Tales of Syzpense #82

A couple more Peter David stories, Dying in the Gutters, the new Jack Kirby exhibit at Skirball, and a Giant-Size Spinner Rack sequel

Another Peter David story occurred to me recently: a few years back — most likely a decade back, but time has lost all meaning since the pandemic so who knows — he came to me with a new idea. His work at Marvel and elsewhere had been drying up a bit, Fallen Angel was in one of its fallow periods, and generally, he seemed at a work crossroads.

He was also feeling the turn of the wheel — that time when you realize you’re becoming the “previous generation” of creator and losing gigs to younger creators or just generally being sidelined for the next hot creator. So Peter’s idea was…

…he wanted to do a book that had echoes of Unwritten and Sandman, but it involved a team of very dark, very British analogues to the Endless, and it had some kind of literary tie to it as well. What’s more, Peter wanted to do it under an assumed name. he said he would create a full backstory for this exciting, young English writer and sell the book that way, as the latest export from the UK following in the path laid by Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, and others.

The pitch was intriguing in its way, if intentionally derivative. Even Peter’s more obvious ideas were smart and compelling. But this one just felt like a road I wasn’t wiling to go down. I just didn’t think deception was a good idea, and anyway, if I was hiring Peter David to write anything, I’d want that thing to be from PETER DAVID.

So it never came to pass. But it made me sad to think that even a guy of his level and his acclaimed body of work had to go through what nearly everyone in the creative field goes through eventually. It was depressing mostly because as I say, this was a decade ago when he seemed to still be a thriving writer, it wasn’t like he was 70 and trying to find his way back to comics after time away.

It made me then think of another big loss recently, that of Mike Peters, lead singer for The Alarm (as well as other bands like Coloursound, Dead Men Walking, and even for a time, Big Country). Mike and The Alarm were also years past their heyday in 2004, when Mike had the idea to release new music under an assumed name, The Poppy Fields, to have the song judged on its own merits, not as the latest work by a singer whose best days (sales-wise) were behind him. And it worked — the Poppy Fields had a hit with their song “45 R.P.M.” And the story, when revealed, took on a life of its own, eventually becoming a fictionalized film called Vinyl (with a soundtrack by Mike and The Alarm).

There’s no real point to the comparison other than these two things: too many people in the creative poppy field go through this same kind of situation, and we don’t talk about it enough. Jeff Mariotte, writer and IDW’s first EIC, recently wrote a great Substack recently about the challenges of a job search in 2025. The larger point is that we’ve collectively just not done enough to provide proper support so creators can at the very least have access to reasonable insurance, or better royalties, or just more generalized support during the more fallow times. The other point is, man, did I love the work of both Peter David and Mike Peters.

PAD by Bill Sienkiewicz (May 28, 2025)

---

CSI: PD

Okay, one more Peter story.

We’d been publishing CSI comics for a few years and they’d started to grow a bit stale. They primarily sold to readers who watched the show, not regular comic readers. (They started off wonderfully, with art by pre-Locke & Key Gabriel Rodriguez and by Ashley Wood)

Eventually, Gabriel and Ash moved on to better things. So, with a new artist (Stephen Mooney, who would also go on to better things like Half Past Danger and The Rocketeer), we had the idea of doing a CSI series that catered more directly to comic fans: we would kill off Bleeding Cool’s Rich Johnston. (Fictionally only, I mean, sorry, Mark Waid)

Rich was still running his previous site, Lying in the Gutters, to we called the comic CSI: Dying in the Gutters, where the central conceit was the CSI Las Vegas crew investigating Rich’s murder, and the killer would eventually be revealed as a real comic pro. In the series, Peter David, Joe Quesada, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and many others had very good reasons for wanting Rich dead. Each issue, written by Steven Grant, would involve investigations of different creators (I even appeared in a couple pages, too).

Rich was happy to play the victim in the comic; and the real creators who signed on all seemed to have the same request: “Can I be the one who killed Rich?” Alas, only one of them was revealed to be the killer.

Anyway, not only was Peter one of the suspects, but we did a variant cover with him standing alongside his Fallen Angel character, courtesy of Fallen Angel artist JK Woodward:

These comics were fun. We had some fun back then. Before the wheel turned.

In looking for the CSI images above, I also stumbled across this: a variant cover by artist Franco Urru, featuring Fallen Angel and Illyria, from the Angel TV series. Peter was a massive Angel and Buffy fan, and so was ecstatic when he got to use Illyria in a Fallen Angel miniseries.

Franco, who had been drawn our Angel and Spike comics alongside writer Brian Lynch, did a wonderful cover for the series. I forgot about this cover but I think often of Franco, who was a great talent and one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with. We lost Franco in 2012.

I certainly didn’t set out to make this one so maudlin but it’s weird how one loss seems to build on or magnify another, and Peter’s loss just made me think of these others, too. It made me think of Harlan Ellison, the best man at Peter’s wedding and a dear friend to so many of us, who would’ve turned 91 on May 27. The losses add up. The good memories with all of these people, though, those persist most of all.

---

Maybe this will lighten the mood a little: both Peter and I took a level of pride in the fact that his Fallen Angel series was once deemed too offensive for prisoners:

---

The King and I

This past week, Ted Adams and I went to see the Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition recently opened, and was curated by Patrick A. Reed and Ben Saunders, and they did a masterful job putting it together. Not only does the exhibit feature more original art than I would’ve expected — from the 1940s to the late 1970s, including some never-before-seen pieces that the Kirby family loaned — but it also showcases a really well-designed story of Kirby’s progress as an artist over the decades.

Museum photos never showcase the works as well as seeing them in person, but I took a number of photos anyway. It’s definitely worth seeing in person if at all possible, but for those who can’t, here’s a brief look at some of the treasures on display.

The gift shop overall seemed lacking — no gallery book, no comic books(!) — but I as happy to see that, among the books they did have there, my Mighty Marvel Calendar Book was among them:

---

All-New, All-Different Spinner Rack

A while back (Tales of Syzpense #25, October 2023), I featured a number of covers with the characters tearing through the background. A handful of those were derivations of the 1975 Giant-Size X-Men #1 cover by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, which has become one of the most heavily homaged cover images of all time.

Since that newsletter, I’ve found a wide array of other covers that also referenced that original piece, and thought it was time to add to the list with even more of those covers here, especially in light of this week’s Giant-Size X-Men #1 that also homages the original image. At this point, there’re enough GSX-1 cover homages to fill an entire spinner rack on its own.

---

Final Order Cut-Off

Two of our Syzygy/Image titles hit F.O.C. this coming Monday, so remember to let your retailer know by that day if you want copies of the footloose and fancy-free Moonshine Bigfoot #3 or Dark Honor #2:

---

A Glimpse of Things to Come

I’m lost in the wilds of New York for a few days this week, and it’s always nice to be back in the city, although after four trips here over the past four months, I’m a bit over the air-and-train travel required to get here, anyway. But I have a particularly nice view from my room this time around. Hopefully the meetings I’m here for go the way I’d like.

But I’ll end this one not with photos but instead with this: a visual tease of something artist Gabriel Rodriguez and I are doing together later this year or in early 2026. Hopefully it’s something we can talk about before long and show off soon after, since Gabe’s work, as it has been since CSI, is stunning to behold. More soon.