THE DOCTOR IS (FINALLY!) IN

This week sees the release of a massive collection from DC that (finally!) reprints my Dr. Fate run with Keith Giffen, Shawn McManus, and several other artistic titans. I wrote an introduction for the book and you can read it below. Enjoy!

(Note: In the printed version I somehow thanked John Ostrander, who didn't contribute to this series (I think I was remembering a story John wrote during my Spectre run), instead of Joe Staton, who did an extraordinary job filling in for Shawn: a major glitch in my mental matrix.  Joe, if you're out there, I'm sorry!) 

The 1980s were an exhilarating decade for comic books. With DC launching groundbreaking series like Frank Miller’s Ronin and Mike Barr and Brian Bolland’s Camelot 3000, Marvel kicking off the creator-centric Epic line, independent publishers offering unheard of rights and royalties (and the Big Two following in their wake), the possibilities were suddenly endless. And it wasn’t just the new wave of creator-owned books shaking things up: This was the era of Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, when writers and artists could shove a stick of dynamite into the mouths of even the most staid and stable superheroes and blow them to bits. (In the best way possible, of course!) I look back astonished that, in a few short years, in collaboration with some of the most brilliant talents in the business, I was writing Moonshadow and Blood: a tale for Epic, Kraven’s Last Hunt for mainstream Marvel, and, for DC, Justice League International and the book we’re here to discuss: Dr. Fate. These were comics in a broad variety of genres and styles and each one, in its way, was profoundly personal. 

 

None more so than Fate.

 

I’d spent the first part of the 80s working exclusively for Marvel; then, in 1986 or so (it’s been a while, so forgive me if the dates are a little off), I went back to DC, where my career began at the tail end of the previous decade. One of the first books I pitched to Dick Giordano, DC’s managing editor in those days, was a mini-series rebooting and reimagining Fate.

To be honest, I wasn’t all that familiar with the character—I initially saw him as DC’s answer to Doctor Strange (even if the truth was the other way around)—but I’ve always loved the supernatural corners of the Marvel and DC universes, where the eerie and the metaphysical merged, creating opportunities to tell the kinds of stories you simply can’t with the spandex brigade. Dr. Fate was one the company’s oldest characters—he debuted in 1940, just a year after Batman—but he’d never been a shining star in the DCU firmament. That meant the character was ripe for reinvention.

 

Sometimes the approval process is an astonishingly quick one, other times you have to jump through your share of hoops to get there and, if memory serves, I went through multiple drafts of my pitch before Dick finally approved it. But my patience was rewarded: I was soon working with one of the greatest editors in the history of comics, the late Denny O’Neil (I’d worked with him before at Marvel and my respect for Mr. O’Neil was off the charts) and an artist I was familiar with but had never met: Keith Giffen. (I could write a lengthy essay about my decades-long collaboration with Keith, who passed away in 2023. I’ve called him the Jack Kirby of my generation of comic book creators—but comparisons like that don’t do justice to either man, so let’s just say Keith was a genre unto himself.)

I remember going out to lunch with Denny and Keith, thinking my story was locked in place and we’d just be having a general discussion. Before the lunch was over there were dozens of fantastic new ideas flying across the table; so many that I was a little dazed and dizzy when I headed home. But ideas, however strong, don’t always add up to a compelling story, and I wrestled, for some time, with all the elements we’d laid out before I came up with a story that clicked.

 

That mini—brought to brilliant visual life by Keith (who was always adding wonderfully insane touches along the way: Kent Nelson with a gaping mouth in his belly? Pure Giffen)—was well-received, but, once it was over, I moved on to other projects. A few years later, with the character popping up in Justice League, I got the Fate bug again and pitched my old friend, and another one of the industry’s greatest talents, Karen Berger, on a Fate ongoing. The original idea was to give the book a JLI flavor, mystical adventures with a knowing wink, but the series soon grew far beyond that. The story, as the best stories always do, took on a life of its own, so much so that I think the readers were a little confused: Is this a superhero book? A supernatural one? A comedy? A metaphysical treatise? A psychological deep-dive? A course in comparative religion? Why is there lowbrow toilet humor side by side with discussions about the nature of God? What is this? 

 

I didn’t know, I still don’t, and that’s what makes this Dr. Fate run so special to me. Remember what I said about the 80s and the lack of guardrails? Karen B and the superb editor who followed her, Art Young, gave me the freedom to take an established DC character and make him my own: I couldn’t have had more freedom if Fate had been a creator-owned book.

I came across a quote, years ago—I’ve been trying to track down the source ever since, to no avail—that said (and I’m broadly paraphrasing): Write each story as if it’s the last one you’ll ever write. Pour every passion, every obsession, every thought and feeling, all that you are, into it. That’s what I did with Dr. Fate: My entire perspective on life, the universe, and everything infused each page—and I’m so grateful that Karen and Art let me do it in my own odd and idiosyncratic way.

 

And I’m extraordinarily grateful to the artist who illustrated the bulk of these stories: the brilliant Shawn McManus. Aside from being one of the nicest human beings you could ever encounter, Shawn is a consummate visual storyteller. Whatever I asked of him, he delivered, from the subtlest to the silliest, from the quietly emotional to the grandly cosmic. (“Hey, Shawn, wanna draw the death and rebirth of Creation?” “Sure!”) He was, and remains, one of my all-time favorite collaborators. (A tip of the hat, as well, to master inkers Dave Hunt, who inked the mini-series, and Mark McKenna, who worked on the first six issues of the monthly, as well as Jim Fern, Joe Staton, and Tom Sutton, who all made vital contributions to our saga.)

 

When you spend years with characters, you come to know them better than your own dearest friends—they become real to you—which is why I’m grateful, as well, to our oddball cast: Eric and Linda Strauss, whose unique spiritual bond was born of twin-soul karma, thousands of lifetimes reincarnating together…the wise and, yes, sometimes demented Nabu…the always-beleaguered Jack Small…and the big-hearted demon with the impenetrable accent, Petey. 

At the time, our Dr. Fate series seemed to fly under the radar, but, over the years, I’ve been delighted to encounter many readers who took the stories into their hearts, had their minds opened, their view of the universe enhanced a little, by these admittedly-eccentric comic book stories. And there’s one question these people have asked over and over and over: “When will your Dr. Fate run be collected?”

 

Guess what? I’ve finally got an answer: Now. 

©copyright 2025 J.M. DeMatteis