J. M. DEMATTEIS
1 Stan Lee. Contemporary comic book readers can’t possibly understand how different the 1960s Marvel comics were from everything else on the stands. DC’s comics—for all their imagination and artistic flair—were pristine and sculpted, all-American and squeaky clean to the point of being nearly antiseptic: no rough edges, no raw emotions, nothing messy at all. If you looked at the Marvel books, especially in the early days of the line, it was all mess. The covers said it all: lurid colors. Captions screaming for your attention. Oversize word balloons with thick black borders around them. Artwork so primitive it was frightening. The Marvel Universe was everything an adolescent boy in love with superheroes and science fiction could ever ask for. It exploded my imagination—and I’ve been picking up the pieces ever since.
There’s been much debate, down through the decades, about the relative contributions of Stan Lee (who was Marvel’s editor, art director, and head writer in that formative era) and his collaborators. From my perspective, Stan’s contribution was incalculable. Even if, hypothetically, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko (both of whom were absolutely essential to the company’s success) plotted every single one of those stories on their own, Stan created the vibe and the mythos of Marvel Comics. He did it with cocky cover copy and the warmth of the “Bullpen Bulletins” pages, the hilarious footnotes and scripts that managed to be absurdly pseudo-Shakespearean and yet utterly down-to-earth at the same time. Most important were the absolutely relatable characters (especially to a boy on the verge of adolescence), constructed of equal parts angst and humor and, above all, heart. Stan put his passion into those pages. They clearly mattered to him, and so they mattered to us, as well.
2 Jack Kirby. With Stan Lee, Jack Kirby took mainstream comics and turned them inside out, upside down, and left his mark forever. But, as his later Marvel work too clearly showed, he was bored. If his collaboration with Lee 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, Kirby jumped from Marvel to DC and started spitting fire. The fire was called New Gods, Mister Miracle, Jimmy Olsen, and Forever People. Books that opened new doors, set new standards, did things that comics had never dared to do before. True, the dialogue in those stories was sometimes awkward—but dialogue was never Kirby’s forte. Storytelling was. Spirit was. Vision was. And those stories had them all. They ran, they rambled, they surprised, and they exploded.
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 create stories that matter.
3 Steve Gerber. Steve Gerber was a mold breaker. He had an 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. He stepped into the Marvel Universe, looked around at the towering structures that Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko had erected, bowed in deference to their collective genius, and then started kicking those towers down with ferocious glee. His work on Defenders (where he injected a Monty Python–esque lunacy into the superhero genre), Howard the Duck (the first overground underground comic book), Man-Thing (his most impassioned and compassionate writing) ranks among the best work of the 1970s. Hell, it ranks among the best mainstream comics work by anybody ever. I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if I’d never encountered Steve Gerber’s work.
4 Harvey Pekar. Harvey Pekar and I met at a convention in the 1980s and had a brief, spirited correspondence debating the merits of realism versus fantasy in fiction. It was then–Marvel editor Denny O’Neil who turned me on to American Splendor, a series that helped explode the limits of what a comic book could or couldn’t be. Pekar’s writing was absolutely naked—brutal and hugely funny—in its honesty. In its wonderfully odd and idiosyncratic way, it was also wise. Harvey brought an outsider’s eye to comic book art as well: the American Splendor strips taught me the value of the static image, how something as simple as a single talking head, repeated panel after panel after panel, could gather in emotional power. Harvey’s work gave me the courage to keep following my own odd and idiosyncratic creative urges, to be true to myself and the visions in my head: a gift of immeasurable value.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, J. M. DeMatteis was a professional musician and music journalist before entering the comic book field. Although he’s written almost all of the major DC and Marvel icons—including memorable runs on Spider-Man and Justice League—DeMatteis’s greatest acclaim has come for his more personal work. The autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams was picked by the American Library Association as one of the ten best graphic novels, and Booklist, in a starred review, called it “as graphically distinguished and creatively novelistic a graphic novel as has ever been…a classic of the form.”