Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Peter David RIP

I've just read on Comicbookclub that PAD died on 24 May.

I can't say I knew too much of his work but enjoyed his X-Factor and the few Hulk comics that I've read.

RIP PAD, your work was inspired.

I've lost an inspiration, a mentor, and a surrogate uncle.

Please, everybody, keep his wife Kathleen, and his daughters Caroline, Ariel, Gwen, and Shana in your thoughts and prayers.

Rest in peace, Peter. I'll miss you so much.

That's all I can manage to post right now.

The picture that's been painted about his declining health over the last few years had me half-expecting this for a while. But knowing it is now a fact that he's gone and that his body of work is now complete is extremely saddening and just surreal. No doubt in my mind that he's among the very best writers of comics there ever was and will ever be. He was also an excellent novelist--I can attest to that, having read several of his Star Trek novels and one of his originals, Howling Mad.

This is such a terrible loss.

Rest in peace.

Beautifully put, Lardy. Thank you.

I still feel numb and not-quite-here, so please excuse the randomness of this and other posts to come in the immediate future.

One of the first things I did after I woke up today was to open one of the four boxes which contain my Peter David collection.

I skimmed the surface, and the first thing that leaped out to me was one of his more obscure works, issues 7 & 8 of Justice League Task Force (gorgeously drawn by Sal Velluto,) where a special mission forces J'onn J'onnz to reluctantly use his shape-shifting powers to become a female Martian. Like a lot of great PAD works, it's riotously funny (Gypsy gets a ton of priceless quips) but it also encourages the reader to think outside the box. It was also ahead of its time -- a story from the JLA Big Guns era also had J'onn as a woman, but it was entirely played for cheap laughs (IIRC, it was not written by Morrison, but by Millar.)

Compared to the tons of work he did for Marvel, PAD did way too little work for DC, most of it between 1993 and 2003. After DiDio was finally shit-canned in 2020, I held out hope that PAD might work for DC again. Then, a couple years later, came the health crisis that Lardy alluded to, and...it's not going to happen now.

Atlantis Chronicles. Aquaman. Supergirl. Young Justice. Sins of Youth.

Please re-read one or all of the above sometime soon, and think both of what we've lost and what we'll never lose.

Another one I am sad to hear we have lost.

I need to have another go at Supergirl. Didn't finish it last time.

I think my clearest memory is a story from his Hulk run, when Betty wants to have a heart to heart not with Bruce but with Hulk. I can't remember much of the details but I do remember the conversation bringing Hulk around from wanting nothing to do with Betty to leaping off with her in his arms to help her.

He had a great touch with the characters he wrote.

...I didn't comment on here until now mainly because I didn't have time or energy to sit down and comment.

I won't... deny... that in his later years he said some problematic things. And I won't pretend that there weren't some problems with his work.

However, his work on Supergirl remains very important to me, and it infuriates me that DC will likely make a tribute to him despite having spent so many years mandating that the comics he wrote needed to be "ignored." I've no doubt in my mind Dan Didio likely had a hand in it all, given how much vitriol was tossed at David's Supergirl series and Young Justice for the sake of hyping up Kara Zor-El's series and Johns' Teen Titans. Graduation Day alone seemed to exist simply to tell fans who liked Young Justice they were idiots for supporting something so "childish" and "pointless."

And it infuriates me that Marvel will pay tribute to him and continue to make money off his creations, especially Spider-Man 2099, while his wife and family had to spend years begging people online for help with his medical bills and now likely his funeral bills. Which isn't even getting into how DC wouldn't have a show like "Young Justice" if it wasn't for him, or how his Aquaman served as the basis for truly reinventing the character after all the damage Superfriends did to his image.

All in all I believe David's passing is a large example of everything that should be rightfully hated about the comic book industry.

Sarky, dear, I appreciate your truth-telling. It was uncomfortable at times but absolutely necessary, and it gave me a lot to think about.

The only thing I take issue with is the whole thing with DiDio and his lackeys drumming up negative publicity against Peter's work. Yes, it hurt at the time, and, yes, it was crude and childish and just plain wrong...but it happened more than 20 years ago! DiDio is gone, and so are all those who supported his moronic views. In the long term, none of that matters, because Peter's work lives on and is already in the process of being reevaluated and appreciated.