Peter B. Gillis Big Comics Readthrough

Peter Gillis' last years as a writer were dominated by projects that didn't quite come to fruition. He had several books in the pipeline, including sci-fi and fantasy novels, plus a short story collection Welcome to the Gillisverse . He'd also written a couple of unfilmed screenplays. In 2016 Gillis began a serialised freewheeling web subscription story Romance of the Rose , through Connor Cochlan's Conlan Press. Gillis asked Dr Strange artist Mark Badger to provide the illustrations. Legal disputes at Conlan curtailed publication, so only 29 of its 50 chapters were posted. I believe 1First were lined up to publish a completed edition, but there's been no word on that since. During the pandemic of 2020, PBG vowed to post a chapter a day of a new story online. As lockdown ended up running much longer than expected, his tongue in cheek madcap fantasy Humans  concluded after 191 chapters, which are still available to read. Following the publication of The Black Flame g...

After a couple of decades of non-existence, a new incarnation of First Comics was founded in 2013, confusing branded as 1First . They launched with a collection of the Brunner issues of Warp , which led to Peter Gillis being offered a new The Black Flame graphic novel. Gillis chose old Micronauts  cohort Kelley Jones to draw it, but tracking him down proved difficult. So instead, PBG reached out to someone he'd long admired but never worked with, classic 70's artist Alex Nino, who delighted Gillis by agreeing to draw it. In the meantime, someone at First had located Jones' address, so the decision was made to split the book between these two stellar artists, with Nino delineating the heavenly Miracle Land pages, leaving Jones responsible for the rest. Despite artwork being completed in 2014, it took another three years to see release, following on from a 7 issue collection of the original Black Flame series. The Black Flame - Nobody Knows This Is Everywhere (2017) Art: Ke...

Attending a Chicago sci-fi con in the mid 2000's, Peter Gillis decided for once to play the fan and queue up for guest of honour Peter S. Beagle, responsible for two of his favourite books as a teenager, The Last Unicorn and A Fine And Private Place . Gillis recognised Beagle's manager as Connor Cochran, a face from the 70's fandom scene. The three of them hit it off and vowed to work together in the future. When IDW put together an adaptation of his seminal work The Last Unicorn, Peter Gillis was Beagle's first choice to script it.  The Last Unicorn #1-6 (2010) Adaptation: Peter B. Gillis Pencils: Renae De Liz Inks & Colours: Ray Dillon I confess to be totally unfamiliar with the 1968 book, or the animated movie adaptation from 1982, so I came into this story cold. This fairytale concerns a  unicorn who believes she is the last of her kind. She journeys out of her protected forest into the medieval world, where magic is now all but forgotten, and most people see h...

The title is advice given to Peter Gillis early on in his comics career from mentor Don McGregor. It was something Gillis could only learn for himself though, through bitter experience. Like a lot of media, US comics are cyclical. Every decade at Marvel, fresh new talent tended to burst through to replace established creators. Peter Gillis came in on Jim Shooter's new wave of the late 70's. By the end of the 80's, that era was history, with many of his contemporaries either having moved on or been phased out. This New World ownership era with Tom DeFalco as editor in chief saw acrimonious departures of longtime core writers including Steve Englehart, Roger Stern and Chris Claremont. An increasing emphasis on editor driven crossover events, 'hot' young artists and the growing speculators market alienated longtime creators and fans alike (myself included). Gillis was a Chicago based freelancer watching "all this infighting" at the New York Marvel offices fr...

Stan Lee was a fan of humour magazines and had tried to get a few MAD style knock offs up and running over the years. One such effort was Not Brand Echh , which, like MAD occasionally did, lampooned superheroes. Here Marvel creators (well, mostly Roy Thomas and Marie Severin) got to work on presumably cathartic parodies of their own creations, in exaggerated cartoony styles. This bi-monthly series only lasted 13 issues in the late 1960's. 20 years later, Marvel decided to revive the concept in the same style as a 4 issue mini,  What The--?! . It proved reasonably successful enough to continue on an occasional schedule, eventually clocking up 26 issues over 5 years, twice as many as its predecessor. By this point Peter Gillis was on the outs with Marvel, when Warp inker Hilary Barta called him up and asked if he wanted to work on a Punisher parody for the first What The. Neither of them had any love for the ridiculously popular at the time and frequently brainless vigilante co...

I must confess, Starfox has long been a favourite character of mine, ever since first encountering him in a Stern/Buscema/Palmer Avengers issue in the mid 80's. What's not to like about a fun loving space adventurer with an effortlessly cool outlook, haircut and costume (at least cool by 1970's standards)? Well, his space lothario ways and emotion manipulation powers appear incredibly dodgy in today's climate (see his trial for assault in latter day She-Hulk ). However, at that more innocent time, Eros was too cool for school, and Peter Gillis seemed to agree, scripting a trilogy of solo tales for Thanos' big brother. Avengers Spotlight #21 (1989) - Starfox Pencils: Tom Artis Inks: Joe Rubinstein Solo Avengers got a rebrand, starting with this issue. I vividly remember picking this up from a newsagents, mainly because it had Starfox on the cover. The story kicks off on the planet Rescorla, home to a race of highly repressed warthog like merchants. Eros is there t...

When I started this blog, there were so many titles I was looking forward to re-reading and sinking my literary teeth into. And on the flip side, there's Gammarauders ... In the late 1980's, TSR struck a licensing deal with DC to produce comics based on their table top role playing games. The majority of these were unsurprisingly Dungeons & Dragons based. Gammarauders was the outlier, a tongue in cheek retro-futuristic game where folks talk in hip future jargon and ride giant cyborg battle animals called bioborgs. Imagine Fallout meets Pokémon , if you dare. Tailgunner Jo editor Barbara Kesel was also overseeing the TSR line, so presumably she was the one who offered Peter Gillis this whimsical nonsense. Gammarauders #1-4 (1989) Pencils: Martin King, Gordon Purcell Inks: Dave Cooper The opening story introduces the main character Jok Tadsworth, a hapless bequiffed wannabe hero with an Elvis fixation and an Aussie accented kangaroo bioborg named Hoag (Paul Hogan reference?...

You may recall that Peter Gillis revived four of The New Defenders in the pages of Doctor Strange , that he had killed off three years previously at the end of his Defenders run. Simultaneously to this revival, he also brought back the other two dead Defenders in the back of Solo Avengers , namely Gargoyle and the deeply complex woman who caused their deaths in the first place, Moondragon. Solo Avengers was chiefly a vehicle for Hawkeye, with the back up strip featuring rotating characters and creators. Gillis somehow secured the first multi-part back up, telling the tale of Moondragon's revival over three acts, which were serialised every other issue for some inexplicable reason. Solo Avengers #16 (1989) - Moondragon Pencils: Don Perlin Inks: Jack Abel The first part focuses on a new character, Pamela Douglas, whose ordinary job and stuffy boyfriend life is thrown off the rails by a mysterious presence in her head. This causes her to go a bit nuts, quote Monty Python and cut most...

Spurred on by larger than life movie action heroes, gun toting vigilantes became all the rage in late 80's comic books. Peter Gillis mused one day what new twist he could possibly put on the clichéd futuristic vengeful cyborg, that the likes of Deathlok and RoboCop hadn't already covered? Well, imagine if the aforementioned was carrying his daughter's disembodied brain on his back, as his literal tailgunner? And to keep her still conscious brain from going insane, Cyborg daddy constructs an elaborate fantasy world for her consciousness to inhabit? Yep, that's a very PBG spin alright. Gillis originally mooted Tailgunner Jo (named after Joe McCarthy's war nickname) for the short lived Hot Comics. However, Mike Gold had been leading an exodus from the cash strapped First Comics to DC, and Peter Gillis was on his recruitment radar. Gillis offered Gold this sci-fi maxi-series, which ended up assigned to veteran DC editor Barbara Randall/Kesel, who was keen, despite ex...

After all that heavy Morituri stuff, I'm taking a breather with a trio of Peter Gillis odds and ends from the late 80's that don't fit anywhere else. Teen Titans Spotlight #20 (1988) - Cyborg Pencils: Tom Artis Inks: Romeo Tanghal Cyborg gets the headline in Gillis' first published story for DC. However Beast Boy (or was it Changeling at the time?) is along for the ride too. When it comes to Teen Titans , I'm only familiar with the classic Wolfman and Perez run, plus the obnoxious parody cartoon my kids annoy me with. This story, entitled " Blenders From Hell ", is somewhat of a halfway house in-between. Cyborg investigates a possessed blender owned by a developer friend of his. It turns out to be some kind of trap for Cyborg, as a Lovecraftian style elder god with the catchy name of Ktktk is trying to break free from another dimension. That's about all the sense I could make out of this chaotic and knowingly silly issue. Tanghal's soft inks are al...