Long before Steve Niles made his name writing horror comics like 30 Days of Night, he was a teenager finding his footing in Washington, DC’s punk scene.
Niles played bass in Gray Matter, one of the bands associated with the fertile mid-’80s period known as Revolution Summer. But his new graphic novel, Take It Back: Life, Anxiety, and Gray Matter, isn’t simply another history of that much-documented era. Written by Niles, illustrated by Brian Walsby, and lettered by Monica Richards, the book uses Gray Matter and the DC hardcore scene as a backdrop for a more personal story about friendship, creativity, anxiety, and finding where you belong.
For someone who has spent decades inventing monsters, writing about himself proved considerably more difficult. “I think it was just time,” Niles tells No Echo. “Enough time had gone by so I could look back clearly. I had a few friends urging me to do it years ago, and that got the ball rolling.”
Niles went through numerous versions before arriving at the story that became Take It Back. Unlike his horror work, he didn't hide behind fictional characters or invented circumstances. “When I write monsters and horror, I make up everything. This one had to stick to the facts,” he says. “Luckily Dante has a great memory, and he helped me write a timeline for the band.”
One of the threads running through the book is Niles’ struggle with anxiety, something that predates Gray Matter and follows him well beyond his teenage years. Punk didn't make those feelings disappear, but discovering a community of young people creating their own music gave him direction.
“Finding out about punk and the fact that kids were doing it changed me,” he says. “It made me happy and made me want to make stuff. It helped me in many ways, in particular finding direction and what would later feel like my family. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn’t discovered the scene.”
That discovery would influence considerably more than the music Niles made.
Growing up around bands that booked their own shows and released their own records provided a blueprint he carried into comics. Rather than viewing publishing as an industry he needed permission to enter, he approached it much like the punk bands he'd grown up around: if you wanted to make something, you figured out how to make it yourself.
“It shaped everything I did and how I did it,” Niles explains. “When I thought about doing comics I never thought about going to the big companies to pitch stuff. I immediately thought, ‘let’s make comics,’ and started figuring out how to do it myself.”
Early projects including Fly in My Eye and his Clive Barker prints were self-published, extending an ethos learned in DC punk into an entirely different creative world. “The DIY ethic has been very important to me.”
Decades later, the Washington, DC scene Niles experienced firsthand has been documented, dissected, and mythologized to a degree few regional punk scenes ever have. From his perspective at the time, however, there was no sense that he and his friends were participating in something people would still be discussing more than 40 years later.
“I didn’t really know anything was happening at the time except there was an incredible explosion of music and new bands,” he remembers about the DC hardcore scene of the '80s. “The city was full of energy. People were putting on and playing shows. Bands like Rites of Spring were just amazing and really inspired others.”
Take It Back also refuses to give its author the neat ending that hindsight sometimes provides. Niles went from making his own comics to becoming an internationally successful writer, but anxiety didn't simply disappear along the way.
It still shows up before meetings and pitches. The difference is that he now knows how to live with it. “It still happens, but I don’t let it get in the way anymore,” Niles says. “I have ways to calm myself and deal with whatever I have to deal with, like meetings or pitches. It pops up now and again, but at least I don’t get sick anymore.”
Take It Back doesn't romanticize Niles' years in Gray Matter or the DC punk scene. What comes through instead is how much of that period stayed with him, from the DIY approach he carried into comics to the anxiety he's still learning to manage decades later. Us, too, Steve.
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Take It Back: Life, Anxiety, and Gray Matter is available now through DiWulf Publishing.
Steve Niles will be in Washington, D.C. for three days of Take It Back events:
- October 8: Panel discussion, Q&A, and book signing at the MLK Branch of the Washington, D.C. Public Library with Niles, Brian Walsby, Monica Richards, Geoff Turner, Mark Haggerty, and Dante Ferrando.
- October 9: Book signing with Niles and Walsby at Lost Origins Gallery in Washington, D.C.
- October 10: Book signing with Niles at Spin Time Records in Washington, D.C.
Tagged: gray matter
