Peter B. Gillis Big Comics Readthrough

During his first couple of years at Marvel, Peter Gillis submitted an assortment of fill ins for Marvel's big guns, learning on the job as he went... Marvel Two-In-One #45 (1978) Pencils: Alan Kupperberg Inks: Mike Esposito A Skrull gangster from an early Fantastic Four lands in New York, impersonating the Thing. Captain Marvel makes a bemused, needless, contractually obliged appearance. Then it all ends in a rushed Scooby Doo fashion. This was presumably aiming for comedic or at least light hearted, but the end result is unremarkable, not aided by some workmanlike artwork. However the script at least shows some personality. Marvel Two-In-One #51 (1979) Pencils: Frank Miller Inks : Bob McLeod A big improvement on the previous fill-in, featuring the fun debut of Ben Grimm's poker game with Nick Fury and lesser Avengers. In the less memorable second half, they fight some faceless goons atop of SHIELD's Helicarrier. At 17 pages, there's not a great deal to the story, but i

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