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Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, J. M. DeMatteis was a professional musician and rock music journalist (writing reviews and interviews for a variety of music publications, including Rolling Stone), before entering the comicbook field.
One of the most versatile writers in the graphic story medium, DeMatteis has been applauded for his intense characterizations and psychological themes, winning acclaim for a wide variety of projects. The epic Kraven’s Last Hunt is considered one of the high-water marks in the forty year history of Marvel’s Spider-Man, while DC’s award-winning Speeding Bullets effortlessly blended the Superman and Batman myths.
Collaborating with Keith
Giffen, he produced DC’s hilarious Justice League, an award-winning spoof of the super-hero genre that spawned spin-offs and imitations throughout the industry. DeMatteis’s dark fantasy creation, The Gargoyle—star of a classic Marvel mini-series—is currently in development at Columbia Pictures.
But DeMatteis’s greatest acclaim has come for sophisticated original graphic novels like Seekers Into The Mystery, Blood: A Tale, The Last One, Mercy, the groundbreaking, critically-lauded Moonshadow and the autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams, which the ALA picked as one of the Ten Best Graphic Novels and Booklist, in a starred review, called “As graphically distinguished and creatively novelistic a graphic novel as has ever been...a classic of the form.”
His fame in the comic book medium has led DeMatteis to work in both television and movies, where his ability to fuse the fantastic with the psychologically real has brought about fruitful collaborations with Caleb Carr, Chris Columbus, and Dean Devlin, among others.
In 1997, DeMatteis returned to his rock music roots with the release of the independent CD, “How Many Lifetimes?”—featuring songs he wrote and performed.
DeMatteis and his family live in upstate New York.
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