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It's been two years since a new issue of comics by Donny Cates has been published. But it's not due to a lack of desire; in 2023, Cates suffered a severe brain injury in a near-fatal car wreck. While everyone survived thankfully, that and other issues left him unable to work, as he tells us he was focusing on trying to live after he dealt with short-term memory loss on a daily basis for six months. But two years later, he's on the mend - we visited with him at New York Comic Con 2024, and as well as at the recent C2E2 2025 - and its there we talked to him and he revealed he's mounting a comeback.

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

While Cates says this "very, very weird book" is not anything he can talk about, we did manage for him to talk about it within the context of his career and expectations given his past.

"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," says the writer. "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."

Cates said this "weird book" is one of "a few things" that he expects to be announced this summer, and in some respects, it's him returning to projects he had been working on prior to the accident.

"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?'"

Donny Cates on returning to Marvel and/or debuting at DC

While Cates is best known for his groundbreaking work at Marvel on such titles as Venom, Absolute Carnage, and Thor, it's not for Marvel, and his five-year exclusive contract with Marvel has ended. Prior to the accident, Cates expressed interest in renewing it with Marvel, but as he tells us now he's a free agent.

"No. No. Not for any bad reason, [my Marvel contract] just lapsed," says Cates.

And while he has a serious interest in working for Marvel and DC, for that matter, he says it's premature to go down those roads at this time. 

"I've been talking to DC and Marvel, and they're all very kind," says Cates. "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."

At one point, Cates was balancing four to five monthly books a month for Marvel while also nurturing a series of ongoing and not-yet-launched creator-owned series. 

"At my highest point, I was writing eight ongoing series. It was a script due every two days," Cates says, referring to a balance of his Marvel ongoing work with his creator-owned series. "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?"

Following his 2023 car wreck, Cates's two ongoing series for Marvel - Thor and Hulk - ended prematurely, and his creator-owned series such as Redneck (with Lisandro Estherren), Crossover (with Geoff Shaw), Vanish (with Ryan Stegman), The One You Feed (with Dylan Burnett), and Flood (with Megan Hutchison) all went on hiatus while he recovered. As Cates recovered, however, his collaborators ended up understandably taking other projects.

"Unfortunately, all the guys that I worked with are mega talented and got new jobs," says Cates. "So if you want me to go back and do Vanish, tell Ryan to 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."

Cates does want to finish those stories, but in addition to waiting until his co-creators' schedules open up, he's also facing the very real fact that he's considerably different following his brain injury.

"Look, it'll be a different me writing. The guy who wrote all his books died," says Cates. "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 can read Popverse's full interview with Donny Cates here.

Get ready for what's next with our guide to upcoming comics, how to buy comics at a comic shop, and our guide to Free Comic Book Day 2025.