We’re All of Us Dying: Peter David, 1956-2025

When I was in high school, I read Star Trek: The Next Generation novels obsessively as they came out. The best were by Peter David. All of them. They weren’t always perfectly in character, but they were witty and clever and tightly plotted. I can still quote some of them decades later. I liked comic books okay, but I didn’t read them much. Omnibus editions were more expensive than a good paperback, and individual comics were cheaper but shorter, and I spent a dollar or two more on a paperback that would last me weeks. So I wasn’t going to be reading his comics works, but he grabbed me right away as a paperback writer.

Peter David was from what I can tell a complicated man. An observant Jew who wasn’t a fan of organized religion; an outspoken liberal who criticized political correctness. His mother was a biologist who worked with Watson and Crick, and he said he got his sense of humour from her. His father wrote for newspapers, including occasional movie reviews. He took his young son along sometimes, and Peter wrote his own reviews of the movies his father was reviewing. Even as a child, his writing was good enough so that it would at times make its way into his father’s published reviews.

His parents, possibly influenced by Frederick Wertham, didn’t let young Peter read superhero comics. He was allowed to read Harvey Comics. He was allowed to read Disney comics. But he was forced to sneak his reading of the superheroes at first. His parents particularly disapproved of the inhuman or strange-looking creations of Marvel. Eventually, they relented, and as a teenager, Peter attended his first comic book convention, meeting Jack Kirby and getting an autograph. His interest in comics faded for a while, and he considered a career in journalism, but in the late ‘70s, it came back.

In a way, we have Stephen King to thank for the career of Peter David, which arguably means he’s another author for whom we have to thank Tabitha King. He went to a book signing of King’s. He presented King with a copy of Danse Macabre, which King signed with, “Good luck on your writing career.” David would sign other authors’ books and comics with the same thing in the years after. David worked in marketing for Marvel and was eventually able to switch to writing.

While he did relatively little direct writing for the screen, Peter David shaped superhero stories, and thereby the later movies about them, for decades. And, yes, he wrote stand-alone novels, and of course there are the novelizations. His novelization of Batman Forever clearly uses plot points taken from earlier drafts of the script than were eventually filmed, but it’s still a fun, bouncy read. No one did it quite like Peter David. And of course the industry then left him without the compensation and recognition he deserved, because that’s the industry for you.