Indie Comics Love in Prime Time

Another thing I got to do after coming home was watch the TiVo’ed version of Sunday’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which included a shoutout to Love & Rockets, the independently published comic from Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez widely credited with creating the “alternative comics” boom of the ’80s that cleared a path for today’s graphic novel-saturated market.

The episode was scripted by L&O:CI co-executive producer Gerry Conway, who has his own rich ties to the comic book world. He began writing for DC when he was still a teenager; by the age of 19, he’d flipped over to Marvel where he landed the Spider-Man gig—killing Gwen Stacy and co-creating the Punisher—then briefly served as editor-in-chief before making a full return to DC. With fellow comics writer Roy Thomas, he wrote the screenplay to Fire & Ice and the story idea for Conan the Destroyer. Soon after that, Conway started writing for Saturday morning cartoons, then worked his way up to prime-time crime shows. He first wrote for the original Law & Order franchise in 1999, and has scripted several episodes of Criminal Intent while serving as a producer since the show’s 2001 debut. (At least one script features a blatant Marvel in-joke, with a killer named “Roger Stern,” one of Conway’s comic-writing peers.)

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