As a kid, you learn how stories work. The more you read and watch, the different voices you encounter—spoken or printed on a page — expand the horizon. They illuminate it. Suddenly, you can see that stories can be told this way; characters can behave in that way; the rules can be twisted, bent, broken, and reassembled. And no one told stories — no one illuminated — like Peter David.
Peter David, who passed away at the age of 68 on May 24, 2025, defined, and redefined, my idea of storytelling — over and over and over again. Constantly. From the time I was eight years old, snagging X-Factor issues in comic multipacks at Walmart. Then to his Captain Marvel run, which kept me in the pocket of Marvel Comics at a time when I'd mostly given up. Then to his long X-Factor run, the magnum X-opus that he was long overdue.
"Ohwhatagooseiam!" That trick mayo jar. "Then we'll get Cable." "Oh great, and maybe the Disney Channel for Rahne?" Just Guido naming himself "Strong Guy." The birth of Madrox and Siryn's son, still the most horrifying comic I've ever read.
Moments from the hundreds of Peter David comics that I've committed to memory, just bursting forth from my mind — a mind he helped form. This is what Peter David brought to storytelling.
Multiple Man punching someone with a Kermit puppet in the Smithsonian. Strong Guy becoming the ruler of Hell. Rahne hooking up with a wolf prince. Polaris low-key reading Jamie Madrox for having rich friends in the DC area (who were those friends??). Making Val Cooper related to Twin Peaks' Dale Cooper, just because. And my god, Peter David also wrote She-Hulk, turning her into a bounty hunter and pairing her up with a Skrull bestie.
Unlike all of the cartoons and comics I'd encountered up until I started reading his X-Factor run in early 1993, Peter David had a voice. There had been a kind of brand voice for superhero comics, one I'd largely base on the work of Chris Claremont. Peter David simply ignored it. His work was irreverent, corny (Rahne's World), winking but smart. Laser-focused on characters, not on what they said (although they always seemed to have been saying something memorable) but how they said it. A Peter David comic read like real people having real conversations, with real-world references. Maybe too many real-world references. But that's also how people talk, so that's how his superheroes talked.
Peter David's comics were unpredictable. In one issue he's knocking down the Washington Monument, and in the next, he's psychoanalyzing characters who have been around for decades, completely defining them for all audiences forever. I didn't know comics could be incredibly shocking while also being incredibly funny — until I read a Peter David comic.
And those comics prepared me for a lifetime of loving stories that blend snark and heart, thrills and quips, irreverence (the ongoing saga of the Chalker brothers, the worst villains in the Marvel Universe) and reverence. No matter how much David would tease superhero tropes, you'd always know he loved his genre — and those tropes — wholeheartedly. He cared about whether or not Lockjaw was an Inhuman dog or a Inhuman who only looked like a dog. He made Moondragon a fascinating, complicated, hot mess of a cosmic hero. He routinely took the leftovers — every character who ever appeared in an X-Factor roster, for example — and made them into your favorite characters.
And sometimes he wrote stories wherein a child is his father's dad and his dad is actually his son. Peter David saw Longshot and Shatterstar and really said, "Oh, this familial mystery? I'll solve it. Watch this."
Peter David's work is why I went on to love The X-Files, Buffy — I'll even say ensemble comedies, like Veep and Cheers. His tone, his mastery of drama and comedy, his work where nothing was sacred yet everything mattered deeply — that's the kinda stuff he made me love, to this day.
I wouldn't be the lover of fiction, storytelling, pop culture, I am today if I hadn't carried an increasingly beat up copy of X-Factor #71 around with me in third grade. And I owe all of it to Peter David, the man who had Wolverine put out a cigarette by swallowing it.
