it's been nearly two years since the last Donny Cates-written comic hit comic shops (that was Vanish #8), and over two years since Cates’ last story credit for Marvel Comics. After a rapid rise as one of Marvel’s most popular creators behind runs on Thanos, Venom, and Thor, alongside hit creator-owned series like God Country, Redneck, and Crossover, for many fans it seemed as if Cates abruptly disappeared. In the summer of 2023, Cates began to open up about his disappearance, speaking on the ComicPop YouTube Channel that he had been in a horrendous car accident, suffering serious injuries that prevented his return to comics. 

But now, the Donny Cates comeback begins.

Popverse sat down with Cates at April's C2E2 for his first full-length interview - talking about where his head is at, what really happened, and addressing the errant gossip and misreporting in the past two years. In this, Cates opened up for the first time about his involvement in Marvel Comics' Ultimate Universe reboot and how he was the original Ultimate Spider-Man writer - but for him, that's in the past, and in some ways a different person than he is now. 

Popverse: It's been about a year and a half since your terrible car accident was reported. Tell us about your road to recovery and how you're doing now.

Donny Cates: Yeah, it was a rough road. For me, I teleported six months after it happened. I was in an Uber, and we got rear-ended, and then we hit the car in front of us. So my head went back and then into the console and shattered my orbital socket.

I got a subdural hematoma in my brain. My brain swelled up so much that it made my spine separate; I got an infection in my spine, and they had to operate on that. And for the better part of the month, I reset my memory every day.

In the press, it's been said that I lost 6 months of my life. That’s not true. For about six months, I lost like every day, and had to reset the next day. And my memory is still dog shit to this day. It's fun to, I get to read my own books and be surprised by them.

But that's been a struggle. Everything’s been rough, re-learning things like tying my shoes, like who my parents are, their names. I was also going through a divorce, so waking up every day and learning I was divorced. I had a lot of help. My, my girlfriend Amy was there every day. She was wonderful.

But it put everything on hold. I lost all the books I was on, and just gotta restart. Luckily, the industry was wonderful. It was very sweet. I could get the time I needed.

But writing never went anywhere. I could've told you where Peter Parker grew up. Like, every realm of Asgard. All that shit stayed perfect, so as far as the writing goes it's not a software problem, it's a hardware problem.

I still... My speech is still really bad, and having the wherewithal to be able to sit down and write, my hands totally shake. So that's all gotten a lot better. I've been working on a few things right now that will be announced this summer, but it's been rough, man. It's odd to come back to places that in your head you were just at, and everyone's like, Where have you been, man?

So, it's humbling. It's also very, very heartwarming to see the outpouring of love from the fans. Everyone's been very kind, and it's good to see that they haven't gone anywhere. Because I got canceled by gravity.

I know a lot of fans are excited to see you back. How's the con been so far, as your first big one in a bit?

It's rough because their experience is so different than mine. I sit and I talk to all of those that come, and for them it's their first or only opportunity to talk to me. So everyone likes to ask me about the accident. And they’re being very sweet. But it is something that I have to relive all day, every day.

It's weird when things that happen to you become public. I didn't get into this industry to get famous. I wanted to make comics. So, like, this idea that my personal life, my divorce, that was in the news and stuff… It's very fucking weird. It's a very weird experience walking into a place you've spent your entire life. Comic cons. I've been doing this since I was 10. And you walk in here and don't know what people know about your personal life and stuff, it's very weird.

Or the speculation, I’m sure, in some gross cases.

A lot of that shit too. I've heard so many fucking things about what I did or what I didn't do. And some people think I'm way cooler than I am. That I was driving the car running from cops, or I crashed a boat, or that I was shooting heroin under a bridge, and worshipping Satan. I was like, man, I wish, that sounds fucking rad. I got hit on an exit ramp and went to sleep. It's not that cool.

But it is a weird thing that people feel comfortable casually walking up to you and saying, 'How's your rehab going?' It's fine, thanks. In a way, you’d want the lowest part of their life to be, not the most public in the world, but I guess that's the price you pay for writing Venom.

Let's hone in on the writing, then. So you mentioned, you were able to experience some of your stories fresh and be surprised by them. What were the things in your style and your approach that stood out that you were like, oh, that's good? And vice versa, things that made you think, I don't want to do that anymore.

I was really impressed by my run on Thor. It was dope. I really loved writing in that voice; the narration required to sound like Thor. I was like, man, that's fucking good.

Then I'll be the first to say it: my Hulk run? I could have done that better. It's odd 'cause like when I wrote Venom, I was going through shit in my life, and I put it into that book. Not as a cipher of me. People get confused when they think about a self-insert. That's not really what it is. It's reminding people that they go through the same things, you’re not alone, those emotions are universal stuff. So it's not as much that as it's excising yourself.

It’s funny because I just said I don't want my personal life to be public, right? But then inadvertently wrote it all in my book. What else am I gonna do and draw from? But Hulk was a book that I did right in the middle of all this. I was in it, and I didn't have any wisdom of hindsight. It's a book that I feel is very different than my other books because I'm hiding. I'm hiding behind the character. And I'm not talking about what I really want. I don't have anything to say about it because it's happening to me at the time. And so it's a very surface book.

Do you want to go back to Hulk?

No [laughs]. No, I don't. It's done.

I don't believe in the idea of low art. I think that things like the Fast and Furious franchise are as important as Schindler’s List. I do. I think that this idea that 200 people got together and made something so that you don't have to think about your wife in a fight and shit like that for two hours is beautiful. It's a really amazing thing. I think that distraction is as important as introspection. My books have always made sure that I get a healthy mix of both.

With Hulk though, it was all that, it's all distraction shit. That's what I needed. And so Hulk is definitely me running from shit. So, sorry guys, about Hulk. They can't all be tens.

I appreciate the honesty on that. That's an interesting perspective coming back to it. You had a Marvel exclusive going into this - is that still in place?

No. Not for any bad reason, it just lapsed.

At my highest point, I was writing eight ongoing series. It was a script due every two days. I can't fathom doing four right now. It's a symptom of time and age, too. I’m not the young ingenue of comics anymore. I'm not the bad boy of comics anymore. I'm 40! Like, how old is this industry that I was the cool young kid?

So what’s your interest in creator-owned versus licensed comics right now?

What I'm doing right now is a very, very weird book. And it's not anything I can talk about, it'll be announced this summer. And people won't expect it. People won't see it coming at all.

I've been talking to DC and Marvel, and they're all very kind. We're all just waiting for a time that I can be, for lack of a better term, reliable, so that I can actually perform where I want to be.

It's not necessarily them saying no or me saying no. Like, I created the Ultimate Spider-Man that Jonathan’s [Hickman] doing.

I pitched that in the room a couple of months before we were gonna start on it, CB [Cebulski] loved it. We built up the entire series. That's why the Maker plot is in Venom. I wrote the outline and some of the scripts for Ultimate Invasion, and then my car accident happened.

It just wasn't gonna be realistic to even try anything. People have asked about why Jonathan's version doesn't adhere to where mine was. And I think it's important to note that Jonathan probably doesn't feel comfortable taking story points from a guy in the hospital who can't write it. And I respect that. I think that Ultimate Spider-Man is a great fucking book. I do.

My entire pitch for that book was that people want him to be married, to have kids. Do it for them! What are we doing here? There’s an entire contingent of people screaming for him and Mary.

It's like we have a Chili's, you have people screaming for ice cream. No, fuck you, we don't have ice cream. Sell ice cream! What the fuck's wrong with you?

It wasn't a hard pitch. The thing is that people who read those original Ultimate Spider-Man books are now my age, right? And Spider-Man’s not really a cipher for us anymore. Because we've all got jobs and kids and stuff like that. And the idea of great responsibility is way different than Peter's life.

So you have to see what's harder? To be Spider-Man with this idea of responsibility when you have no one at home waiting for you? It's hard when there's a lot; it takes more of a hero, but he does it even though he has these things at home, to me.

So I said, the ultimate Spider-Man for us would look like us; a little gray in the beard, has to go to the store and get stuff for the kids. I was like, that's what people would respond to now because we grew up and didn't have a Peter for us anymore. Tom Holland's a kid. The guy in the main run is perpetually a kid. But Spider-Man has always been there for me. And I pitched it because I wanted to have a Spider-Man for me.

I'm not gonna get too upset. For the first time in my life, I have a Spider-Man book that I can't read. It was mine. I can't read it anymore. I designed it and pitched it as mine, and now… he looks like me! He looks exactly like me in the fucking book, with kids and everything. It's like I can't read it. It's Jonathan's thing, doing a version of a song that I wrote.

And you wanted it to be yours?

It's not like anything against Jonathan. Oh, it's a beautiful, great book. But I have emotions attached to that book that no one else on the planet does.

It's the same with Knull in the film [Venom: The Last Dance]. Watching Knull talk on screen, I'm the only person on the fucking planet who has this emotional system with this character. Like, I created this guy high in the bathtub. It’s a very weird and lonely experience sometimes.

Does the Knull situation make you think twice about putting a creation into Big Two work?

No. I'm never gonna let money or politics or legal shit get in the way of being the best I can. Listen, I'm there for a reason, I'm there to play in their band.

It's not about how much money I make. It's about how much money you make off the thing that I make. And there comes a point when you're talking to billion-dollar corporations, where when they say no to you, it's personal because they can afford it.

The Maker plots you were seeding in Venom. What can you tell fans about where you were thinking of taking that? Obviously, it went a different direction in Ultimate Invasion.

The idea was that if you can fucking time travel, right? Then you don't go back in time and kill Peter, you go back in time and kill the spider. So the Maker was unmaking everyone's origin stories. Ultimate Invasion was just gonna be him going back in time and slapping the super soldier serum out of the guy’s hand, or finding Bruce [Banner], and “Yeah. Don't go to work today.” That's the most cold blooded shit in the world. You steal dreams from people who didn't know that they had them. Which is apropos of things that happened to me. It was gonna be, Peter got to the place in the Ultimate Spider-Man where he was - I think Jonathan did a version of this - where basically he chooses to be Spider-Man as an adult.

He had a choice to be Spider-Man. A version of him that chooses to do that, knowing what's gonna happen, and giving him this spider, telling him to choose. It’s a completely different dynamic for a character to choose to have your parents die versus your parents getting killed. You know what I'm saying? Which I also call bullshit on the whole Bruce Wayne thing. A lot of people's parents died, dude. Like they don't…No, that's not okay. He's beating criminals on the streets as a billionaire. Like right now, if we were in the world, we were now, and there was a guy in Denver who was, like, in an Ironman suit beating people to death. People would all go, That's Elon Musk. The only person who could be doing that is the insane billionaire dude. It wouldn't be that hard to fucking windle down.

I always thought that he should just get rid of Bruce Wayne. Or what he should actually do is the Tony Stark thing and just go, yeah, I'm Bruce. When Vlad the Impaler, who would go on to become known as Dracula…He did this thing in town. He had this golden cup, and he went into the middle of this town square, and he put it on the ground, and he said, Take it. It was there for a hundred years. If I ever wrote Superman, I would do this thing, and he would just give up being Clark Kent. He’d take his glasses off, just put him them in a town square. And they'd be there for a thousand years. No one would ever do anything. Until Bruce came along and stepped on them anyway.

But back to Ultimate U and the Maker [laughs]

That was the idea. It was unraveling Marvel’s origins, and then you have the characters with the choice of being who they're gonna be. Rather than these things happening to them.

I think it's a powerful distinction, and it becomes the ultimate choice. And it's all obviously anchored by Peter. And the idea is that Marvel doesn't want to give him kids and a wife because the character is evergreen. The character has always gotta be the model of who it is.

Eventually, when you give him the wife and kids, eventually what's gonna happen is either he's gonna have adult kids and you have a grandfather as Spider-Man, or he's gonna lose a child, or he's gonna get a divorce. That's their reasoning. That taints Spider-Man over time.

My argument would be he killed Gwen Stacy like a year into it. He broke that bitches’ neck. He's okay. He's been divorced. All these things have already happened.

The way that I think of these characters is that you don't honor these characters by treating them as fragile. I think it's our job as the inheritors of the legacy of these characters to try to break them as hard as you can. And it's only in doing that that they will show you how strong they are.

Look, every character survived the nineties. They can't be broke. If we didn't fuck up fucking mullet Superman dying, coming back… and I mean Cap was a Nazi, and Peter can’t have a kid? What are we doing?

Just say you don't wanna do that's fine. Then I think it presents a whole new set of beautiful choices that Peter has these things that he's gonna lose as opposed to not getting them, so that he doesn't have to lose them. At a certain point, he becomes selfish in that is really beautiful because he should be selfish to a certain point, if he has, because he fucking made a deal with the devil for an 80-year-old lady.

I'm curious about the status of all your creator-owned stuff as well. What are the plans for Redneck, Crossover, Vanish? What do you want to do with them?

Unfortunately, all the guys that I worked with are mega talented and got new jobs. So if you want me to go back and do Vanish, tell Ryan [Stegman] stop doing fucking X-Men. And we'll get right on it. Honestly, I don't want to go ahead and do it with anyone else.

But you want to continue them?

Yeah, of course. Look, it'll be a different me writing. The guy who wrote all his books died. So I don't know if my writing style will sound like that. I can still write. I think it's good. Is it gonna sound like the same guy? I don't know.

You wrote in Crossover how your priorities shifted in between these big, traumatic events in your life. With the accident, what are you noticing as far as themes, things you're most interested in with your writing?

Man, it sounds weird. Memory is all we have. Like you and I are sitting together, right? Right now, we only exist in the memories of an older us. You know what I'm saying?

And so much of our lives, we don't remember, we don't recall birthdays. In that way, did it actually happen? Reality is just a continued remembrance of the past. And when that's taken away from you, it gets really fucking weird and surreal very fast.

At the height of all that stuff with Marvel and everything, I was very well off financially, and, with divorces and hospital bills, that tends to not be the case. I never cared about money. I spent it on friends. During COVID, I paid for every comic store in Austin to keep their doors open. I do it for the memories. You do it for experiences.

And to wake up from the accident and realize that the money and those memories are gone. It is surreal to the point of: is this a simulation? You have to find different ways of perceiving and enjoying life.

If you know that, like right now, what I'm doing with you, I will probably 99 percent have no recollection of having talked to you or any of the words I said. So I'll have to find a new way to exist in every moment. I've been doing like sound therapy, which is this weird thing where sound is the thing closest to tied to your memory. And like this trip right now, I pick a band and listen to nothing but that band, okay. And so when I listen to that music later – Rush – I’ll be taken to the Chicago thing.

Memory’s a big one for me. Being in the moment. Learning to love what you have, being grateful for things. I don't think that I was ever too high off all my shit like that. Like this arrogant douche bag, I don't think I ever got there, but I certainly hovered around it. I can see back now. But when you think it's gonna last forever… It's a lot of success, too.

If we ever meet again, I'm gonna bring some Neil Peart and some Rush and just see how it's going.

Subdivisions is one of the best ones ever. Subdivision.

I've been a drummer for 20 years, too. Don't ever read his novel, though. He wrote a book called Ghost Rider. It was after his whole family died. It's real dark.

Popverse: On Instagram, you said you'd buy the first issue for anyone who can guess your comeback book? Is this the creator-owned tease you had earlier? Or is this a licensed thing?

I never said it was creator-owned. I suspect no one will ever get it. It's that out there. I'm not buying books…I don't have like Venom cash anymore. It’s a weird book that you will never be able to guess, but when people hear he's doing a licensed book, they’re like, he’s doing Mega Man. It's not that. It's at the same time of being weird in left field as the biggest thing I've ever done in my entire life. I'm actively enjoying my life right now before it's announced because when it gets announced, it's gonna be so much different.

Wait and see.

You were teasing DC comics, with Superman and Batman clues in Crossover. You've mentioned you’re open to working for them. You wanna do some DC stuff?

My name is DC. Yeah, of course, I wanna do it all. Like I said, it's not an absence of them wanting me or anything, or Marvel too, it's just a matter of I have shit I want to get done first.

This will all make sense this summer. There’s a reason why I've not come back, gone back to DC or Marvel, like right away. And you'll understand why.

Last question. What’s the status of the God Country movie?

The writer’s strike of 20-whatever slowed that down, and COVID happened. Shut that down. And I think the director got on something else. I think they honestly think it's happening. They re-up the option every year, and so I can get paid for it. So I'm just happy they pay.

I have an idea for a sequel I kind of want to do. I'm probably not gonna do it because I don't wanna fuck it up. But I guess just know I have one [laughs].

Anything else you wanna make sure people know about?

I didn't crash the fucking boat. And I'm not shooting heroin. And what else did I read? I didn’t get into a fight with the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel about comics.

My ex-wife didn't put a curse on me. That's out there. We're all friendly. She's fine. I'm fine. I guess the thing I want them to know is I'm far less interesting than they actually think I am.

Or I’m lying. And I'm shooting heroin on a boat and worshipping Satan [laughs].