LENNON DAY 2026

It's October 9th, what would have been John Lennon's 86h birthday (how is that possible?), and in honor of the occasion I'm happy to once again tell the tale of my two encounters with my rock and roll hero. (And if you want to take a deeper dive into Lennonology, you can join me for a tour of Lennon's extraordinary solo career here and here.) Enjoy! 

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In January of 1975, I was twenty-one years old, attending Brooklyn College (drifting through Brooklyn College is more like it; academics were never my strong suit), playing music, writing songs, dreaming of rock and roll glory—and, simultaneously, an equally-glorious writing career. I’d been in and out of bands for years, partnered with some terrific players, but among our crowd of Brooklyn musicians, there was no one better than Jon Cobert. Jonny was an extraordinary piano player—but he was also the kind of intuitive genius who could pick up just about any instrument and make memorable music. I may not have been sure about my own rock and roll future, but I knew, we all knew, Jonny was headed for great things. As noted, I was writing songs on my own—had been since I was fourteen or fifteen—but Jonny and I often wrote together, as well. I crafted the lyrics—a few of them quite sublime, many of them truly atrocious (and, happily, long forgotten)—and Jon, with far more consistency, would provide the superb musical bedrock. (Three of the songs we wrote together—"April Rainbow," "I Can Fly" and "Don't Wanna Live in Yesterday"—appeared on Jonny’s CD, Here’s Your Canoe, and you can listen to one of them here.)

In those ancient days, Jon was in a band that, at various times, was called Dog Soldier, Community Apple and, the name that seemed to stick, BOMF. The band was managed by Roy Cicala, who ran one of one of Manhattan’s premier recording studios, Record Planet, East. Roy was also a skilled engineer—one of the best in the business—who’d worked with John Lennon on Imagine, Some Time in New York City, Mind Games, Walls and Bridges and Rock and Roll. Not surprising that RPE was Lennon’s studio of choice in New York or that BOMF’s destiny and Lennon’s became temporarily intertwined. The band added hand claps and vocals to some Walls and Bridges tracks, appeared in now-classic videos for “Slippin’ and Slidin’” and “Stand By Me” (more about that later) and backed Lennon up for his last major television appearance—a very odd affair called “A Salute To Sir Lew Grade”—wearing outer space jumpsuits. Lennon also provided lyrics for a song that BOMF recorded called “Incantation.” (The song was never released, but I remember it as a throbbing, voodoo-inspired rocker, with lyrics in the “Come Together” vein.)

That night in January of ‘75—if I’m remembering correctly, it was a Tuesday or Wednesday, I know for sure it was a weeknight—my old friend (and brilliant drummer) Cliff Hochberg and I were bored and, looking for something to do, drove into the City—if you lived in Brooklyn, you never referred to it as Manhattan, it was just the City—to hang out at the Record Plant with Jonny. (Something we did regularly because...well, wouldn’t you?) There was nothing of any major (or even minor) import going on that night: we were just drifting from the band’s rehearsal room to a little songwriting studio that had been set up for Jonny. At one point, I was sitting alone in the hall when I saw Roy Cicala walk by. A moment later, Cliff appeared, with an excited expression on his face. “Do you know who’s here?” he asked. “Yeah,” I replied, not sure why Roy’s appearance had Cliff so elated, “Mr. C.” “No,” Cliff said; and then, after a suitably dramatic pause (hey, even if he didn’t pause, he should have), he added: “Mr. L.”

Cue the thunder and lightning. Cue the orchestra. Cue the earth shaking beneath our feet. John Lennon was in the building. John Lennon: the man whose music and wisdom, anger, wit, lunacy and honesty had fascinated and inspired me since the Beatles invaded America when I was ten years old.

A moment later, Jonny appeared. “Hey,” he said, casually (he, of course, knew there was nothing casual about it), “you guys wanna meet John?” By the time he’d finished that sentence, Cliff and I were racing down the hall ahead of him, like two demented roadrunners.

Lennon was in Cicala’s office and that’s where we (along with several of the BOMF boys) were headed. When we stepped into Roy’s outer office, we heard a distinctive nasal voice—a unique mixture of Liverpool and New York—from inside. It was a voice I’d been hearing for most of my life, but always on television, on the radio, on the record player. But now that voice—and the source of that voice—was on the other side of the wall. I’m sure my cheeks drained of color: it's a miracle the top of my head didn’t blow right off. Cliff and I exchanged looks of wonder—he was as much a Beatles fanatic as I was and (almost) as big a Lennon fan—and then we filed into the main office.

Roy was there, along with his then-wife, Lori Burton. May Pang—John’s girlfriend (this was during the infamous “Lost Weekend,” when John and Yoko were separated)—was, too. And Lennon was there—right there—looking...well, real. The only time I’d ever seen him in person was in 1972, at the Madison Square Garden “One to One’ concert—and I was way up in the cheap seats, under the influence of...well, that doesn’t matter. But this wasn’t some distant figure on a stage or a flickering image on the television. This was an actual human being—looking somehow more fragile, thinner, and shorter than I’d imagined. And yet, somehow, larger, too: every inch the rock legend; wearing a long black coat, a white scarf tossed across his shoulder, a bottle of Kahlua in his hand, all topped—or perhaps bottomed—by cowboy boots with spurs (yes, spurs). He’d been out to dinner with Pang and afterwards they’d haunted some record stores, where Lennon had purchased a pile of 45s that he’d stacked up on Roy’s turntable. “Disco,” Lennon said, indicating the new and unfamiliar sounds coming from the speakers. “Gonna be the next big thing. It’s all you’re gonna hear for the next ten years.”

None of us had ever heard the word disco, let alone the music, but this was John Lennon, after all, so we took it as gospel (good thing. Turned out he was right). There was some more chit-chat and the bottle of Kahlua was passed around (I wasn’t a drinker, so I can’t comment on the quality) and then, soon after, it became clear that Roy, John and their partners wanted to be alone. The audience with the Pope of Rock was over. As we all filed out of the office (well, the other guys filed out, I’m pretty sure Cliff and I floated, five feet off the ground), someone inside put on John’s exquisite Walls and Bridges track “Number Nine Dream,” which had just been released as a single. “No, no,” we heard an agitated Lennon bark, and it was very clear that he meant it, “get it off, get it off.” (So much for the Great Lennon Ego).

We regrouped back in BOMF’s rehearsal room, Cliff and I sharing our amazement, shock and wonder at what we’d just stumbled into; Jonny delighted by our jaw-dropped stupefaction. (And let’s face it, despite the fact that the BOMF boys already knew Lennon, each new encounter was something special for them.) I don’t think we’d been in the room for more than ten minutes when a figure appeared in the doorway, holding a guitar: Lennon. He wanted to play some of this new disco music that had so captured him and wondered if the guys were up for it. Needless to say they were. There was only one problem: Lennon didn’t have a guitar pick. Cliff quickly offered up his Brooklyn College ID card. It was a clumsy substitute, but Lennon didn’t seem to mind.

So there I was, on a random weeknight, sitting on the floor of this small rehearsal room in the middle of New York City, while—maybe three or four feet away from me—John Lennon was playing guitar, urging the band on, jamming away. It was completely surreal. I mean, what were the odds of this happening? Cliff and I exchanged occasional looks of astonishment—but not for too long, because we didn’t want to take our eyes off the magician in front of us, perhaps for fear that, if we looked away too long, he’d just disappear in a puff of smoke. (Five years later, he did.)

BOMF's drummer was having a little trouble getting the distinctive disco beat down—not surprising, since it was a very specific, and, at the time, very new, rhythm—and Cliff, I later found out, had to restrain himself from leaping up, knocking the guy to the floor and taking over. (And I’m sure Cliffy would have nailed that beat instantly, too.) I, meanwhile, was watching Lennon’s hands fly across the guitar neck, studying his every move (there was a rhythmic effect he got by muting the strings and using the pick percussively: I’ve been doing the same trick ever since).

I don’t know how long this off-the-cuff, extraordinarily private concert went on—time, as you may suspect, had taken on a very distorted, other-dimensional quality—it might have been fifteen minutes, it might have been forty-five; but, eventually, Lennon satisfied his disco-craving and was done. That’s when he turned to me, offering Cliff’s ID badge. “Here’s your credit card,” he said, assuming I was the guy who’d given it to him.

You might think this was my opportunity to be witty, profound or, at the very least, gushingly fannish. It was certainly a chance to say something to this man whose life and work had meant so much to me for so long.

Didn’t happen.

In the movie version of Woody Allen’s Broadway play, Play It Again, Sam, there’s a scene where Woody’s character, Allan Felix, is on his first post-divorce blind date. Felix is a barely-functional, sputtering, jittery nervous wreck, a walking disaster, and, when he’s introduced to his date, the only thing he can do is wave like a moron and emit a guttural caveman grunt: “Nugh!” That’s pretty much what I choked out at Lennon—”Nugh!”—as, bug-eyed, I pointed to Cliff, clumsily indicating that it was his “credit card” and not mine. Lennon returned the ID badge, then quickly vanished back into the land of myth and Kahlua.

And that, in and of itself, would have been as memorable, and embarrassing, an encounter as I could have ever asked for. But this was just a set-up for the second, even more memorable and far-more embarrassing, encounter that would come, a few months later, on a sunny afternoon in March (the 18th according to Wikipedia—although they got the name of the recording studio wrong, so who can say for sure?) when I got to spend a day watching Lennon and BOMF film videos for the recently released Rock 'n' Roll tracks “Slippin’ and Slidin’” and “Stand By Me”—both intended for a British television show called The Old Grey Whistle Test.

Looking back, it’s amazing that I was allowed in at all. Jonny C and I were good friends, of course, but I suspect it helped that we were also songwriting partners: a number of songs we created together were part of BOMF’s repertoire and, as a result, we were both under contract to the aforementioned Roy Cicala. (The contract sounds impressive, but it didn’t lead me to rock and roll fame and fortune. Jonny, on the other hand, has had a long, successful—and well-deserved—musical career.) In any case, on that sunny March day, I skipped my classes at Brooklyn College (something I was in the habit of doing, anyway), hopped the subway into Manhattan and hustled over to West 44th Street, where the Record Plant was located.

As I recall—and, in retrospect, it’s fairly astonishing—there was no security detail to pass through: I just walked in, headed straight for the studio and opened the door. There, leaning over the sound board was John Lennon, who looked up, peered over his glasses and said, in that sharp, utterly distinctive Liverpudlian voice, “Is this the place?” I scanned the room, looking for Jonny C—who was my ticket in—but he wasn’t there; so, utterly intimidated (just because I’d encountered Lennon before didn’t mean I was any less overwhelmed by his flesh-and-blood presence), I muttered, “Uh...yeah, it is, but I’ll wait outside...”, closed the door and retreated to a nearby couch. I probably would have sat out there all day if a couple of the BOMF boys hadn’t come by, noticed me and alerted Jon to my presence.

Jonny C promptly appeared and ushered me into the studio—where I was soon sitting comfortably in a chair in the engineer’s booth while, on the other side of the glass, John Lennon and the band ran through take after take of “Slippin’ and Slidin’” and “Stand By Me” for the film crew. (BOMF was actually miming to prerecorded tracks from the Rock ‘n’ Roll album. Lennon, though, was doing a live vocal.) Anyone who’s followed this blog for more than five minutes understands how profoundly JL—as a Beatle, as a solo artist, as a human on the planet—has inspired me; so I think you can imagine what it was like for me to sit there, for hours, watching him perform, running the band through their paces (miming, as I learned that day, isn’t as easy as you’d think); one of the greatest vocalists in the history of rock and roll singing take after take: laughing, joking and, well, being John Lennon.

And yet as I watched Lennon work, it seemed as if—despite more than a decade as one of the most famous, admired men on Earth—being on camera, the center of all that attention, made him uncomfortable. His attitude, his bearing, wasn’t that of the Clever Beatle, the peacenik sage, the political firebrand: it felt as if he’d retreated into Hamburg John, the young, rock and roll tough guy. It was a subtle thing and there was certainly none of the aggression or anger that often got him in trouble: he was, as expected, charismatic and charming. Still it seemed to me that he was wearing a mask to protect himself and keep the world at bay. In a few short months he’d retire completely from music to concentrate on being a husband and father (by March of ’75 “Lost Weekend” girlfriend May Pang was gone and Lennon had reunited with Yoko, who was pregnant with Sean) and it’s clear—in retrospect, at least—that he was, in fact, sick of "riding on the merry-go-round" (as he sang in "Watching the Wheels") and was preparing for his retreat. Soon he’d be shedding all his personas and reconnecting with the person he’d been before the Beatles. Until then, he’d keep pretending to be some version of Famous John Lennon.

There was a telling moment when, during one break between songs, he muttered—it was more like a discussion with himself than a request to the group—”Anybody got any coke?” (And, no, he wasn’t talking about Coca Cola.) A second later he shook his head. “Nah,” he said, retracting the request, “if I do that, I’ll probably bite Tom Snyder’s head off.” (He was scheduled to tape an interview for Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show that night. You can watch it here.) The coke request seemed like an old reflex, the immediate denial of the request reflecting a high level of post-”Lost Weekend” self-awareness—and a signpost to the new, family-centered life that was waiting for him at the Dakota. (It’s very possible I’m reading into this—after all, I didn’t know the man, who am I to analyze him?—and yet, given my own intuition and the insights Lennon himself provided in interviews he gave after his emergence from his five years of House Husbanding, it feels true.)

After they ran through both songs a number of times, Lennon and the band took a break and the musicians filed back into the engineer’s booth. Everyone was standing around chatting, the vibe amiable and low-key (well, I was low-key on the outside, but in my head I was doing backflips and screaming “John Lennon! I’m standing here with John Lennon! Dear God—how is this even possible?!”). Jonny C took this opportunity to formally introduce me to Lennon. “John,” he said, trying hard to sound casual (yet knowing full well what a Momentous Occasion this was for me), “have you met Marc, my lyricist?”

Lennon quickly looked me over and then offered a perfect, deadpan Lennon greeting. “Hello, Marc my lyricist,” he said, as if "my lyricist" wasn't a description, but my last name.

So there I was, standing face to face with John Winston Ono Lennon. He’d just greeted me with a clever quip and I desperately needed something to say in reply. It was like flash cards were flipping over in my mind, each one stamped with a possible answer: I could tell him, I thought, studying the cards, how much he means to me; how his Beatles music—from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “I Am The Walrus”—completely rocked my world and my consciousness; how John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band—aside from being one of the greatest albums in the history of popular music—helped get me through an incredibly difficult period in my life; how brilliant I think Walls and Bridges is. There were so many things I could have said, but I rejected them all. I kept returning to the fact that Lennon had greeted me with “Hello, Marc my lyricist”—and I knew I needed to come up with a matching quip, something sharp and witty. In the name of symmetry, it had to begin with “Hello, John my...” But “John my” what? My internal computer frantically scanned the Lennon archives, recalling a story about JL meeting Chuck Berry, during the taping of a Mike Douglas Show; how Lennon—always a teenaged rock and roll fan at heart—greeted Berry by calling him his hero. (Keep in mind that all of these mental acrobatics actually happened in a matter of, at best, two or three seconds. Subjectively, it felt like an eternity.)

And then it clicked—and I had my reply.

“Hello, John, my hero,” I said. As soon as it came out of my mouth I felt like a total fool. This wasn’t cleverness, this was revealing myself as a transparent Beatles fanboy. I was certain my idiocy would get me ejected from the building, unceremoniously tossed out onto 44th Street and banned from the Record Plant for life. To my immense relief, the group laughed—not at me, they actually seemed to find my answer amusing (or perhaps they were just acknowledging the unspoken fact that they all felt the same way)—but Lennon had an odd reaction. For a moment—just for a moment—he pulled back, as if he couldn’t believe One Of Them had gotten in: another wide-eyed, open-mouthed Beatlemaniac trying to make him into the god he didn’t want to be. He recovered quickly, but I’d noticed—and it underlined the sense I had about how uncomfortable he was wearing the fame he’d been cloaked in since 1964.

Soon after that, Lennon and the band went back to work, finishing up the videos. The last bit of filming was of the musicians in the booth, gathered around the sound board, listening back to the tracks. I was hoping no one would realize I was still there and I’d get myself immortalized on film with John Lennon—but Jonny C quickly gave me A Look and I knew I had to retreat. In the end it didn’t matter: the film of that day had been forever imprinted on my mind.

A little later, Jonny and I were heading upstairs to the band’s rehearsal room and we found ourselves standing in the elevator with Lennon, who was also heading up. This would have been the perfect chance to say something, anything, else and perhaps atone for my humiliating “my hero!” outburst—but I couldn’t get a word out. The elevator stopped, Lennon went his way and we went ours.

My time with John Lennon was over that day, but Jonny’s wasn’t. Not long after the Rock ‘n’ Roll videos were filmed, Lennon recruited BOMF to appear with him on the Salute to Sir Lew Grade television special. This time the band didn’t just mime, they actually got to record—and perform—a new version of “Imagine.” This turned out to be the last public performance of John Lennon’s lifetime. (If you’re wondering about the two-headed masks BOMF had on, this was apparently Lennon’s way of commenting on Sir Lew’s two-faced business dealings.)

As for me, looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, and the knowledge of the tragic fate that awaited Lennon outside the Dakota in 1980, I’m far less embarrassed by what I said to him at the Record Plant that day—and far more grateful. He was my hero and I got to tell him that.

That’s not humiliation, that’s grace.

copyright © 2026. J.M. DeMatteis 

SHRIEKING

I was recently asked to provide an introduction for a Hungarian collection of my Amazing Spider-Man story "Shrieking." It was an interesting exercise going back in time, assessing a story written decades ago, and remembering my collaboration with the great Mark Bagley. You can read the intro below. Enjoy!

Family.  It’s the foundation of our lives, the human experience that, perhaps more than any other, shapes us as children and guides us in navigating the world when we become adults.  Of course, in many cases, those childhood influences, our interactions with mothers, fathers, siblings, doesn’t help at all: it hinders us, wounds us—and we either spend the rest of our lives healing those early wounds or surrendering to them, sinking down into the dysfunctional dark.

Family is the theme that runs through all four issues of “Shrieking,” which was my first continuing storyline when I took over the writing duties on Amazing Spider-Man, way back in 1994 (has it really been that long?).  I’d explored the theme before in Spider-Man stories, most notably in the “Child Within” arc in Spectacular Spider-Man; but those stories focused on the singular experiences of Peter Parker, Harry Osborn, and Edward Whelan. With “Shrieking,” Mark Bagley (more about him later) and I were focusing on the family as a unit.  On the internal dynamics that can either lift us up or shatter our souls.

 

For Peter Parker that dynamic flows from past to future.  Still reeling from the revelation that his parents—apparently returned from the dead—were actually robotic imposters, Peter, in shock and emotional agony, finds it difficult, almost impossible, to sustain his relationship with Mary Jane, retreating—much as Peter does in the recent Brand New Day film—into his Spider-Man persona, rejecting his wife and literally cocooning himself in an effort to avoid the inevitable struggles of being human.  (The rupture in her marriage also forces MJ to confront the shadows of her own troubled childhood, something she’d been avoiding for years.)

But no cocoon can protect us from life’s vicissitudes—as Peter learns when his beloved Aunt May, the very bedrock of his family life, has a stroke.  It will take Mary Jane’s pregnancy, an event that comes along soon after this story, to help heal Peter and MJ, allowing them to fully embrace each other and find the love and nurturing that a functional family unit can provide.

There’s nothing functional or loving about the family unit Louise Barrison (aka Shriek) tries to build with her “son,” Malcolm Mcbride (aka Carrion).  Barrison (I provided Louise’s civilian name, but the character was created by writer Tom DeFalco during the “Maximum Carnage” crossover) has suffered unimaginable childhood abuses and that pain has driven her to madness.  For all that, she’s trying, in her demented way, to assuage that childhood pain by building a new family.  Malcolm, tortured by the abominable deeds of his alter ego, rejects Shriek’s efforts, but Carrion embraces Louise and becomes a willing part of this massively dysfunctional delusion.

 

Perhaps the true hero of “Shrieking” isn’t Spider-Man at all, but Malcolm’s mother, Beatrice McBride, whose love for her son burns fierce and bright—and whose determination to bring Malcolm back into her maternal arms will not be broken, no matter what violent and seemingly unassailable obstructions Shriek throws in her way. Beatrice is the very embodiment of family at its most heart-forward and self-sacrificing.  “Shrieking” is a dark story, but Bea McBride is the blazing light that shines in the heart of that darkness. (In the end, even Shriek is touched by that light; it momentarily pierces her madness and drives her to a stunning act of self-sacrifice.) 

 

Comics is a visual medium, and a script—no matter how good—rises and falls with the illustrative power and storytelling skill of the artist.  For “Shrieking” I was paired with one of the most celebrated Spider-Man artists of the past forty years, Mark Bagley.  Success as a comic book artist isn’t just about being able to draw well, it’s about telling a story from panel to panel, emphasizing the right moments, drawing the eye across the page in such a natural way that the reader sees the characters actually move, breathe, and come alive. Mark is able to do all that and more.  He delivers the massive action sequences necessary for superhero tales, but his work also underscores the powerful emotions at the core of our tale.  I was fortunate to have him as a collaborator during my Amazing run.  Fortunate, too, to be working with one of Marvel’s most gifted editors, Danny Fingeroth, who remains a dear friend to this day. 

 

“Shrieking,” as noted, is an unusually dark Spider-Man story, but, at its core, it’s about moving through that darkness toward something better, truer, more lasting. And that, I think, is the essence of Spider-Man.  Peter Parker, no matter what terrible obstacles he faces—outside of or, just as often, within himself—will always do the right thing, always rise up and embrace kindness, compassion, and hope. 

 

May we all follow his example.

©copyright 2026 J.M. DeMatteis

SALTY!

Coming up in one week: FanX Salt Lake—September 24th through 26th at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City. I haven't been to the beautiful state of Utah for many years and I've never attended a con there, so this should be a great time. If you're attending, please come by and say hello. 

BATMAN DAY 2026!

Batman Day is this coming Saturday, but let's start the celebration early with an edited/updated version of a piece I posted a few years ago, looking back at my history, both personal and professional, with the Dark Knight...

I’ve loved Batman since I was a kid. One of my primal memories is being six or seven years old, sprawled out on the living room floor with crayons and a stack of drawing paper, trying to replicate a Dick Sprang era Batman cover line for line. In many ways, that square-jawed, slightly goofy (okay, more than slightly) version of Bats is the one I cherish more than any other. I also remember the fangasms I had when, in the seventh grade, Batman came to television: it may have been campy to the grown-ups, but to naive, overweight, just-turned-twelve year old me this was serious stuff: comic books come to glorious life in a way they never had before.

So, yes, JMD the fan has a long-standing, deep connection to Bats but I honestly didn’t think JMD the writer had much of a history with the character—after all, I’ve never written a Batman solo series—until I took a look back at my career and discovered that I've written more Batman tales than I ever realized. Many more. And it started with, of all things, a coloring book.

“The Mystery of the Million Dollar Joke” is the first superhero story I was paid to write. And, yes, there’s a genuine kid-friendly story in there, waiting for you to bring it to life with your Crayolas. Paul Levitz offered me the gig when I was first starting out at DC and I stayed up all night, hunched over the typewriter (remember those?), banging out the script. If memory serves, I was paid a few hundred dollars for my efforts—which was just fine in 1979—and I still have a copy of the book tucked away on a shelf in my office.

The first comic book superhero story (y’know, the ones with the colors already provided) of mine that ever saw print was also a Batman adventure, in Detective Comics #489. “Creatures of the Night”—also edited by Mr. Levitz—had Batman hunting vampires, mainly because most of my work in those days was for the DC horror anthologies and vampire stories were my stock-in-trade. I don’t remember much about the script beyond the fact that it was illustrated by a Batman artist I admired, Irv Novick, who had nice things to say about it when I encountered him in Paul’s office one day. Those kind words meant the world to a newbie writer.

My first full-length superhero story was also edited by Paul and also featured Batman: Brave and the Bold #164, “The Mystery of the Mobile Museum,” teamed Bats and Hawkman (a character whose solo feature I wrote for a short time in World’s Finest) and my story was solid, but hardly classic. What was classic was the artwork, by the great Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. He took my script and raised it up to another level entirely.

I didn’t encounter Batman again for another seven years, when he joined the ranks of the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League—but he was an integral part of that series throughout its five year run. Of course our Batman was a little different from the grim ‘n’ gritty avenger that the brilliant Frank Miller unleashed on the world the year before JLI debuted. Our Bats had a sense of humor—incredibly understated, true, but it was there—and, though he’d deny it to his dying day, he enjoyed the idiotic escapades of Beetle, Booster and the rest of our quirky, and wonderfully obnoxious,

cast.

In 1993, I came at the Bat sideways, via the Superman mythos, for an Elseworlds story called Speeding Bullets (art by the hugely-talented, and sorely-missed, Eduardo Barretto). SB posited a universe where the rocket from Krypton was found not by the Kansas Kents but by the Gotham Waynes. The baby was christened Bruce and, after being traumatized by his parents‘ murder, the boy grew up to be a flying, super-powered—and extremely angry—Batman.  And, if Kal-El was Batman, how could Lex Luthor not be the Joker? 

A few years later—tied to the release of the third Batman movie, Batman Forever—came Batman/Two Face: Crime and Punishment: a serious exploration of Harvey Dent’s split personality (building on a wonderful story written, a year or two previously, by Andy Helfer), featuring dynamic, emotional art by Scott McDaniel, and that was followed, in 1994, by a four-issue Legends of the Dark Knight arc, brilliantly brought to life by Joe Staton, that may be my absolute favorite of all the mainstream superhero stories I’ve written. “Going Sane” featured a Joker who believes he’s killed Batman. With his mortal enemy gone he has no reason left to live—and his mind snaps. Now, if we snap we go crazy—but if the Joker snaps...he goes sane. What came next was a tender love story—a tragedy, really—about a gentle man who doesn’t know he was once a homicidal maniac with a permanent grin on his face. At least he doesn’t until Batman returns to Gotham and all hell breaks loose. The story also focused on Bruce Wayne’s relationship with the doctor who brought him back from the brink of death and, I hope, revealed a Batman whose greatest weapon was his compassion.

The next year, the amazing Mark Bagley and I had the pleasure of teaming up Batman with my old pal Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spider-Man/Batman: Disordered Minds. This was followed, two years later, by DC’S Batman/Spider-Man: New Age Dawning (beautifully illustrated by Graham Nolan). To say that it was a kick teaming up two of my all-time favorite characters—and doing it for both Marvel and DC—may be the Geek Understatement of the Century.

I didn’t return to Gotham until 2002, when I scripted another Legends of the Dark Knight arc—a Robin-centric tale, with art by the terrific Trevor Von Eden, called “Grimm”—and wrote my first Batman graphic novel, Absolution (with rich, painted art by Brian Ashmore): a gritty story of justice and redemption that found Batman traveling to India in search of a holy woman...who just might be the terrorist Bruce Wayne has been hunting for over a decade.

Around the same time, Bats appeared in an issue of Justice League that I wrote, during Grant Morrison’s run, along with an issue of The Spectre and the 2003 Justice League/Spectre mini-series Soul War. Batman later guest-starred in an issue of Phantom Stranger and Keith Giffen and I sent Batman’s DNA into the far future in our Justice League 3000/3001 series—which imagined a Batman very different from the one we all know. This is a Bruce Wayne who wasn't traumatized by the death of his parents—in fact he can't remember their murder at all—and that lack of a motivating tragedy has altered him in fundamental ways.

In 2021, I joined with Justice League Unlimited producer (and all-around great guy) James Tucker to write the Justice League Infinity mini-series, which built on and continued that classic television series. Batman, of course, was a pivotal part of the story. Then, in 2024, Rick Leonardi and I got to revisit the classic Starlin-Aparo arc “Death In The Family” with our mini-series Death In The Family: Robin Lives!

I’ve also had the pleasure of writing Batman in animated form—first with multiple episodes of the aforementioned Justice League Unlimited and then with eight episodes of Batman: The Brave and the Bold. I’m genuinely honored to have been a part of both those wonderful shows, but I got a special kick out of writing for B & B because it was so reminiscent of the square-jawed, over-the-top Batman I adored as a kid.

2015 saw the release of the direct-to-video animated movie Batman vs. Robin—which explored Bruce Wayne’s relationship with his son, Damian—and the following year brought the sequel, Batman: Bad Blood, which shined a spotlight on the entire Bat family.

2026 saw the release of season two of Amazon Prime’s Batman: Caped Crusader animated series, which featured my episode “The Spectral Hand.” I’m happy to say that, if there’s more Cape to come, I’ve been assured a place at the table.

It seems that, after a more than forty-year history with the character, my dance with the Dark Knight isn't over yet—and I hope we keep dancing for years to come.

 

©copyright 2026 J.M. DeMatteis
Batman and his pals ©copyright 2026 DC Entertainment

THE LAND DOWN UNDER

I took a (cyber) trip to Australia to talk to Dave at the Signal of Doom podcast. We discussed Caped Crusader, the Kraven What If?, my novel Dark Future, and much more. You can listen right here.

HERE THERE BE DRAGONS!

Dragon Con 2026 is coming up fast. I'll be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (September 4th, 5th, and 6th)—meeting fans, signing books and posters, doing panels, and hanging out with my son and daughter, who'll both be around to assist me at my booth. I haven't been to Dragon Con since 2019 and I'm really looking forward to heading back to Atlanta. If you're there, please stop by my table and say hello.

KIRBY DAY 2026

If anyone in the history of comics deserves to be called a genius, it's Jack Kirby: artist, writer, visionary. We all stand on his shoulders.

Here's a Kirby tribute I've posted a couple of times before—focusing on Jack's magnum opus, "The Fourth World Saga"—and I post it again in praise of a man whose imagination has inspired generations, and will go on inspiring us for generations to come.

Happy Birthday, Jack—wherever in the cosmos you are!

Like most people too in love with their own opinions, I’m fond of sweeping statements, and one of the sweeping statements I often toss out when the subject of comic books comes up is this: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the two formidable talents who forged the Marvel Age of Comics—and, one might argue, all comics that followed—were the Lennon and McCartney of their medium. Rock and roll and comic books were two of my greatest passions growing up and the link has always seemed obvious to me. The Beatles, led by John and Paul, redefined popular music in the sixties, just as Marvel, led by Stan and Jack, redefined comics. (Not that DC was sitting around doing nothing, mind you...any more than Dylan, the Stones and the Who were; but the Beatles and Marvel, at least in this writer’s opinion, were way ahead of the pack.) But all that blew apart when the decade turned.

Those of you too young to have been comics fans in 1970—that tumultuous twelve months of Kent State, student strikes and Richard Nixon’s sweaty upper lip—can’t begin to grasp the impact that three words—”Kirby Is Here!”—had when they appeared on the cover of, believe it or not, Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen. I was sixteen, a devoted Marvel follower, and still naive enough to believe that Lee and Kirby were as inseparable as, well, Lennon and McCartney. Of course 1970 was also the year in which the Beatles publicly disintegrated, as well. “The dream is over,” John Lennon sang—and it certainly was. Across the board. Across the country. The idealism, the optimism, the inspired lunacy of the sixties—which had spread throughout our culture via music, film, novels, and, yes, comics—was beginning to turn sour. Let’s face it: if Stan and Jack, if John and Paul, couldn’t keep it together, what possible chance did the rest of us have? (This sounds incredibly silly now, but, believe me, this was an unbelievably urgent question then. At least to me.)

But the energy and enthusiasm of those years was still pushing us forward and, in some ways, the creative energy of the early seventies surpassed the sixties. Sure, the Beatles were a dead issue, but the music Lennon produced in the years after the split, most notably the brilliant John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album, was some of the most powerful, important music rock and roll had ever heard. (I told you I was fond of sweeping statements.) And this music was produced as a direct result of Lennon’s boredom with the Beatles, of his pulling away from McCartney’s influence, from the security of success. He danced out on a limb, the limb held, and the result was Art.

The same can be said of Kirby. With Lee, he had taken mainstream comics and turned them inside out, upside down, and left his mark forever (just as he’d already done, in earlier times, with Joe Simon: Kirby, it seemed, never met a revolution he didn’t like). But, as his later Marvel work too clearly showed, he was bored. How many times can the Thing turn against his partners? How often can Loki tiptoe past Odin’s bed and usurp the throne of Asgard? Pretty often—but too often for a restless limb-dancer like Jack Kirby. As with Lennon, Kirby’s vision was unique, singular; and, if his collaboration with Lee (as important to Marvel’s success as McCartney was to the Beatles’; neither man should be underestimated) brought Kirby to new levels, those levels had now been attained, a plateau had been reached, and it was time to move on. Without collaboration. Artists, real artists, tend to burn. When they’ve burned long enough, the smoke starts pouring through their lips and they’ve got to spit the fire out.

In 1970, Jack Kirby jumped from Marvel to DC and started spitting fire. The fire was called The New Gods, Mister Miracle, Jimmy Olsen and Forever People. Books as important to comics as Lennon’s POB album was to rock. Books that opened new doors, set new standards, did things that comics had never dared to do before. New Gods was clearly the most focused, perhaps the best of the bunch; Mister Miracle offered the most flat-out fun; Jimmy Olsen was as wonderfully bizarre, in its way, as those Silver Age stories that featured Jimmy turning into aliens, werewolves and giant turtles. Forever People—which featured Kirby’s cosmic hippies, the embodiment of youth and naivete, idealism and dreams—was my personal favorite; encapsulating, as it did, Kirby’s (and my own) hope for the future. True, the dialogue in these stories was sometimes awkward—but dialogue was never Kirby’s forte. Story-telling was. Spirit was. Vision was. And these stories had them all. They ran, they rambled, they surprised, they exploded. (The language often did the same thing: the dialogue, as noted, may have been clunky, but Kirby’s prose was also so wildly passionate, so utterly idiosyncratic, that it achieved a kind of mad poetic grandeur.)

There seemed no definite beginning, middle, or end; there was just the constant search, the quest for an intangible something that could never be defined. The characters themselves couldn’t be called three dimensional, in the conventional sense, but they existed in a dimension all their own. Orion and Lightray, Scott and Barda, Big Bear, Serafin, Desaad and, perhaps the greatest villain in the history of comic books, Darkseid: these were people that I, as a reader, cared passionately about. I enjoyed their company—and looked forward to their evolution. Unfortunately, for reasons that I’ve never heard adequately explained, that evolution was cut short. With the exception of Mister Miracle (which staggered on for several more issues), all the “Fourth World” titles were axed.

But you can’t kill a dream—and these stories live on, resonating not just through the DC Universe but all of popular culture. The word genius is one that’s often overused, and cheapened by that overuse, but if the comic book business has ever produced a genius, Jack Kirby was it: a genius who taught me that keeping my eyes wide, focused both on the limitless heavens and the infinite universes within the human heart, is the surest way to creating stories that matter.

The “Fourth World” saga was unquestionably Kirby's magnum opus. If you’ve read it before, I urge you to read it again. If you haven’t read it, I urge you to put aside your preconceptions, grab the first volume of the Fourth World Omnibus and surrender to one of the 20th Century’s master storytellers.

©copyright 2026 J.M. DeMatteis