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

SHAZAM!

Director Dan Riba and I join James Enstall and my favorite Wonder Woman, Susan Eisenberg, to discuss the Justice League Unlimited episode "Clash"—which features a classic battle between Superman and Captain Marvel. It's one of my favorites among the multiple JLU episodes I wrote.

You can listen below. Enjoy!