New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed comic book writer Peter Benno Gillis passed away in the company of friends and family in upstate New York on June 20, 2024, after a series of medical issues that kept him in and out of hospitals over the past several years.
Best known to comic book readers as a Marvel Comics mainstay throughout the 1980s, Gillis was a lifelong comics reader, an activity encouraged by his parents, who were overjoyed to see young Peter reading newspaper comics and children’s books by the time he was three years old, according to younger brother Rob Gillis.
“He could not remember a time that he was not reading comics,” Rob said. “From age three he was reading, and he could speak German as well as English. My father did not speak German, so that was a source of consternation to him.”
Gillis was a prodigious reader who enjoyed the Superman and Batman comics provided by his parents in his early childhood, as well as Jack Kirby’s monster stories published by Marvel forerunner Atlas Comics in the late 1950s. But it was the early Marvel Comics, notably Fantastic Four, that really sparked Gillis’s imagination.
“We used to get our hair cut at a barbershop where they had old comics. We’d get a haircut, then we’d ask if we could keep the comics we’d just read," Rob said. “I remember my dad giving the barber a quarter for two comics, so the barber actually turned a profit on that deal … and that’s how we got Fantastic Four issues 2 and 4."
“Peter loved Tom Swift and the Hardy Boys, too," he said. "He had an appetite for reading almost anything. Going through his bookshelf, he had a history of electrical engineering of the 1930s, written in the 1940s. Who would buy that? Someone who wants to know everything.”
His love of comics was a constant all throughout his childhood, and he always approached them very thoughtfully, his brother noted, and was never shy about expressing his opinions. “We were both letter hacks. Both pretty good at it,” Rob said. “We were doing it and getting responses. Mary MacPherran, the Marvel Comics secretary, would write back to us with an actual note, not just letting us know that our letter had been published, but letting us know what they thought, or that so-and-so had really enjoyed our letter. Really interacting with the fans.”
That thoughtful approach to everything he studied was a constant throughout every aspect of Gillis’s life. The gifted learner skipped two grades in school and excelled in every field of study. “He got perfect 800s on his college boards. Got accepted to the University of Chicago,” Rob notes. “He entered college as a Physics major, but in his second year he switched to Medieval Germanic Literature. He never lost his interest in science, and was a lifelong subscriber to Scientific American. He loved fantasy writers, but he always had an interest in our family’s Swiss heritage. He figured if he became a writer, he would need a day job. There may only be six professors of Medieval Germanic Literature in the country, but he knew that he’d have been qualified for that job. Somehow he found the time to write and produce three musicals during college, too. One called Merlin, and one called Arthur, which was about his favorite coat.”
But academia never held the same appeal for Gillis that comic books did, and he made the decision to leave grad school to return to his family home in White Plains, New York, just a short commute from New York City and the hub of American comic book publishing.
“[I was stranded in] the Beckett-like plains of ‘All But Dissertation,’” Peter Gillis said in a 2004 interview with The University of Chicago Magazine. “I didn’t exactly quit; I just started devoting less time to the damn thesis and more time to funny books.”
Through letters pages, articles and interviews that he wrote for fanzines, and comic book conventions and other social gatherings held in New York City, Peter befriended a number of established comic book professionals and editors as well as many would-be pros who were making a name for themselves in the comics fanzines of the 1970s, including Dave Cockrum, Jim Starlin, and Marv Wolfman, and many aspiring creators who would become Gillis’s closest friends. “He and I were part of a cohort of comics fans who met at conventions in the 1970s and aspired to turn professional,” Dean Mullaney recalled. “Most of us did. There was no competition among us; we all encouraged each other to meet our dreams. Peter was probably the most intellectual of the group that included Mark Gruenwald, Peter Sanderson, Rich Bruning, Meloney Crawford, Frank Lovece and me, among others.”
Frank Lovece published a short-lived fanzine called Nimbus that provided the perfect showcase for Gillis’s offbeat, thoughtful approach to comics journalism. “Peter, a medieval German literature scholar wrote two pieces for me,” Lovece said. “One of them I suggested: an overview of Western comics and what they meant in the 1970s when kids were no longer into Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Gene Autry and the rest of the one-time giants. And Peter wrote what I to this day consider the greatest article ever published about Western comic books. I think in retrospect how a schlub like me could get a writer like that to take him seriously. Not that that’s how I thought at the time.
“The other piece was something he’d suggested for an issue themed to the then-ascendant ‘cosmic characters.’ Peter came up with an interview with God. What he created was in no way gimmicky or glib or cute. It was a highly readable but very serious exegesis of the subtext of these kinds of comics and characters. If he’d written a straightforward piece about the moral philosophy of God and Man as represented in comics about the likes of Thanos and Warlock, I’m not sure the average comics-fanzine readership would have understood or appreciated it as much as I think they did Peter’s user-friendly take.”
Through the fan press, networking and the local comics scene, the nearly everyone in Gillis’ circle of friends found their way into the professional comics industry in some way, shape or form by the late 1970s. “In those days, fanzines were a good way to break into the industry, if that was your goal,” said Gillis’s longtime friend and editor Mike Gold, who met Gillis when Peter interviewed him in 1976 for a radio station-published magazine called Triad. “It used to be that was the way. Independent comics publishing hadn’t really started yet. Almost everybody from my generation, that’s how you established yourself. Some of these magazines were pretty big. An awful lot of very good people came in that way. The convention scene was just getting to be a big deal, in terms of going there and meeting people in the business, and making those connections, as a means to get in. That was very effective.”
Having a presence in New York, and making himself known at the publishers’ offices, was also very effective. “When my brother decided to give comics a shot, in between his masters and his dissertation – he was already writing his dissertation – people knew him already, and that opened that door for him,” Rob Gillis said. “At one of those lunches we used to go to, he stopped by the offices to visit people, and Archie Goodwin asked someone, ‘What book does Gillis write for us?’ They went, ‘He doesn’t write any books for us.’ And Archie said, ‘Well, give him a book'!”
After “shov[ing] scripts in people’s faces for about nine months,” Gillis made his first sale, a self-contained story that was published in Captain America #224 in the summer of 1978. Additional freelance assignments for Marvel soon followed, including fill-in issues and short stints to bridge the gap between creative team changes. As his official comics writing career commenced, Gillis continued to write articles and conduct interviews for popular fanzines, and served as a founding editor of the magazine Comics Feature in 1980.
“I never really worked directly with Peter, but he did some stuff for Mark Gruenwald when I was his assistant,” said editor Mike Carlin. “He was just around the Marvel offices a lot in the early ‘80s, so we hung out during that period. He was clearly the smartest guy in the room but he never made anyone feel stupid. His work was always worth reading, and he was super reliable. That was a combination us editors loved.”
One title that frequently showcased Gillis’s work during this era was What If?, an anthology series that explored alternate universes that had diverged from the timeline established in the mainstream Marvel Universe. The series had no set creative team, which made it an ideal proving ground for an up-and-coming writer who was skilled at writing high concept pitches.
“The What If? book, he did so many of them," Rob Gillis said. “He didn’t think they’d let him write the monthly Spider-Man comics, because they thought he’d get too weird for them, but that title allowed him to explore those characters, and ended up being many of his favorite stories.” Gillis penned more than a dozen issues of What If? from1979 through the final issue of the series in 1984 as well as a 1988 What If? one-shot that proved popular enough to instigate a revival of the series as a monthly title in 1989. Fans regard many of Gillis’s scripts as the best of the series, often citing issue #44, which culminates in Captain America’s impassioned speech about the nature of patriotism and the American way, as one of the defining moments in that character’s history.
“For me, it was the good handful of What If? comics that remain for a real high point, both for Peter’s career and certainly for that series,” comic book publisher Chris Ryall said. “He wrote a number of issues throughout its run, and the majority of the scripts for its final year, and most of his issues remain real high points of that series. Since its inception, What If? issues tended to end in terrible tragedy, and many of Gillis’s issues followed suit, but he kept the consequences on a more human level. The pain and grief that Reed Richards experiences in What If? #42, ‘What If the Invisible Girl Had Died?’, is still resonant.”
What If? and a host of fill-in issues established Gillis as a talented writer and a team player, and paved the way for ongoing assignments on established Marvel titles, including the second volume of Micronauts, a science-fiction space opera based on the popular late 1970s Mego toy line. “Gillis was responsible for a whole lot of my favourite comics and was a huge inspiration in many ways as a writer,” Immortal Thor writer Al Ewing said. “His Strange Tales run remains peak Dr Strange, and Micronauts was the ur-text for ‘take these toys and make poetry out of them.’”
The mid-eighties was Gillis’s most prolific period at Marvel, as What If? and Micronauts overlapped with his tenure on The New Defenders and Dr. Strange, which was followed by a 19-issue stint as writer of the character’s adventures in the anthology title Strange Tales, which in turn culminated in a new ongoing solo title for the character titled Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme.
“Even though Peter and I had a lot of friends and acquaintances in common, I don’t recall having a real conversation with him until I was looking for a writer to replace J. M. DeMatteis on The New Defenders,” editor Carl Potts said. “A year or so later, writer Roger Stern decided to leave Doctor Strange. Stern had set a very high bar, producing many quality Doctor Strange stories during his years on the title. As I was searching for a writer to both expand on what Stern had done and create new directions for Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme, someone, possibly Stern, suggested Peter B. Gillis. Gillis was a fountain of ideas for paving new paths for Strange while honoring the character’s previous adventures.”
Gillis’ talents brought him attention outside of the Marvel Comics offices, and he was the first writer that Mike Gold approached when he established a new, independent publishing company called First Comics in 1982. Gold and publishing partner Rick Obadaiah had scored a major coup by hiring artist Frank Brunner to illustrate an ongoing comic book series based on Warp!, a trilogy of science-fiction plays created by the Organic Theatre Company of Chicago, and thought Gillis was the perfect writer for the job. “Brunner had just loudly quit comics in a cover story for The Comics Journal, and I realized that if we could bring him back, people in the community would look and say these guys must have something going for them if they can bring him back into comics. So we got him, and that’s exactly what happened,” Gold said.
Gillis followed DeMatteis’s lead on The New Defenders with a thoughtful, character-driven approach that focused as much on interpersonal relationships than superheroics. Of particular note was the cosmic-powered adventurer named Cloud, created by DeMatteis and artist Don Perlin, a character who could shift their gender identity and appearance at will, and served as a member of The New Defenders in both male and female personas. In a 2022 article for Book Riot, Jessica Plummer observes, “The Defenders under Gillis’s pen is a deeply, deeply queer book, and Cloud is a huge part of that.” One of Gillis’s friends was transitioning at the time that he was writing The New Defenders, and the sensitivity and empathy that Gillis brought to his depiction of Cloud from 1984-86 was literally decades ahead of its time.
“Then we needed a writer. I wanted somebody I could work with in person on that first one. I had a strong background in editing, but a minor background in comics. I’d worked for DC for a couple of years, and that’s it. Pretty experienced editor, but I hadn’t done a lot of comics editing yet," he said. "I looked around, and Peter [who had moved back to Chicago] was there, I knew him, and he was arguably the smartest guy I’d ever met in my life. I don’t know how you can tell that one person is so much smarter than everyone around him. I thought that if we’re going to work with this material and make it into an ongoing book, not just adapting the plays, we’re going to need someone who knows how to write comics and has an intelligent approach to the material. So we brought Peter in. And he did not disappoint.”
One of the concepts that Gillis introduced in the pages of Warp! was the creation of Cynosure, the center of the multiverse, a location that made interdimensional travel as simple as crossing the street. Cynosure led to the creation of the First Comics multiverse, and served as the setting for John Ostrander and Tim Truman’s Grimjack, one of First’s most enduring and longest-running titles. “He created that for a Warp! story that Howard Chaykin drew,” Gold recalled. “That was just genius. And that reflects his intelligence, right down to coming up with the name Cynosure for heroic fantasy. I was thrilled.
“I called him up once because he’d written some magic incantations into a story, and I had to ask him, ‘Is that Sanskrit?’ And he said yes. I said, ‘You speak Sanskrit?’ And he said, ‘Well, very few people actually speak Sanskrit.’ So the guy was fluent in Sanskrit.”
When he wasn’t studying dead tongues or other arcana, Gillis was very active in Chicago’s comics scene, and always had a busy social calendar. “I ran the first ten Chicago Comic-Cons, 1976-85, we had these little monthly events, and Peter was at all of them,” Gold said. “An active participant in that community. I can’t imagine that anybody in that city who had any interest in comics hadn’t met him during that time. And that was a draw, that a Marvel Comics writer was there, hanging out and meeting fans, signing their comics.”
Gillis’ intelligence and wide-ranging knowledge made him the ideal candidate to co-develop and write First Comics’ breakout series Shatter in 1985. Chicago-based artist Mike Saenz was a computer enthusiast and visionary who saw the potential of using home computers to create artwork, and to create comic books, specifically. “He looked at that original 128k Mac and said, ‘that is a brush,’” Gold said. “Saenz brought in samples, and we said that’s great, but we need a story. Like most computer geniuses, and Peter was one, Mike would look at the latest updates in technology and say, ‘This is nifty, let’s use this, too.’ But in the computer world, those updates come along every 27 seconds. So you can never meet a deadline that way.
“So clearly the guy to work with him, write stories, co-plot, was Peter Gillis. Peter, sort of unfortunately for him, lived near Mike, and near Rick Oliver, who was our assistant editor. These guys got into fights all the time. Not physical fights, since they’re all comics people. Peter’s major job was to pull Mike away from whatever was bright and shiny so that we could get things done and actually publish something. Peter, though, knew computers backward and forward. He could have taken apart one of those Macintosh computers and put it back together, and that was back when those machines were totally sealed and hardly anybody could do that. Michael was a genius in seeing that you could make comics with the computer, and Peter was a genius in making that happen, in speaking the same language as Mike.”
Saenz departed the labor-intensive comic book series after three issues, but the title’s short-term impact and long-term legacy were secured by its historic production. “I’m not saying that computers wouldn’t have gotten there without Shatter, but we got there on Apple day one,” Gold said. “The people at Apple Computers in Cupertino were amazed, astonished. They wanted to market the Macintosh for business rather than art, but we were a closet success there. We were changing the comics business earlier than it would have otherwise. And once the Mac got to color, about a year later, that was it. Everything changed.
“Laser printers went from 72dpi to 300. None of that, the impact that Shatter had, would have happened if Peter weren’t a good writer, a good collaborator…but also because he knew his stuff. We kept making major changes to the storytelling, adding more detail, more depth. How does the story work? Not a lot of people could answer those kinds of questions at that time, but Peter could. That’s what happens when you’ve got the smartest guy in the room on your team. It’s just that simple.”
And when that intelligence was applied to a project that Gillis was passionate about, he was a force to be reckoned with. “It’s difficult putting Peter B. Gillis into a box others may understand,” longtime friend and collaborator Brent Anderson said. “Peter was his own man, his own personality, his own force upon the world, and as close to a classic Renaissance man as anyone in the world of comic books who has ever been worthy of the title.”
The pair first met in 1985, when Anderson, visiting Marvel’s offices in the hopes of lining up his next ongoing freelance project, met with Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, who was making plans for the forthcoming “New Marvel Universe,” which included a proposal treatment from Gillis about “mortal superheroes sacrificing themselves to save the world from a barbaric alien invasion, which frankly sounded a little ho-humdrum to me,” Anderson said. “But I was willing to read it before casting it aside. After reading it, however, I wanted Jim to introduce me to Peter. I wanted to hear if Peter had any other ideas about the series than what was in the outline pitch. And, boy did he ever. We liked each other immediately and went to lunch that afternoon to discuss the possibility of working together on this unusual title.”
That title, Strikeforce: Morituri – Latin for “we who are about to die” – followed a constantly changing roster of characters who had volunteered to undergo an experimental process that would grant them superpowers that could be used to defend Earth and repel the alien invaders who had enslaved the planet, but those powers came with a cost, killing the subject less than one year after the procedure. “The eventual death from the Morituri process could happen anytime from the day after the subject endured the process,” series editor Carl Potts said. “It was impossible to know before going through the Morituri process what power(s) the process would endow the subject with.
“So, it was possible for a volunteer to receive a power that was useless in combat, like changing the color of their fingernails at will. Despite having no useful power to fight the Horde, volunteers who received useless powers still had very little time left to live. I was fascinated and couldn’t wait to discover the various motives of the volunteers. Peter was always pushing genre boundaries. He liked to expand on what it meant to be a hero and what motivates heroes.”
Longtime friend Peter Sanderson agrees with that summation of Gillis’s writing. “He was always pushing the envelope on what you expect in comics, whether with established characters or with his own creations.”
Gillis and Anderson felt that this series would be better served as a standalone title and not as part of Jim Shooter’s New Universe, which they felt would have a negative impact on the line and its immediacy. “We quickly discussed how Morituri, as it was simply called in the beginning, could be Peter’s and my vehicle for creating our own universe of characters and storylines and unique take on the traditional world of superhero comics,” says Anderson. “We had the chance to create what we called a ‘Kirby Mill’ of unique and genuinely different characters arising from the traditional milieu of the superhero genre, our own Inhumans, Elementals, Kamandi, or New Gods habitat.
“When we took our idea back to Shooter that Morituri would have to stand apart from whatever other plans were being made around the New Universe, he was not enthusiastic about it, saying it was to be the flagship in the middle of this New Universe and had to be included. Peter and I disagreed and said if that was the case Peter would take the book – and me – to one of the independent publishers at the time. Shooter saw a potentially good thing almost getting away from Marvel and agreed to have Morituri stand apart independently on its own. Peter and I were elated.”
While both creators were in New York – Anderson lived in California, and Gillis resided in Chicago – the writer invited Anderson to spend the weekend at his childhood home in White Plains to brainstorm ideas and develop characters for the series. “It was one of the most wonderful weekends I ever spent anywhere, creating a superhero science-fictional universe and eating fine homemade German cuisine courtesy of Peter’s lovely mom," he said. "On the last evening I was there, Peter and I were upstairs in the attic bedroom Peter had shared with his brother that still had the four-drawer file cabinets full of the Gillis’ comic book collection, not in plastic bags and without backing boards, just stuffed into the drawers in numbered order ready at a moment’s notice to be read and devoured."
“The opportunity of working with Peter Gillis in the development of a comic book universe was a dream come true," Anderson added. "It didn’t turn into the ‘monster hit’ that Peter and I had hoped for, but it was the most fun I’d had drawing comics up to that point, and I am eternally grateful to my good friend and colleague and compadre Peter Benno Gillis for having taken me along on this most wonderful journey.”
Gillis and Anderson both left the title in 1988, 20 issues into its 31-issue run, and Gillis was removed from his only other monthly Marvel title, Dr. Strange: Sorcerer Supreme, after the series’ fourth issue. Although he received critical acclaim for his four-issue Black Panther miniseries illustrated by Denys Cowan, Gillis found himself once again relegated to scripting fill-in issues and one-shots, although he saw it as an opportunity to diversify his writing portfolio. “He had such versatility,” editor Carl Potts said. “Peter had the versatility to produce great stories for both of Marvel’s very different ‘What’ titles, What If? and What The-?! To those who knew Peter only from his superhero work, he might have seemed too serious to produce comedy. However, when we launched Marvel’s self-parody anthology, What The-?!, Peter was one of the first creators I asked to contribute to it.”
Gillis, in fact, co-plotted and scripted the very first story in the very first issue of What The–?!, a Punisher story co-plotted and illustrated by Hilary Barta. “He was a teller of somewhat unusual stories, but not exactly humor,” Barta said. “But somehow I knew he was the guy to ask, if only because we both hated the Punisher. And his script was wonderful, and very funny.”
As his time at Marvel drew to a close, Gillis’s longtime friend and editor Mike Gold had moved from First to DC Comics, and welcomed the opportunity to bring one of his favorite writers into the fold. “DC had acquired the license to produce comic books based on Dungeons & Dragons,” Gold recalled. “Byron Preiss was editing those titles for DC Comics, and as group editor, I recommended that he give Peter a call. Role-playing games are pretty intense, and they’re not built to plotting, they’re built to reacting. You’re playing a game, so you’re reacting. Peter understood that difference, and could tell the story, and sure as hell he did. He was the exact right guy for the job. I think he enjoyed it.”
Gillis’s most notable title during his brief time freelancing for DC was a six-issue miniseries called Tailgunner Jo, based on a concept by Doug Rice, who had befriended both Gillis and Gold in Chicago. “Doug Rice is, still, a complete expert in manga and anime,” Gold said. “And that’s because of the Vietnam War. Doug was out there, fighting, and he would take leave and go to Japan, and fell in love with manga and anime. In Chicago, he’d get a hold of old 16mm prints of anime and we’d go to a local comic shop in Chicago once a month, before anybody knew about it, and we had a guy who was fluent in the language to help explain the stories to us.
“So when Doug said, ‘I have an idea for a comic book called Tailgunner Jo,’ I absolutely loved the title. It’s a reference to Senator McCarthy, back in the fifties, so it was kind of funny. Doug and Peter were already friends, so hooking them up was not hard. And it was a challenge. Let’s make something brand new, inspired by something that’s unknown in this country, and make it work for people who aren’t that familiar with manga. Which was a lot tougher in those days, before Viz or Dark Horse, or us with Lone Wolf and Cub. A whole different world.”
The series, beautifully illustrated by Tom Artis, became a cult classic, but was, like so many of Gillis’s comics, ahead of its time. Artis, who passed away in 2007, would develop several additional concepts with Gillis, but unfortunately, none ever came to fruition. “Tom was one of Peter’s best friends,” Rob Gillis said. “Peter visited his grave every year. There’s so much unpublished stuff from them working together.”
With the conclusion of Tailgunner Jo and his RPG-based series Gammarauders, Gillis found himself mostly out of the comics business. A handful of one-off Marvel Comics assignments came his way over the next two years, but by the early 1990s, he was done with comics. Or, for the time being, comics were done with him.
“A person like Peter, generally speaking, has a hard time communicating with people he doesn’t know,” Mike Gold said, looking back on Gillis’s career. “Again, too smart for the room. It always took him a little while to sort of figure out how to approach each individual person. But there was so much intense creativity, backed by knowledge.
“Assume the reader doesn’t know anything, and you’ve got to develop the characters, the backstory, do the world-building – and Peter never had a problem with any of that. As the editor, it’s your job to ask questions, to say when you don’t think the reader will get that, or that I don’t get that. I think translation was the best word for what I had to do with him as his editor. And it was always worth it.”
But not every editor or publisher was up to that challenge, and that, along with the lack of a true blockbuster title to his credit, cut him out of the industry almost entirely by the early 1990s.
“He was one of the first old-timers, one of the first that the younger guys, the editors, saw as being too old to work in comics. He stopped getting work because he stopped being ‘a thing’ to the younger people. Eventually, and it didn’t take long, but those young people were in management, and they started calling all the shots. So many creative industries say, you’re old, we’re tired of your stuff, and you’re way too expensive. And a lot of guys, Peter being one of them, fell into that trap.
“He had that additional problem of being too smart for the room, and some editors didn’t want to work that hard. It was true for some guys, definitely, and even me, some of the time. And it’s hard, because you’ve got respect for them, but you don’t want to work with them like that, because it seems disrespectful. Not getting work ends up being an ugly compliment. Peter fell into that trap. And he wasn’t there in New York to fight for work."
Although Gillis was dismayed that he’d fallen out of favor at Marvel and DC, he continued to write for his own entertainment, crafting novels and short stories, and developing concepts with artists in and around Chicago. “It was twenty years in the wilderness for him," Rob Gillis said, “but he still went to conventions, and was a fixture in the local comics community. He found a way to make a living doing computer graphics, and that enabled him to buy a very nice historical house and have some creativity, but he was always writing.”
One Chicago-based artist who befriended Gillis, Mark Staff Brandl, spent many hours at the artists’ hangout MaxTavern, discussing art, literature, and the local comics scene. “He was quirky and intellectual as all get out. He was a multifaceted intellectual with various academic degrees, but also a popular culture as well as Icelandic and other medieval and myth literature scholars. That is similar to my own mix of scholarliness, fine art and popular culture. Yes, we are both darn intellectuals, which scares many a pop culture fan, and popular culture aficionados, which makes the fine art and novel world cringe. I think in a better world, his uniqueness would have been more treasured, as he is artistically in the camp of and up there with Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Terry Pratchett, and Nnedi Okorafor.
“Our discussions were always still inspirational to me. Now I wish I had recorded them. Peter was a true genius and humorously wonderful to chat with, and talk deeply with, about a thousand subjects.”
After a long absence, Gillis returned to mainstream comics in 2010, when IDW asked him to write the official comic book adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s beloved fantasy novel The Last Unicorn. “I always felt like, despite all the great work he produced, that Peter was never as heralded for his writing prowess as other writers of his day. But for those of us lucky enough to read his stuff, we knew then, and know now, that he was one of the best," Chris Ryall, who was serving as IDW’s Publisher at that point in time, said. “On that project, drawn by Renae De Liz and Ray Dillon, Peter’s work far exceeded the requirement, and made the graphic novel something unique and special, one of the real high points from that point in my career.”
Artist Renae De Liz also holds that project in high regard. “I was pretty star-struck getting to work with such a legendary writer! He was extremely kind, and did such a fantastic job translating a beloved story into comic book format,” De Liz said. “I didn’t realize at the time [it] was a return to comics for him, which makes me appreciate our short time collaborating even more.”
The Last Unicorn proved to be a career highlight for Gillis in many ways, as the collected edition occupied the New York Times Best Sellers list for nine weeks in 2011. Not long after, he reconnected with First Comics co-founder and publisher Ken F. Levin, and “it all started flowing again,” according to Rob Gillis.
“There’s a Shatter video game that’s in development, other books in development, two great prose series that were serialized online. One of them, called Humans, I think is one of the best things that he’s ever written. Not easy to digest, not something for 15-year-olds, and something called The Romance of the Rose, based on a medieval piece. He’d been more and more active, and the Levin family has been very supportive over the past several years," he said. "There are books that will come out soon, this year or next. Romance of the Rose, Mark Badger is doing illustrations for that. There’s a pipeline, several unpublished novels. Straight prose. Several novels that should see the light of day sometime.”
Declining health in recent years led Gillis to sell his Chicago home so that he could move back to upstate New York to be closer to his family. “Expected but unexpected,” Rob Gillis said of his brother’s passing. “Peter had been struggling almost the last two years with health issues. Getting better, getting much worse, getting much better, getting far worse.” Surviving family members also include sister Jacqueline Gillis, sister-in-law Suzy Brack, and nephew Scott Gillis.
News of Peter Gillis’s passing was, as Rob noted, not unexpected, but friends said that he had been as prolific as ever in recent months, and had even scheduled some personal appearances and book signings at local comic shops. “I was just getting ready to video chat with him again as I had several times, in his hospital bed, when I heard the sad news from his brother,” Brandl said. “I had heard he was improving and he was looking forward to being back at home at his writing desk. I still had plans to collaborate with him on some philosophical comics works.”
Gillis’s passing brings a powerful mix of emotions for his friends and family, who are celebrating his life, but, appropriately enough, can’t help but look at his life and ask, “What if?”
“When he started getting really, really sick, it was incredibly sad. There’s a loss from Peter’s death that … and through his whole illness, really, it’s quite sad, because Peter had so much more to give us,” Mike Gold said. “When I won the Hero Initiative’s Dick Giordano Humanitarian of the Year Award, I said in my acceptance speech that the comics community is like a doughnut shop. We all know each other, we all have so much in common. People who have hated each other for twenty years are still on a first-name basis. So this may be a doughnut shop, but it’s a hell of a good doughnut shop.
“And that remains a major attraction for those of us, a couple thousand people, who are in the business. And those relationships are fabulous, and long-lasting. Guys I haven’t seen in twenty years, it feels like I just saw them yesterday. When I think back on the people we’ve lost, one of the first things I think about is what they’ve done. And when you realize what they could have done, and that’s when you really miss them.”
The post Peter B. Gillis, 1952-2024 appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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