Peter B. Gillis Big Comics Readthrough

Peter Benno Gillis was born in New York in 1952. He was a voracious reader of everything he could get his hands on, particularly gravitating towards science fiction and comic books. Bilingual from an early age, Gillis went on to study Medieval German Literature at the University of Chicago. But his heart remained in comic books. As well as an established Marvel letter writer, Gillis become a frequent contributor to the burgeoning fanzine scene, along with friends and luminaries including Mark Gruenwald, Ralph Macchio, Peter Sanderson, Richard Bruning and David Kraft.  By 1977, Gillis had returned to New York and was regularly submitting scripts to Marvel, yet getting noticed by editor in chief Archie Goodwin was proving tricky. Goodwin's assistant Jim Shooter had shown some interest in his scripts, so as soon as Shooter was promoted to the top job at the start of 1978, Gillis knocked on his door. Shooter handed him a fill in on the perennially late Captain America , which Gillis wr

Welcome. If you're here, you've presumably already heard of comics writer Peter B. Gillis . But here's a little preamble and overview of why this blog exists.  I was a huge Marvel comics fan in the 80's, snapping up every issue I could find here in the UK. I've always had a taste for the original, offbeat, and downright peculiar, which drew me to the stranger underbelly of Marvel; the space opera of Micronauts , the black magic of Doctor Strange and the Lovecraftian weirdness of New Defenders . One name that kept popping up in the credits of said comics was writer Peter B. Gillis. His stories were always so literate, humanistic, idiosyncratic and an all round cut above from your average tights book of the era. Then at the start of the 1990's, his name started disappearing from credits. By 1992, he appeared to have left comics for good. I started wondering, whatever happened to Peter B. Gillis? The proto-internet of the mid to late 90's was no help solving t