Peter David has passed on and the world of comics is lesser because of it.
In the last couple of hours since I received the news I’ve been reflecting on David’s career and the scope of it. As hackneyed as it is, it still seems like just yesterday that I picked up X-Factor #71 by David and Larry Stroman from the corner convenience store on my way home from junior high.
It was the first of many title-defining runs that David had with X-Factor and it was far from my first encounter with his writing, but we’ll come back to that. X-Factor #71 was part of Marvel’s big push for the X-books at the time, along with Uncanny X-Men, adjective-less X-Men, and X-Force. For my money, it was probably the best X-book out there at the time because it was the most fully realized.
While Chris Claremont and Jim Lee were busy kicking ass, taking names, and breaking sales records with X-Men #1, David was turning in a book that was both fun and funny in equal measure every month. The characters, and they were most certainly that, had personalities larger than the comics panel could hold. Here was a group of second-stringer mutants that you knew and liked and they didn’t need exploding playing cards or adamantium claws to get my vote.
Prior to me picking up X-Factor I had actually stumbled across David’s work as a novelist. I was a voracious reader of everything but textbooks in my youth and tended to gravitate towards the spiritual successor of the pulp novel, the mass-market paperback. David had penned a number of Star Trek: The Next Generation novels along with The Rocketeer novelization that I had read before discovering his work as a comics scribe.
After reading and rereading X-Factor I had to know more about the author and upon looking up David’s name in the credits and then glancing over to my bookshelf I had a moment similar to that of the finale of The Usual Suspects. Everything just lined up. I double checked the author bio (likely) at the back of Star Trek: The Next Generation Book 10, A Rock and a Hard Place and saw that it was indeed the same Peter David. Truly a god amongst men to be so talented to write both novels AND comics that I enjoyed the heck out of.
David quickly became a comic writer that I would follow from title to title along with haunting the local B. Dalton and Waldenbook stores waiting for his next Trek book to drop. Eventually, David was given his own corner of the Trek universe to play in with the New Frontier series of books that ran from 1997 to 2015. An autographed copy of the New Frontier omnibus sits in a place of prominence in the Star Trek corner of my living room.
I had the opportunity to meet Peter David on a couple of occasions and was honestly starstruck the first time I met him. In addition to all the stuff I outlined above, he also had character defining runs on Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk AND co-created Spider-Man 2099, and this isn’t even beginning to scratch the surface for how he influenced me as a writer. The work he did, in a way, gave me permission to be silly as a writer. I always got the impression that he was writing to amuse not only the audience, but himself, and that made it okay for me to write just for myself. If anyone else ended up enjoying it, well that was just a happy accident.
It’s a difficult task to sum up the existence of on person into a short piece. I could literally sit here and recommend work by Peter David for the rest of the day (the novel Star Trek: The Next Generation: Vendetta, the Madrox miniseries, Young Justice, X-Factor vol. 3). I could also share a few anecdotes about meeting him, or how I once (in the late ‘90s) emailed him and he emailed me back! What a thrill that was.
I was always excited when a new comic from Peter David would hit the stands since his health issues in recent years made them even more few and far between. But from the beginning to the very end, David was a writer that never lost step and I fear we’re never going to see someone like him ever again.
