Friday, January 31, 2025

AMARTITHI 2025



Wishing a blessed Amartithi to my Meher Baba family around the world.

"Do not search for God outside of you. God can only be found within you, for His only abode is the heart."—Avatar Meher Baba


Thursday, January 30, 2025

IT WAS 40 YEARS AGO...YESTERDAY


The first issue of Moonshadow was released on January 29, 1985—40 years ago yesterday. 40 years? "Time," as Bob Dylan sang, "is a jet plane, it moves too fast." Can it really be four decades since the brilliant Jon J Muth (who has gone on to an award-winning career writing and illustrating children's books) and I embarked on one of the greatest creative journeys of our careers? There's no arguing with Father Time, but it's still mind-boggling to us both. 

What's even more mind-boggling—in the very best way—is the fact that, barring a gap here and there, Moon has remained in print ever since that aforementioned first issue. In fact, this May sees the release of Moonshadow The Definitive Edition—Expanded: an updated version of the Eisner-nominated hardcover DH released back in 2019. And, yes, "expanded" means there are even more behind-the-scenes extras included in this 528 page beauty.  

So happy that this story—which remains so close to my heart—will be back out in the world.

Pop! Poof! Ping!
(If you know, you know.)

Monday, January 20, 2025

INTO SHAMBALLA WITH DAN GREEN

Tomorrow sees the release of the latest Doctor Strange Marvel Masterworks edition—which, to my great delight, is reprinting, for the first time in decades, Into Shamballa, the Doc Strange graphic novel I did with artist/co-plotter Dan Green, way back in the mid-eighties.

I wrote an essay about the book, and my collaboration with Dan, for this new edition and you can read it below. Enjoy!



In the early 1980s, my then-wife and I decided it was time to pack up our belongings and our not quite two-year-old son, move out of Brooklyn, where we’d both been born and raised, and relocate to that vague, magical kingdom called Upstate. We ended up in a charming old house in a charming little town about a hundred miles north of New York City.

 

Problem was, we didn’t know a soul in the area and it was a difficult adjustment—especially for me: A writer who spends a good part of his existence locked away in his own imagination doesn’t have many opportunities for meeting new people.

 

One day a package arrived from Marvel—a regular occurrence in that ancient era before the digital revolution—with what I assumed was dialogue-ready art for one of the many books I was writing. Turned out the penciled pages inside weren’t meant for me but for an inker named Dan Green, who I’d never met. Left to my own devices, I would have just packed the art up and sent them on to Dan, but my wife noticed that his address was nearby, about twenty minutes away, and insisted we deliver the pages in person. “Who knows?” she said. “We might make some new friends.”

 

A few days later we found ourselves at the Green house, spending an afternoon with Dan and his extremely pregnant wife, Sandi (one of the sweetest humans it’s ever been my pleasure to know—and a chef of almost supernatural ability) and, true to my wife’s prediction, we did indeed forge new, and lasting, friendships. (My son Cody and Dan’s daughter Galen grew up together, went to school together, and remain dear friends to this day.)  

 

As we got to know each other, it became clear that Dan was an intense and interesting man, deep thinking, extremely creative (he was so much more than just an inker, as the breathtaking painted art in this volume attests). Like many of us, he wrestled with some formidable inner demons, but that wrestling was balanced by a strong sense of humor—and a truly good heart.     

 

Given our intersecting creative lives, it was inevitable that Dan and I would work on a project together and, united in our common love of all things mystical, decided to create a Doctor Strange story: one we hoped would be memorable, unique. And we collaborated in an equally unique and memorable way.  

 

Keep in mind it’s been decades, and memories are fragile things, so take everything that follows with the proverbial grain of salt. That said, Dan saved my outlines and scripts and many of his layouts and notes and, using that material as a kind of archaeological guide, I’ve tried to reconstruct the way we created Into Shamballa.                                                                              

 

                                                            ***

Since Dan and I saw each other regularly, we worked very closely every step of the way, bouncing things back and forth, building the story together, brick by brick. After we talked the story through and came up with a framework that excited us, we pitched it to Jim Shooter, who was editor-in-chief of Marvel at the time, and he had some very valuable insights that helped bring our story into deeper focus. I then wrote up a five-page story outline for our editor, Carl Potts, that we also shared with Roger Stern, who was writing the Strange monthly at the time. We wanted to make sure we weren’t stepping on Roger’s toes and that our story didn’t overlap with anything he was doing.

 

From there Dan and I worked out more details of the story, discussed layouts, tone, etc. Then, based on our conversations, I wrote up another outline, breaking the story down, which Dan used as a jumping off point, laying out the entire graphic novel and, I’m sure, adding new details along the way.

 

I wrote my script from Dan’s layouts, but I was free to change things, make shifts, as I went along. When, a few years ago, Dan unearthed a trove of Shamballa material he’d saved, he found some of the layouts—and I use the term loosely!—that I’d quickly doodle if, in the writing, my script deviated from what Dan had already done. This gave him a sense of what I was seeing in my head as new elements of the story unfolded. I also added some art notes to the script itself, offering visual suggestions—something I’d forgotten until Dan showed me the old pages.


Dan had feedback about the script that I then incorporated into another draft and, with that in front of him, worked out the final layouts. We went over those together, making sure we were both happy, after which Dan went on to the finished pages—which, all these years later, still stand as some of the most beautiful art to ever grace a comic book or graphic novel. (By this time, Dan had a studio space close to my house, shared with another dear friend, my Moonshadow collaborator Jon J Muth. I’d pop over and find Dan at one table painting Doc, Jon at another painting Moon. How fortunate was I?)

 

This kind of back and forth is not the way the average comic book is done. The fact that we were able to do so much work face to face, and that we had the extended deadline that graphic novels afford, allowed us to really collaborate in a way writers and artists in comics working on monthly books just can’t. (Even the title was a collaboration: If memory serves, I came up with “Shamballa”—after the Tibetan spiritual kingdom that was central to our tale—and Dan suggested adding “Into”!) It was a magical creative partnership, as befits such a magical character, and, all these years later, Into Shamballa remains a project I’m incredibly proud of—and a true testament to Dan’s brilliance as both an artist and storyteller.


***

 

Over the course of decades, Dan and I sometimes lost track of each other—I went through some seismic changes during those years, including a divorce, new marriage, and the birth of a second child—but we always managed to reconnect. Long friendships are often like that: the tide moves out, but it eventually sweeps back in again.

 

Sandi Zinaman passed away in 2015—a terrible loss—and it seemed to me that a part of Dan died with her. After Sandi’s passing, Dan and I got together regularly—in retrospect, not regularly enough—talking about life and comics over lunch, and it was clear that Dan was still struggling with those aforementioned inner demons. But he was still creative, still passionate, still Dan. We sometimes discussed Into Shamballa and our frustration that, although the story had been reprinted in other countries, sometimes in gorgeous oversized artist’s editions, it had been out of print in the U.S. for many years.  

 

Dan Green passed away in August of 2023: a great loss for comics, a greater loss for those who knew him personally. I’m sorry he didn’t live to see our Doctor Strange epic reprinted in this Masterworks edition, but profoundly grateful that it’s back out in the world, offering a new generation of comics fans the chance to discover our story—and Dan’s extraordinary work. 

 


Safe travels, Dan. Say hello to the Lords of Shamballa for me.



©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis

Wednesday, January 1, 2025

2025

2025? Sounds like a date out of a science-fiction story, a point in time in the far distant future. How could that possibly be the year we've just entered? But it is. And it's a strange science-fiction world we're living in, like some particularly twisted Philip K Dick novel. Gazing out at that world there's good reason to abandon hope, embrace despair. But there's the version of the world that's shoved down our throats by the media, day after day—what I call the CNN Reality—and there's the deeper world, the truer world, that lies beneath.

And in that world, good and decent people live good and decent lives, seeking simple human kindness and giving the same in return. In that world, hope is very much alive and the future, which can seem so dark right now, black as pitch, is bright with the promise of better days. 

That's the world I choose to live in. The world I hope, in some small way, I can help  manifest. If, as I believe, the microcosm is the macrocosm, our smallest efforts—a comforting word, a compassionate gesture—can echo out across the planet in miraculous ways. Maybe, together, we'll surprise the pundits and transform 2025 into one of the most positive, beautiful, extraordinary years ever.

And, if not, we'll still have lived our lives in the light of hope, of decency, of love. Which will make it a very good year indeed.

Happy New Year.