Search Results

Part one of DeMatteis's career retrospective covers his origins in Brooklyn, his years as a musician, and his gradual entry into comics through DC's anthology titles. He discusses creating Creature Commandos and I, Vampire for DC, his discomfort writing straight superhero fare, and his preference for dark psychological fantasy in the vein of The Gargoyle and Greenberg the Vampire. He argues that the Kirby/Lee era remains unsurpassed for superhero work, and that Gerber and Englehart's 1970s run kept him reading comics into adulthood.

Part two of a multi-issue interview covering DeMatteis's Marvel career: his struggles finding his voice on Defenders, Marvel Team-Up, and Captain America, and his eventual creative breakthrough with the Gargoyle limited series and the Epic series Moonshadow. He discusses the controversy over Moonshadow being labeled potentially pornographic, argues passionately that the future of comics lies in creator-owned work outside the mainstream superhero square, and singles out Frank Miller, Alan Moore, and Steve Gerber as exemplars of the driven, personal vision that makes great comics. He also previews an upcoming Doctor Fate project with Keith Giffen at DC.

This concluding installment of a three-part interview covers DeMatteis's creative process on Moonshadow, his collaboration with artist Jon J Muth, and the challenges of marketing mature-reader comics within the Marvel/Epic system. He discusses editorial friction over content (the "fuck" ban and a deleted rape scene), his success in obtaining a Ray Bradbury cover quote, and his literary influences (Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Madeleine L'Engle). A second segment covers his Spider-Man arc "Kraven's Last Hunt" — in which Kraven kills and buries Spider-Man and impersonates him — and his work on a Twilight Zone television script.