Socrates should have written comics.
I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.
What I need is for comics to not cheapen out and just do what they think a bunch of bloodthirsty 15 year old fans want.
Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.
When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.
I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.
I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a 'soul' and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap.
Flash is about freedom; Flash is about expression. Flash is about just the joy of exuberant running and of freedom, and the moment you weight him down with too much Batman-like baggage... that's not the Flash anymore.
I'm not a big fan of the George Lucas school of meddling and tinkering. That's a slippery slope.
When you're a kid, regardless of the age you grew up, everything is high opera. With hormones raging, you have to fight external and internal battles that you've never had to deal with before. Unlike Tony Stark and Steve Rogers, who have seen it all and been through it all, everything heightens the drama.
The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.
Indestructible does not mean utterly invincible.
If you go back and look at the first issue of 'Indestructible Hulk,' if you have a sharp eye, you'll catch something that I totally forgot to put in there. In my horror, I only realized after the fact that I took totally for granted that everyone in the world knows what triggers the transformation.
Captain America is an interesting character because it makes you ask those questions in yourself as a writer. What do we want as a nation, what do we mean as a nation, what is our role in the world as a nation? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a country?
I got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.
Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.
Real science is the greatest, most exciting springboard I have available to me as a writer, and I don't feel the least bit constrained by it.
Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.
