Steve Niles and Brian Walsby Bring Gray Matter’s Story to Comics in TAKE IT BACK

Punk history hits different when somebody who lived it gets to tell the story himself. Take It Back: Life, Anxiety, and Gray Matter brings writer Steve Niles back to his years playing bass in Washington, DC punk band Gray Matter, but this is not some glossy backstage victory lap where everybody pretends the good old days were nothing but loud guitars and cool flyers. Niles is digging into friendship, anxiety, mental health and the creative scene that helped shape the writer he eventually became.

Released through DiWulf Publishing, the graphic memoir is written by Niles, illustrated by Brian Walsby and lettered by Monica Richards. Comic fans know Niles from 30 Days of Night, The October Faction, Frankenstein Alive, Alive! and his Cal McDonald stories. Before all those monsters hit the page, though, he was cutting his teeth in the ridiculously influential Washington, DC punk scene of the 1980s.

That distinction matters because punk memoirs can get corny fast when everybody starts polishing the past until the dirt disappears. The whole damn point of that scene was that it was messy, immediate and built by people figuring things out while they were doing it. Take It Back sounds interested in preserving that humanity rather than turning Gray Matter into another perfectly framed artifact from a legendary era.

Niles has described the project as one of the most challenging things he has written because talking about his own mental health battles is harder than inventing vampires and werewolves. That tells you exactly where the emotional weight is coming from. The monsters here are anxiety, memory and the stuff inside your own head that somehow gets louder when the amps finally go quiet.

As a musician, that part lands with me. Music can be escape, therapy, identity and a giant middle finger to whatever is eating at you, sometimes all during the same three-minute song. But eventually the rehearsal ends. The show ends. Everybody goes home. Whatever you were trying to drown out is still sitting there waiting for you, and a book willing to talk about that side of creative life has a chance to connect well beyond people who know every record in the Dischord catalog.

Walsby is the right kind of artist for this material because his own résumé is soaked in underground music culture. His work has been associated with bands including 7 Seconds, Descendents, Melvins, Die Kreuzen and Big Star, along with the underground magazine We Got Power. This is not somebody parachuting into punk because distressed lettering and photocopied flyers suddenly look cool again.

That shared cultural language should give the memoir an authenticity you cannot fake. Gray Matter came out of a Washington scene whose DIY attitude spread far beyond the clubs, basements and records that created it. Take It Back uses that world as emotional geography, where music, friendship, creativity and mental health are all tangled together instead of being separated into neat little chapters of a Wikipedia biography.

There is another layer here for comic readers because Steve Niles is so strongly identified with horror. If you only know the dude who helped make vampires terrifying again, this book opens a completely different door into where that creative voice came from. Suddenly the distance between punk rock and horror comics does not seem very far at all. Both thrive on outsiders, DIY energy, confrontation and creating something because waiting for permission was never part of the plan.

For punk fans, Take It Back is another piece of DC music history told by somebody who was actually there. For comics readers, it is a personal look at one of modern horror’s recognizable writers before the career everybody knows. And for anybody who has ever used music, art or some loud-ass creative obsession to survive what was happening inside their own head, this one may hit harder than expected.

Take It Back: Life, Anxiety, and Gray Matter is available from DiWulf Publishing for $20. Punk history is cool. Punk history that is willing to admit the people making it were complicated human beings is a hell of a lot more interesting.