Kraven's Last Hunt

 

I couldn't think of a better way to start my blog than with one of my favorite storylines across all comics, Kraven's Last Hunt.

Kraven's Last Hunt (also known as Fearful Symmetry) was written by J.M DeMatteis for Marvel in 1987.  I didn't know the back story on this arc, until I was getting ready to write this blog.  J.M DeMatteis originally proposed this story to Tom DeFalco at Marvel in the mid-1980s, with Wonder Man being the one buried by his half-brother, Grim Reaper.  DeFalco turned it down.

DeMatteis pitched it to DC years later, this time exploring what would happen if Joker actually killed Batman.  DeMatteis stated it would effectively turn the Joker, "sane."  When he pitched it to DC, they declined because it sounded very similar to The Killing Joke, which was being developed at the same time.  DeMatteis reworked the story yet again, and replaced Joker with Hugo Strange, but it was still rejected by DC.

DeMatteis did not give up, and pitched the idea again to Marvel, but this time with Spider-Man being the lead character and he would buried by a new villain, that he would write specifically for the story.  After reading Kraven's entry in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, DeMatteis substituted the hunter for this new villain he was creating.

The story was originally supposed to run entirely in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, but the editor at the time decided to publish it as a crossover through all of the Spider-Man titles at the time, stating the impact of Spider-Man being killed would be lost if there were other Spider-Man stories running at the same time.

In 1994, DC published DeMatteis' Batman/Joker story as "Going Sane" in Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #65-68.