Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going, or will he just fade away?
There's always been this feedback between comics and films. But I think that if you take that analogy too far, if you only see comic books in terms of films, then eventually the best we can end up with is films that don't move. It would make us a poor relation to the movie industry.
I don't really have any great interest in writing for movies. Comics, to me, is a much more promising field. There's still a lot of ground to be broken in comics, whereas movies, to a degree... I don't know. They're a wonderful art form, but they're not my favorite art form. They might not even be in the top five of my favorite art forms.
When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.
The comics I made from 1990 to 1997 were largely based in vaguely urban, vaguely dystopic settings because that was my reference point for comics storytelling in general.
Comics are stories; they're like novels or anything else. So the first thing you have to do is become a good storyteller.
Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.
In the comic-book world, there tends to be an overblown sense of tradition. Bad habits die hard. There are ways I think the form could work more effectively if we lost the bad habits that were created before we were born.
The important information you need at the beginning of an issue. Like way they did the old Frank Miller Daredevil issues in the first five pages he always had to state his origins and how he got his powers.
The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first 'Spiderman' game as well as 'Fantastic Four,' and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.
Coming from the world of comics, I was very surprised that writers and illustrators, for the most part, don't talk, and they don't collaborate.
Comics are essentially films with fewer frames per second.
I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.
To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.
I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn't really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, 'Nah, let's change that,' and I designed the page.
I feel like I understood the language of comics. I had a real fluidity with that medium at a very early age.
