I'm a huge fan of anything Ed Brubaker does. A lot of his 'Daredevil' stuff. A lot of his creator-owned stuff, too. His 'Criminal stuff,' I'm really into.
Comic books themselves are getting more literate. And there are people who are screenwriters and television writers and novelists who are writing for the comics, for some reason, they love doing it and some of the art work in the comics, I mean it rivals anything you'll see hanging on the walls of museums, they're illustrations more than drawings and all the people are discovering this and they're turning on to it.
I've been a Marvel reader since I was just a kid, and I've dreamed of being a Marvel writer for almost as long, so being tapped to officially join the team is truly something.
I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.
I have grown up reading Marvel Comics and Marvel movies with their intricately woven storylines. It is fascinating to see how Marvel has created characters and stories that resonate so well with audiences across the globe, making movies at a scale that one had never before imagined.
At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
I think our Batman had to be fun, light-hearted, funny, tongue-in-cheek... and I think that made kind of an homage to those earlier comic books, where Batman always had a quip or something.
In the Golden Age of Batman, I penciled, inked, and lettered my strip by myself.
I was into Alan Moore and Frank Miller. I was a teenager when all those books where coming out for the first time - 'Watchmen,' 'V for Vendetta.' It was a great time to get into comics.
I'm a big comic book geek and I've been reading comic books since pretty much since I was five or six in 1971 or something like that. So, I mean, I read it all and there's certainly a lot of different iterations of Superman that I personally have enjoyed more than others.
I think comics will always be around. I think there's something nice about a comic book. People love to hold 'em, turn the pages, fold 'em up, roll 'em up, stick 'em in their back pocket, show 'em to a friend, and say, "Hey, look at this."
With comics, you always talk about a big break, but there are a lot of big breaks in your life and not one of them makes a big difference.
I love writing comics too much.
I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read.
There's something exciting about weekly strips in that you're following the way the story reveals itself to the writer week by week. All the possible directions it could have taken are there; it's a kind of participatory reading that I think books discourage.
I never thought I would work in mainstream superhero comics or Valiant or Marvel. I just set out to make the kinds of stories I wanted to make, which at the beginning was small personal stuff like 'Essex County.'
Ever since I'm done with Zim everyone thinks that I'm going to go back to comics. I've been flooded with emails asking me if I'm working on the new Johnny over and over again.
When I started writing comics, 'comics writer' was the most obscure job in the world! If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have become a moody English screen actor.
I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.
It's very strange for me to do a comic book for my first movie. But I used to collect - and I love - comic books.
I love the challenge of taking established, iconic comics characters and showing readers why they remain contemporary.
I have nothing to do with comics. I know nothing about comics. I am aware of the importance of comics, but they're not within my world. Not because I feel that I'm above it, but just that micro-surgery is not in my world either. Is that a deficit or is that an advantage?
I had never been a comic book person before, really, because I had no access to them. Once I had access, I thought that these are just another avenue for telling stories and delving into the imagination.
I knew I really wanted to work in comics in 1979.
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.
