by Liam Isaacs
The following is a rejected draft of the afterword for Terrance Fellow’s Disaster Mob: 30th Anniversary Edition, published by Detonation! Comics (a subsidiary of Ubbe Iwerks Media).
The original Disaster Mob was published by Detonation! Comics in 1996, and its 30th anniversary edition is set to release later this year.
The draft in question is by Disaster Mob co-creator and lead artist, David Turetsky.
To be quite frank, I find it absurdly difficult to write this sort of thing. I know that’s rather cliché to say about a collection of one’s own work, but it’s true, and perhaps not for the reasons you’d expect. When Disaster Mob editor extraordinaire, Samantha Keith, asked me to fill up a couple of pages to introduce myself as co-creator of this treasured series, I was more than hesitant. Her email sat in my inbox for weeks until I had the courage to respond. That is, because, unfortunately, I have never felt entirely like the co-creator of the treasured series in question. And, on top of my imposterous attitude toward this work, it had barely been a year since my former friend and colleague, Terrance Fellow, who wrote the issues in this lovely hardcover collection you see before you, passed away.
Terrance and I met at a comics convention on a cold October morning in 1995. (This was still during a time when “ComicCons” were actually for comics, and not a place for adult children to ogle at corporate advertising on a weekday and buy ridiculous bobble-heads of their favorite superheroes, whose creators, by the way, never get a cent of the revenue those plastic-pieces-of-shit make.) Our booths happened to be across from each other at the rinky-dink venue we’d flown to in Maine. At that time, I was finishing up some ink work for a DC project that sold rather lacklusterly. I had pinned up prints of my most memorable pages and displayed some of my original art on my table beside my name.
I knew of Terrance, having read a few issues of his run on Uncanny Light-Man, but he seemed illusive, having come out of nowhere to do some work for the Big Two and quickly skyrocketing himself to fame and fortune (not that anyone could actually make a real fortune in this line of work). He was one of those McFarlane types, who had always been around, but you never realized how much of a star he was until it was too late. I’d heard a rumor that same year that Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief at Marvel, was his cousin or some such, but, in any event, he rose to comics greatness with apparent ease, and this first interaction with him was at the height of his commercial success.
There were also rumors he was planning to end his five-year contract with Marvel and start a book at this new independent publishing house, Detonation! Comics, which was making headlines for its unusually fair treatment of creators—this line of work pays like shit, something I’m sure my contemporaries reading this know all too well. It sounded wonderful to be part of something like that, but I was an up-and-coming artist, still barely breaking into the industry. I had no pull, no cousins that were editors-in-chief at Marvel.
No one had come to my table except for one teenager who seemed to think I was Dave Cockrum, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise. I waited for hours, watching fans walk by dressed as Spider-Man and Batman and one time as Swamp Thing. (No one dresses up as Swamp Thing and I thought it was pretty neat.) This was how it went at that time in my life; I was very accustomed to the tedious convention grind. But having been placed across from comics-superstar Terrance Fellows, I was a little peeved, and on that day in particular, packing it all up for good crossed my mind more than once. I watched as lines and lines of fans waited to have their issues of Light-Man signed.
At noon, I began to gather my things to take my lunch break when Terrance left his assistant at his booth and walked across the aisle toward me. I couldn’t believe it. I sat right back down, making eye contact with him. His sharp smile with those mid-westernly crooked-teeth pinned me to my chair. He said something like, hi, I’m Terrance Fellows, and I said something like, yes I know who you are, the pleasure is mine, would you like to look at my work? Of course I would, yada, yada, etc, etc.
He thumbed through my pencils, then happened across a sketch I had done earlier that day. It was of a spider-ape-hybrid creature, toting a hyperbolically large rifle, a bandoleer around his chest, and a beret upon his little monkey-head. Terrance asked who he was, and I told him it was an original character, and I hadn’t come up with a name yet.
“Really, no name?” he asked.
“Uh,” I stammered, “how about Glitch?”
“Love it. I really dig this guy. What’s his deal?”
“A soldier, I think. For a fascist dictatorship or something.”
“Hell yeah, man. I wanna write a comic for this guy.”
He said it so nonchalantly. Terrance always had this casual air to him, like everything was really no big deal at all. That same day, Terrance asked me to draw a few more designs for characters like Glitch—sketches that would later become Red Diamond, Hawk, Golden Sage, and Featherfall, the fan-favorite characters you see here in this lovely hardcover collection before you.
He told me, “Let’s see what else you can come up with by the end of the day, and we can hash out the details later.” He gave me his hotel room number and the next day, at breakfast, we hashed it out.
Of course, as you already know, Glitch and his friends would become the members of a rag-tag group of monsters, science-experiments-turned-soldiers, that went awol at the end of the Vietnam War, and thus, our baby, Disaster Mob was born. Later that same October, we pitched the idea to Detonation! Comics and I got to drawing the first issue’s cover.
Had I not drawn Glitch that day, had I gotten up earlier for my lunch break, had we been placed at different corners of the venue, my life would have never changed, and I might never have broken into comics. But then again, even after the success of Disaster Mob, my life didn’t change all that much compared to my “co-creator.”
The first chapter’s script was an exhaustive 74 pages of tiresome exposition for an issue that was supposed to be 22 pages long. He called me frantically as I was getting into bed one night and asked me to cut down the script and illustrate the first few pages by the next day (this was before the impeccable Samantha Keith joined us as our editor). I told him I’d do my best, as I was just as excited as he was, but this became a frustrating pattern.
Many of the first twenty issues of the series were delivered to me like this—unedited, messy, and way too long. The ones that weren’t a laughable jumble of words came to me in panicky two-sentence letters. He wrote to me once: “Didn’t have time to write anything this week. How about the Mob meets aliens? Just go crazy. Do whatever you want.” This issue later became, “Monkeys in Space,” which I’m quite proud of.
Finally, Samantha joined us, and things got a bit easier, but I was still doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the storytelling side. Occasionally, I’d get a “script” that was a paragraph long, and I had to write the dialogue—which critics would note was never my strong suit. But, in all honesty, I was just happy to have a job. And one that was as successful as it was.
Disaster Mob was not the most commercially successful of Terrance’s work—anything he wrote for the Big Two far outsold the majority of his indie “masterpieces”—but it was by far his most critically successful. It was praised for its edgy, political take on what “superheroes” would actually be like in our real world. Although, in hindsight, that’s what everyone was trying to do at the time. And in fact, we had the occasional critic tell us we had gone too far (particularly with our takes on the Waco Siege and the Kent State Massacre) or that our book was a Watchmen rip-off.
After our grand finale in 1999, I saw Terrance for the last time at a “wrap party” of sorts at his new home in Los Angeles. We clinked champagne glasses and he told me he wanted to do something big with Disaster Mob moving forward, but he wouldn’t tell me what. I told him it sounded exciting, and I was on board, but I needed a break. At least for a month or two.
Unbeknownst to me, Iwerks Media was about to buy our little indie publisher, seeing as Detonation! Comics was going bankrupt. In the wake of this, Terrance was asked to expand the Disaster Mob universe, and began writing multiple new spin-off stories. I found out months afterwards when my agent sent me a solicitation for Disaster Mob: Echoes, featuring art by Rob Fucking Liefeld. New leadership wanted “better” artists—assholes that were big during that era, like J Scott Campbell, Erik Larsen, Marc Silvestri (excerpts of their work on the series can also be found in this lovely hardcover collection). Terrance never reached out to me, and ghosted me on several occasions after I, in my naivety, pleaded with Detonation! to have a meeting with him.
Terrance later said at a panel at San Diego ComicCon that he, in fact, had created Glitch, Red Diamond, Hawk, Golden Sage, and Featherfall. This was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. I thought about suing, but I knew I wouldn’t win a dime. It was Iwerks, and their legal team would crush me like Mr. Metal, Glitch’s infamous arch-nemesis. Moreover, Disaster Mob was work for hire, and what had happened to me was happening to everyone else—none of us really owned the rights to our characters.
Years later, Disaster Mob was given the major motion picture treatment, as many of Terrance’s later works were. I remember sitting in the theater with my wife in 2005, watching the credits roll on that mediocre feature—a butchering of the work I had done. At the time, it had been compared to Blade and X-Men but ultimately fell short of what made the original great—my goddamn art. My goddamn direction. And there, at the end:
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE CREATOR OF DISASTER MOB
TERRANCE FELLOW
There his name was, in the credits. And me, in the theater, sipping my Diet Coke, having not spoken to Terrance in years. I was still living in upstate New York, in the same house I lived in when drawing Disaster Mob, and he was living in Los Angeles, working with John Favreau on a live-action, Iwerks-funded Light-Man movie.
After seeing the dumpster fire that was Disaster Mob (2005), I thought about throwing out my original sketches of Glitch and his friends, which had been framed in my studio since I returned from that fateful Maine ComicCon trip. Instead, I sold them online and bought a new car, vowing to never think about Terrance or all the ways he screwed me over. Until, I suppose, now.
This lovely hardcover collection is, indeed, lovely. It harkens back to a simpler time. I do hope you’ve enjoyed reading it, just as much as I enjoyed creating Disaster Mob.
— David Turetsky, 2026
Dear David,
I appreciate the work you’ve done for this afterword, but I don’t think we can publish something like this. Our omnibus is a love-letter to Terrance and his work, and, as you know, it’s coming out on the anniversary of his fucking death. We can’t put something this degrading and libelous in a book that millions of fans will read. The socials will lose it. And my boss can’t take another scandal after the whole not-paying-artists-as-much-as-our-writers thing. I’ll give you another shot, but if you can’t deliver I’m reaching out to Liefeld.
All the best,
Samantha Keith
Reading into Culture 