John Ney Rieber

John Ney Rieber is an American comic book writer.

Career John Ney Rieber's first professional work in comics was scripting over the finished pages of the graphic novel Tell Me, Dark, conceived by his late friend and mentor Karl Edward Wagner and artist Kent Williams. Initially, Williams approached Wagner with five pages of art asking him to write a story around that. Wagner agreed, and the pair signed a contract with DC Comics to release an 80-page hardcover graphic novel. At the beginning of production, the book's initial editor Karen Berger took an extended maternity leave. The replacement editors accepted Wagner's script, but as soon as Berger returned, she rejected the script and asked for rewrites, while Williams also changed some narrative elements as he saw fit. One year later, as the changes from all sides kept being made, Rieber, who at the time was working on the 4-issue prestige mini-series Shadows Fall for Disney Comics' failed Touchmark imprint, offered to rewrite the story using the finished pages after seeing the struggles that Wagner and Williams were going through:

After the collapse of Disney Comics, Art Young, Touchmark's Editor-in-Chief, went back to DC Comics and offered everyone he was developing projects with to continue working for DC's new imprint Vertigo. Commenting on the assignment, Rieber said he was hired "accidentally", after then-Marvel Knights editor Stuart Moore mentioned the book in a conversation, offered Rieber to write some samples and liked them enough to give him the book (despite "looking for a heavy hitter <...> like Frank Miller or Greg Rucka"; In addition to the ongoing Captain America series, Rieber was supposed to write two mini-series starring the character: the out-of-continuity Captain America: Ice, which was announced in February 2002 by the artist Jae Lee and subsequently integrated into the main book as its third arc, and another one, unannounced, which was supposed to bridge the three-month gap between the previous volume and the Marvel Knights one (the writer of the eventual bridging mini-series Darko Macan later confirmed that it was Rieber who was supposed to be the original writer.) While Rieber's original outline for the series was supposed to start with "The Extremists", which became the title's second arc, To finish both "The Extremists" and "Ice" (which, by the time Rieber left, had only one fully scripted issue), Marvel hired Chuck Austen who was also rejected at the launch in favor of Rieber but still agreed to bring his plots to a close.