddball cast of characters, taking the stories in new, unexpected directions. (Let’s have a round of applause for Joe Abraham, Nate Watson, and the other gifted artists who helped bring the Hero Squared universe to life. And a heartfelt tip of the hat to Boom! founder Ross Richie who made it all possible.)

As the years passed, a funny thing happened: This guy who was a favorite collaborator became more than that. He became a friend. Sure, we’d get on the phone every week or so to discuss the stories we were working on, but we’d also talk about our families, politics, the ups and downs (and ups and downs and ups and downs) of the freelance life. In the pre-Covid years, I saw Keith regularly at conventions, often sitting next to him, passing Giffen-DeMatteis issues back and forth between us for signing, and chatting away.

The truth is, if Keith and I had met out in the so-called Real World, I don’t think we would have ever become friends—we were very different people—but coming together creatively opened the door for us to come together as human beings. And I’m so very grateful for that. (Thanks, Andy.)

When people ask me what it was like to work with Giffen, one story always comes to mind. I’ve told it before—apologies if you’ve heard it—but it really defines the man. It was the late 1980’s. We were standing in the halls of DC Comics on a Friday, Keith telling me his idea for a new story: the secret origin of one of our most ridiculous characters, the brain-dead, canine Green Lantern named G’nort. Keith spent five or ten minutes spinning the entire tale, in detail. You could see he was excited. He liked this wonderfully goofy story and he wanted to do it—just the way he’d envisioned it. The problem was, I didn’t like it. And I told him I didn’t.

Did Keith get angry? Did he tell me I was a talentless jackass who had no right passing judgment on his incandescent genius? No. He just looked at me for a second, took a breath, shrugged—and then launched into an entirely new origin of G’nort, which he created on the spot. And it was perfect. I can’t think of many people who could switch creative gears like that, but Keith had more raw creativity than just about anyone I’ve ever known: a tsunami of stories and characters and odd, brilliant notions. A one-of-a-kind mad genius whose seismic impact on the comic book industry will be felt for years to come.

Wherever in the multiverse you are, Mr. Giffen, know that you are well-remembered. And sorely missed.

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis

WATCHING THE WHEELS

October 9, 2025 will mark the 85th anniversary of John Lennon’s birth. In celebration of a brilliant artist who remains at the top of my rock and roll pantheon, here—in chronological order—are my top ten Lennon solo songs.  (This could have easily been a top twenty, but I restrained myself!)

1. Cold Turkey

Lennon’s first single outside the confines of the Beatles was the anti-war classic “Give Peace A Chance.” He followed that with one of the most extraordinary songs of his career, the soul-shredding addiction saga “Cold Turkey.” I can’t imagine any other major rocker of the era putting out a song this naked, this raw.

2. Instant Karma

Lennon’s first official solo single—the two others were released when the Beatles were still a unit (or believed to be)—is another of his greatest, and his first collaboration with Phil Spector. “Instant Karma” is a joyful cosmic anthem, a rollicking rush of spiritual uplift, buoyed by the spectacular drumming of Alan White.

3. God

1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band remains one of the most unique and powerful albums in the history of rock and roll, and this song is the transcendent grand finale to Lennon’s tortuous emotional journey. In a little over four minutes, he puts the final nails in the coffin of the sixties and charts a path forward into the new decade. A masterpiece.

4. Imagine

What can I say that hasn’t been said already?  “Imagine” is the song that will forever define Lennon in the public’s mind: a utopian vision that some have called hopelessly naive. But if we can’t dream, how can we change the world? Needed now, more than ever. 

5. Happy Christmas (War Is Over)

John and Yoko took a public domain folk song called “Stewball” and used it as the foundation for a Christmas classic, complete with holiday bells and a children’s choir. The Christmas season never officially begins for me until I hear this song. 

6. Mind Games

After the debacle of the Sometime In New York City album (which is neither as bad as we thought it was back in 1972, nor as groundbreaking as Lennon and Ono wanted it to be), Lennon needed a reset—and “Mind Games” was the first step. The lyrics are a wonderful, Lennonesque phantasmagoria, but the message is familiar: “Love is the answer.” 

7. Nobody Loves You (When You're Down and Out)

Lennon went through did some serious wrestling with personal demons (and he had many) during his so-called “Lost Weekend” period, but the result was one of his finest albums, the brilliant Walls and Bridges. “Nobody Loves You” is to Walls as “God” was to POB: It’s the essence of the entire journey, boiled down to one harrowing, unforgettable song.

8. Stand By Me

The standout track on Lennon’s troubled oldies album, Lennon’s take on this Ben E. King classic is the definitive version. “Stand By Me” has extra meaning for me because I was there in the studio when Lennon and his backup band (which featured my old friend Jon Cobert) filmed the promotional video for this song. An amazing day.

9. Watching The Wheels

After five years away, John and Yoko returned to recording, joining forces for the excellent Double Fantasy album. “Watching The Wheels” was Lennon looking back on those five years with typical wit and philosophical musing. But the song ultimately became a final statement from an artist who left us too soon.

10. Grow Old With Me

Just Lennon at the piano in the Dakota, recording onto a cassette tape. But despite that (or perhaps because of it) “Grow Old With Me,” which appeared in this fragile form on the posthumous Milk and Honey album, never fails to move me. A simple, heartfelt paean to marital love, “Grow Old With Me” could have been written by Paul McCartney: The two of them had more in common than Lennon ever fully acknowledged.

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis

IN PRAISE OF GERBER

Marvel recently released a new Marvel Masterworks volume, collecting more of Steve Gerber's classic, iconoclastic run on Man-Thing. I wrote the introduction to the book and you can read it below.

Much as I adore 1960s comics—the innocent, inspiring DCs early in the decade and the Marvel explosion led by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko—the 70s might be my favorite comic book decade. The 60s saw Jack, Stan, and Steve breaking new ground in sometimes radical ways (just as the Beatles, Dylan, the Who, and others were doing in rock and roll; it was a revolutionary time all around), building a new foundation for the comic book form as they constructed that impressive skyscraper called the Marvel Universe.

The following decade saw an astonishing influx of new talent to the industry, hungry young writers and artists who were raised on, revered, those classic stories, and wanted to not just build on that foundation, but construct some dazzling new structures of their own. The result? Seminal works like Roy Thomas and Barry Smith’s Conan, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing, Denny O’Neil and Neil Adams’ Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu, Steve Englehart’s Doctor Strange (with Frank Brunner and Gene Colan), Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and… Well, I could go on, it was truly an embarrassment of riches: a staggering body of work by creators at the very top of their game. These are the books that kept me reading comics at a time when I might have left them behind—I’d just turned 16 when the new decade dawned—and the creators I still hold in highest regard.

But if I was forced to pick my favorite comics of the 1970s, I’d choose the works of two very different talents: Jack Kirby, the medium’s elder statesman, who proved, with his interlocking Fourth World books at DC, that he remained universes ahead of everyone else (and we’re still trying to catch up), and the man I’m here to laud and celebrate: Steve Gerber.

I first came across Gerber’s work in an issue of The Incredible Hulk, plotted by Roy Thomas and scripted by Steve. Truth is, when I’d see a new writer’s name in the credits, I’d wince a little. No matter how talented, it usually takes time for a storyteller to find their level, to become comfortable with the format, and it often showed. Looking back, there was nothing particularly memorable about that Hulk story, but something in Gerber’s voice—and he had one, right from the start; not many writers can do that—impressed me. He seemed comfortable, at home, in the medium; he didn’t stumble out of the gate, he sprinted confidently ahead. I’ll have to remember this guy’s name, I thought. I’ll have to pay attention to his work. And I did.

It became clear, very quickly, that Steve Gerber was a mold-breaker. He had, as noted, a unique, individual voice at a time when many of Marvel’s writers—even the very best of them—were burying their individuality beneath a layer of Stan Lee-isms. Gerber stepped into the Marvel Universe, looked around at the towering structures that Kirby, Lee, and Ditko erected, bowed in deference to their collective genius, and then started kicking those towers down with ferocious glee.

I could write an entire essay about Steve’s work on Defenders (where he blew the superhero genre to pieces and never bothered to put it back together) or Howard the Duck (the first overground-underground comic book: If you weren’t around then, you simply can’t fathom the impact Howard had on the comics landscape), or just about any of his 70s Marvel work (which in no way denigrates the superb work he did later; this era just happens to be my favorite because that’s when I discovered Gerber). But we’re here to discuss the stories in this volume from my favorite Steve Gerber series of all: Man-Thing.

According to legend, Man-Thing was created by Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow at a time when the comic book business was becoming enamored of the horror genre (the loosening of the Comics Code had a lot to do with that). Around the same time Manny oozed out of the swamp in the short-lived black and white magazine Savage Tales, DC launched their own bog-beast with Wein and Wrightson’s “Swamp Thing” story in House of Secrets. By 1972, both characters had their own ongoing features and, from this reader’s perspective, Swamp Thing was winning the competition: There was a gorgeous pulp-poetry infusing Wein’s prose and a horrifying elegance to Wrightson’s art. Their collaboration remains a high point of the medium. It would have been easy for Gerber to take his cues from Len and Bernie when he took over the Man-Thing feature in Adventure Into Fear #11—but, being Gerber, he went off in a very different direction.

Man-Thing (it didn’t take long for the character to get his own book) essentially became a stealth anthology series. Yes, there were recurring characters like aspiring sorceress Jennifer Kale and down (and down and down) on his luck Richard Rory, but the story was the star here and the looser format allowed Gerber to ignore, and shatter, the medium’s expectations. To follow his unique muse wherever it led him.

I suspect Steve was a fan of Rod Serling and his anthology series, The Twilight Zone, because you can feel the influence of episodes like “The Shelter” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” in his Man-Thing work: stories, driven by a kind of righteous fury, that thrust people into desperate situations, forcing both their inner demons and inner angels to the surface. Stories where characters speak in feverish, frustrated, wildly poetic monologues, illuminating themselves, and the human condition, in the process. (Brian, in this volume’s classic “Song Cry of the Living Dead Man,” may be the single most Serlingesque of all Gerber’s protagonists: The direct descendant of Gart Wiliams of “A Stop At Willoughby” and Martin Sloan of “Walking Distance.”) In a way, Man-Thing himself is the Serling figure in Gerber’s tales: Rod as swamp monster, shambling onto the stage when necessary to introduce and sum up the drama.

This is not to suggest that Gerber was copying Serling: The man was sui generis and Man-Thing became an ongoing vehicle for his compelling and idiosyncratic worldview. Looking back, it seems that the muck-monster’s swamp home was—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—a representation of Gerber’s own psyche; each character who stepped on the stage another aspect of that psyche. But if all the Man-Thing stories offered were a form of self-therapy, they would have soon been forgotten. What made them unique was Gerber’s constant inventiveness and, more important, his ability to dig deep into his characters, to drill down into their emotional and psychological core. And that’s what drives these stories more than anything: raw emotion. It’s the force that touches Man-Thing himself, for better and worse, again and again. When I teach writing classes, I tell my students that a great story requires the writer to thrust a (metaphorical) knife deep into their chest and bleed onto the pages. Gerber did that every issue: The stories were profoundly personal and, simultaneously, universally relatable. They made me feel, touched my heart—sometimes elating and sometimes devastating me. And that emotional authenticity is, I think, the main reason Gerber’s Man-Thing stories still resonate today.

Yes, a lot of it is fairly bleak—Gerber is turning over rocks in both the collective consciousness and his own, and finding the worms and maggots hiding underneath—but there’s also an undercurrent of hope, of reaching for the light, as well. Ayla’s love is what redeems Darrel the Clown’s soul; Sybil’s sacrifice heals Brian’s shattered consciousness.

But these are comic books and they’re not created in the vacuum of a writer’s mind. In comics, great stories require great artists to bring them to life on the page, and Gerber had some truly brilliant collaborators. The early tales in this collection were drawn by the masterful Val Mayerik, whose offbeat, atmospheric style perfectly suited the tone of Steve’s work (I had the pleasure of collaborating with Val in the 1990s, on a stand-alone story for Marvel’s short lived Amazing Adventures anthology called “Pogrom”: It was sensitive and difficult subject matter and Val handled it with grace and power), but the bulk of the stories were brought to life by one of my favorite artists, and favorite people, the great Mike Ploog.

Long before I ever met Mike and collaborated with him on Abadazad and The Stardust Kid, I was a huge fan, floored by his Marvel work—most notably on Ghost Rider, Kull the Destroyer, Weirdworld and, of course, Man-Thing. Mike was right at home in Manny’s mystical swamp, because the Ploog Universe literally dripped with mood, mystery and wellsprings of emotion. His monsters were touched with humanity and his humans were often a hairsbreadth away from becoming monsters themselves. More important, Mike was a master storyteller who could deliver the big gut-punching moments, but also understood the importance of letting the eye flow, subtly and easily, from panel to panel: leading the reader on with a gesture here, a facial expression there, each panel an integral part of a larger tapestry.

Looking back, it’s amazing that Mike was even working at Marvel, because he didn’t fit any company molds: Ploog, like Gerber, was unique. A one-off. A very singular beast. Yes, you can see the influence of Will Eisner—Mike apprenticed with Eisner, after all—but Mike absorbed that influence and created his own unmistakable visual stamp. (Frank Chiaramonte inked many of Mike’s Man-Thing stories and it was that rare, magical case of a penciler and inker who were perfectly matched. Even the best inkers can sometimes obscure the strengths in a pencil artist’s work, but Chiaramonte inked Ploog as if he was channeling Mike himself. Look at the issues where it’s all Ploog and there’s hardly a difference. They were an extraordinary team and it’s a shame we didn’t get more of them.)

One of Marvel’s founding fathers, the legendary John Buscema, brought several of the stories in this volume to life, most notably the aforementioned “Song Cry of the Living Dead Man.” I can only imagine what Buscema—who, despite the brilliant work he did in the genre, was never a huge fan of superheroes—felt about this story. It must have been baffling in some ways, but it also must have been liberating. He clearly pours everything he’s got into it, stretching his formidable storytelling talents into new realms. Klaus Janson’s inks, oozing and dripping with marshy mood, only heighten the power of the story.

“Song Cry,” along with the Darrel the Clown two-parter collected here and the “The Kid’s Night Out” (which will appear in a future Masterworks) are, for me, the peak of Gerber’s Man-Thing work. But, really, it’s all peak. Remember: This is pre-Epic Comics. Pre-Vertigo. Pre-Moore and Gaiman and Morrison. But those innovative imprints, those wonderfully disruptive writers, couldn’t have existed without Gerber. Steve was out there dancing alone on the creative precipice—then leaping off it into unknown dimensions. Without realizing it, he was clearing a path for all of us who followed. How lucky we were to walk that path he cleared, then branch off onto distinctive paths of our own.

I only met Steve Gerber once, in the mid-1980s: I was in Los Angeles on business, visiting with Marv Wolfman, and he invited Steve to join us for dinner. I’d love to say Steve and I hit it off instantly, became best pals, and stayed in touch for years after—but that’s not what happened. We shared a pleasant meal, said goodbye, and never encountered each other again. But I didn’t have to be friends with the flesh and blood Steve Gerber in order to know the man. I got to know him, intimately, through his extraordinary stories—many of which are in this equally-extraordinary collection.

And Mr. G—wherever in the multiverse you are: Thank you.

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis

DUDES!

Yes, it's another podcast interview—this time with those fine fellows Zach and Adam of the Spideydude Radio Network. We take a deep dive into All Things Spidey, with a focus on Spider-Man '94. The interview is embedded below. Enjoy!

MORE '94!

The second issue of Spider-Man '94 hits shops next week. Here's the hype, straight from Marvel and AIPT:

THE MARK OF KAINE! After his first altercation with KAINE, Spider-Man is left with many unanswered questions. Where did Kaine come from, and what are his connections to the dreaded MORLUN?

Brace yourselves and expect the unexpected as the lore of the hit animated series continues to expand in new and exciting ways!

Written by: J.M. DeMatteis

Art by: Jim Towe

Cover by: Nick Bradshaw, Rachelle Rosenberg

Page Count: 32 Pages

Release Date: October 8, 2025

Preview pages are below. Enjoy!