Early Life & Career

Early Life

Matt Fraction was born December 1, 1975 in Chicago Heights, Illinois. He developed an affinity for telling stories as a child, and enjoyed reading both comic books and comic strips. The first comic he remembers buying was Batman #316. Comic strips he enjoyed include Peanuts and Doonesbury. He became a regular, weekly comic reader around the time that the 1985–86 DC Comics storyline Crisis on Infinite Earths ended, though he found that storyline too bizarre and impenetrable to a new reader; as a result, he gravitated toward Marvel Comics, finding Spider-Man to be his favorite, along with other books such as Star Wars and G.I. Joe.

In the late 1990s Fraction worked as an employee at the Charlotte, North Carolina-based comics retailer Heroes Aren't Hard to Find.

Career

Fraction started creating comics with smaller publishers including AiT/Planet Lar and IDW Publishing. He became known early in his career for his creator-owned work on The Five Fists of Science and Casanova, before taking on a number of increasingly high-profile assignments for Marvel Comics.

Fraction wrote two columns for Comic Book Resources: "Poplife" and "The Basement Tapes",the latter with Joe Casey.

Fraction teamed with Ed Brubaker for an acclaimed run on Marvel's The Immortal Iron Fist. The pair re-teamed on Uncanny X-Men for a short time, after which Fraction wrote the series solo until leaving it in 2011.He wrote The Mighty Thor and The Invincible Iron Man, the latter of which led to his consulting work on the set of the film Iron Man 2 and writing the Iron Man 2 video game that tied into that film sequel.

In 2011 Fraction wrote the event limited series Fear Itself, which was the central book of the crossover storyline of the same name. In December 2011 he revived the Defenders series with artist Terry Dodson and in August 2012 he started a new Hawkeye series with David Aja. As part of Marvel NOW!, Fantastic Four was relaunched in November 2012 with the creative team of Fraction and artist Mark Bagley and its spinoff series FF being produced by Fraction and artist Mike Allred. Fraction left both series due to other work commitments.

In February 2013, he was named on IGN's list of "The Best Tweeters in Comics", which described him as "the premier comics Twitter personality."

In 2013, Fraction co-created with Chip Zdarsky the series Sex Criminals for Image Comics. In 2014, he co-created with Christian Ward the series ODY-C, a science-fiction retelling of the Odyssey with the characters genders changed to women.