by Matt Sernaker, Editor-in-Chief

ComicsOnline is back at one of our favorite Midwest conventions: FAN EXPO CHICAGO! This year, we were invited to do our regular press coverage and also support the event by moderating panels with their incredible talent.

To kick off our 2026 coverage, we are pleased to share a new exclusive interview with our old friend, writer/executive producer Greg Weisman (Gargoyles, The Spectacular Spider-Man, Young Justice). Weisman joined Host Matt Sernaker and shared his SECRET ORIGINS for our ongoing spotlight series. He also shared unique insights into his work on Gargoyles, The Spectacular Spider-Man, and more. Check out the full interview below:

ComicsOnline: Greg, I’m so excited to spend some time with you at FAN EXPO Chicago. It’s been a little while since we last saw each other, and I’m happy to celebrate everything that you’ve done in the world of comics and animation. It’s ComicsOnline’s 25th anniversary, and we’ve been highlighting secret origins, not of the characters that you’ve created, but of how you got started in the industry and the world of comics.

Greg Weisman: I was an editor on Secret Origins, for starters. I worked as assistant editor to Roy Thomas when he was editing Secret Origins at DC back in the ’80s. Dick Giordano, who was executive editor at DC Comics at the time, mentored me and brought me on as an editorial assistant, which was a very fancy title for Xerox Boy. Then I moved up to assistant editor, then associate editor, and I worked with Carrie Bates on Captain Atom. I’m from Los Angeles, so I was living in New York when I worked at DC, but I eventually moved back to L.A. and started working at Disney TV animation. There, I started off as a staff assistant, then became manager of current programming, and then director of series development. I created a show called Gargoyles, and moved over to produce that, and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing ever since.

CO: And you’ve gotten to continue to explore the world of Gargoyles more recently. How did that come to fruition?

GW: It happened in two phases. Back in the 2000s, some partners and I tried to get the license to Gargoyles comics, and Disney said no because we- our company, which is a generous way of putting what we were doing- had no experience, but they did team us up with SLG. So we did 12 issues of Gargoyles and six issues of Bad Guys, which have just been reprinted by Dynamite. More recently, Dynamite got a Disney license, and they wanted to do Gargoyles, and my editor approached me and asked me if I wanted to write it. I said I would kill to write it, and he said, good, because you’re the only guy on my list to write it. We’ve done a whole bunch of comics, uh, that have done very well for Dynamite and very well for me. It’s been really fun to work with these characters.

CO: Was it an organic slip back into these characters, or did it take some time for you to refine?

GW: No, it was pretty easy. I mean, I never stopped thinking about Gargoyles. I have so many of those black-and-white composition books. I have 12 of them with story ideas for Gargoyles, and I have a timeline that’s 500-something pages long. So, I’m never gonna run out of Gargoyles stories, and it was great to have a venue to tell some of them.

CO: I don’t know if you’re allowed to answer this, but there was some talk recently of Gargoyles returning in some form to Disney in animation or live action. Is there anything that you can share?

GW: Well, I know the live-action side of it is, uh, the Atomic Monster had the license to develop a live-action Gargoyles for Disney+, and that’s dead. I have no idea about animation, but there are no current plans for live-action.

CO: Well, moving to a different property, our first meeting was from The Spectacular Spider-Man. I genuinely loved every conversation I’ve had with you, the cast, and crew over the years. How does it feel that The Spectacular Spider-Man still is, in many people’s minds, the number one animated version of Spider-Man?

GW: Without meaning to sound arrogant or immodest, that was the goal, you know? That’s what we were going for. I didn’t want the show to be like Batman: The Animated Series, but I wanted it to have that kind of resonance for Spider-Man. We were a very different show, but we wanted it to feel definitive. We had what we called the five Cs: we wanted it to be both classic and contemporary. We wanted it to be cohesive and coherent, and we wanted it to be iconic, which I know doesn’t begin with a C, but has a nice hard C as the second letter. And we really set out to try and make something that people would look at and go, yes, that’s Spider-Man. Yes, that’s the Green Goblin. Yes, that’s Venom. Yes, that’s the Lizard. That’s Mary Jane. That’s Gwen. We wanted people to look at it and go and really recognize it. And for younger viewers, we didn’t have much exposure to Spider-Man, which is almost impossible because the Sam Raimi movies were happening at the same time. But we wanted them to have the same excitement about Spider-Man that we all had when we first read it.

CO: I went back and rewatched it recently. It holds up so beautifully, and like many others, I wish that you guys got to continue the story. With all the reboots and changes that keep happening, maybe someday that could happen.

GW: It seems unlikely. I wish I could say otherwise, but nothing would make me happier; I’d love to be wrong and get another chance to do it.

CO: So continuing on the Spider-Man theme, you got to do the Spectacular Spider-Men comic for Marvel. Did you get to pitch that to Marvel, or did they come to you?

GW: They actually came to me and said, we’re doing an ongoing title with Peter and Miles. Do you want to do it? I said, yes. I think some of the people in editorial have been reading the Gargoyles comics and knew I could write halfway decently. And then some other people remembered, Oh, yeah, he’s the guy who did the Spider-Man show. So, uh, you know, obviously, it’s in the main Marvel continuity. It’s not Spectacular continuity, but I suggested they title it the Spectacular Spider-Men. I thought that’ll sell more books coming from me, and spiritually, I felt it was a descendant of Spectacular. Continuity is not exactly the same, but the way I write Peter is the way I write Peter. When we did the TV show, he was in high school, and now he’s obviously in postgraduate school and perpetually 26. Miles is perpetually 16, and I just felt like they had been in a sort of mentor-mentee relationship for, I don’t know, 25 years. I’ve had mentors, and I’ve been a mentor, but over time, if that relationship is gonna last, it has to become a true friendship. You know, you just don’t stagnate as mentor and mentee if the relationship is gonna be ongoing. And so that’s how I built it. It’s like, now they’re just buddies checking in with each other, and that also allowed Peter to be kind of a goofball. He’s hanging out with a teenager, so he feels free to just be… himself and not be too serious. But Miles, on the other hand, is hanging out with an adult, so he’s trying to be the grown-up in the relationship. You know, in moments of crisis, Peter becomes the grown-up when he needs to be, but he’d rather just relax and kick back and have fun.

CO: Well, I loved that Josh Keaton, a number of voice actors, actually acted out several panels and pages from your run.

GW: Josh was wonderful, because I do not have any technical know-how whatsoever. I had this idea because we had this one really funny scene between Peter and Kenny at the coffee shop, but I didn’t know how to do it. I contacted Josh and Andrew Kishino, who had played Kenny King Kong in our TV series, and asked, “Would you guys do this?” Josh said, I’ve got you covered. And then we wound up doing a whole bunch of them for a number of different issues. Lacey Chabert came back and played Gwen, Zarah Fael played Ms. Marvel, and Zino Robinson played Miles. That’s who I would cast if I were doing the show anyway. So it was a lot of fun.

…

Special thanks to Greg Weisman and FAN EXPO Chicago for this interview.

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