Will Murray, a prolific pulp novelist and the co-creator of Squirrel Girl, died on August 24, 2026, at the age of 73.
“I was born in 1953, the same year the pulps died,” Murray said in a 1997 autobiographical sketch now at the Internet Archive, but ironically, he did a good deal to keep the category alive, writing almost two dozen Doc Savage novels as well as Tarzan and Mars Attacks!, almost always under a pseudonym.
By his own account, Murray started reading comics in 1961 and was introduced to The Shadow and The Green Hornet two years later via revivals of the radio shows on Boston’s WORL. “I was forced to read 1930s-era Nancy Drew books by a well-meaning third grade teacher who inadvertently exposed me to the kind of stuff that by the time I broke down and read my first Doc Savage in January 1969, basically meant there was no turning back,” he wrote in that 1997 profile. He began collecting pulps and related material, wrote fanzine articles, and published his own fanzine, Duende, on a very irregular basis – the two issues came out in April 1975 and Winter 1976/77. The third issue became The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, published in 1980 by Odyssey. “Universal used it as one of the source books for their ill-starred Shadow film,” he wrote. “Buying copies of the book meant they didn’t have to hire me as a consultant. I’ll never write another book like that again.”
In 1979, Murray graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, with a bachelor’s degree in English. That same year, he began his professional writing career with the afterword to the posthumously published Lester Dent Doc Savage novel The Red Spider. Dent was the creator of Doc Savage and wrote numerous novels and stories about the character, most of them under the name Kenneth Robeson, before his death in 1959. Through his fanzine writing, Murray became friends with Dent’s widow, Norma, and became her literary agent, helping with copyright, finding places to reprint Dent’s work, and buying the rights to the outlines for his unwritten novels. One of these outlines, Python Isle, became Murray’s first published novel and the first of 20 Doc Savage novels that he was to write in the coming years.
Murray also wrote a number of novels in Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir’s The Destroyer series, as well as two The Destroyer black-and-white series for Marvel.
Squirrel Girl made her first appearance in 1992 in a story titled “The Coming of… Squirrel Girl” in Marvel Super-Heroes Vol. 2 #8, published by Marvel Comics. Murray co-created the character with Steve Ditko. As he said in a 2009 interview with Jazma Online (now at the Internet Archive),
“Actually I created Squirrel Girl in script form without any artist input. Tom Morgan was originally going to draw it, but when he dropped out, I requested Ditko and got him. Ditko did a great job in bringing my baby to life. He invented that knuckle spike. It wasn’t in the script. I based Squirrel Girl ironically enough on a long–ago girlfriend who read comics and was into “critters”—wild animals of all types. Coincidentally, she was big Ditko fan. I think I got the idea because I had a bunch of squirrels running around my roof and sometimes coming in through my open bedroom window and inspiration struck.
“By a strange coincidence, although I never described SG physically in my story, Ditko somehow managed to capture the likeness of my old girlfriend. I’ve been thinking of pitching Marvel a Squirrel Girl project. She’s defeated most of the major Marvel super villains. It’s time she met her match in The Ultimate Pistachio.”
Marvel turned down Murray’s pitch for a follow-up story in which she tries to join the Fantastic Four, and she made only a few appearances from then until writer Dan Slott included her in his 2005 Great Lakes Avengers miniseries. She got her first solo ongoing series in 2014, with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson (see “Marvel Announces ‘The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl’ #1”). Although Murray’s original story has been reprinted in several collections, it appears to be his only published Squirrel Girl comic. While he wrote a number of prose stories featuring Marvel characters, including the novel Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Empyre, Murray’s comics credits end in the early 1990s.
That may have been because he was so busy writing both fiction and nonfiction, which included comics history. Over the course of his life, Murray wrote over 40 novels as well as short stories, nonfiction books, and articles, most of them about well-known characters from Sherlock Holmes to the creations of H.P. Lovecraft to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and he received several awards for his research and fiction. In 2023 he received the First Fandom Hall of Fame Award.
Source: ICv2
