Michael Reaves

Michael Reaves was an American author and television writer, an Emmy Award winner for his work on Batman: The Animated Series, who moved between screenwriting and prose fiction across a long career, including extensive contributions to the Star Wars expanded-universe novel line. He is best known in a collaborative-fiction context for co-creating the InterWorld trilogy with Neil Gaiman, built around Joey Harker, a boy who discovers he can slip between the countless parallel Earths of the Altiverse and is recruited by alternate versions of himself to keep two opposing cosmic factions from tipping the balance between magic and science. Reaves and Gaiman launched InterWorld in 2007, blending YA multiverse-hopping adventure with a genuinely inventive central hook: Joey's teammates are all the same person refracted across infinite realities, letting the story explore identity and difference through a cast that is simultaneously one character and dozens. Reaves's television background contributed a fast-paced, visually driven sensibility to the series. The two sequels, The Silver Dream and Eternity's Wheel, were co-written not by Reaves himself but by his daughter, Mallory Reaves, continuing the series and its distinctive premise after his direct involvement in writing further installments ended. Reaves died in 2020.