Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Punisher is scary; he should be scary.
I love 'The Omen,' just as a piece of plotting.
Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.
I'm sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.
I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.
I think Batman has the Wolverine problem. I think he's overexposed.
I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.
My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.
For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.
Heroes are defined by their villains - Batman is nothing if he doesn't have Two-Face.
Character is made up of a variety of different things. One of those elements is gender.
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.
Every writer has characters that they become attached to and that they feel very strongly about.
Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best.
I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.
I am the product of Denny O'Neil in many ways, I carry forth a lot of what Denny instilled in me.
Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.
I tend to see - socially, I don't tend to be myself in a male role. I don't know any other way to put it.
The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows.
A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.
DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like 'The Avengers' breaking six hundred million domestic.
The goal of 'Revelations' is that once it's all done and finished, and you've read all of it, it is its own story.
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.
Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.
I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.
The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.
The goal with 'Alpha' was to run towards the cliches and then to break through them, and that doesn't change depending on the medium.
I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.
Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.
'Alpha' is a very fast-moving book. It doesn't lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to.
I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime 'ouvre,' there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.
When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.
Like nightclubs and sporting events, entry into an amusement park is a permission to become someone else. We come for the experience and to relish it.
I think that Batman loses his efficacy and mythology if he's got too many people around him. That's what the Justice League is for, you know what I mean?
There is a sequence in my 'Detective Comics' run where you can't find consecutive issues by the same artist. That's intentional. That was done on purpose.
When we're 16, we have lots of heavy thoughts. And these are the heavy thoughts, where, when we're in our 30s, we look at 16-year olds and sort of scorn it.
When there's a clear vision, and you've got the creative teams working toward that goal, each on their own, it can then come together quite elegantly at the endpoint.
I showed up pretty much at the exact right moment to end up with a lot of work on my plate very quickly, because I was young and foolish, and so I wrote very quickly.
To me, the joy you're going to get in a 'Punisher' story is watching him punish incredibly wicked people. Now, if you can add to that an emotional content, wonderful.
I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard.
Every character needs an adversary - one who is both challenging and a contrast for the hero. The best adversaries reveal something about the character they're contrasting.
I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.
We forget when we're all grown up. 16 was a long time ago. It's hard to remember how freakin' difficult it is as 16! Life is not easy, and you're trying to figure stuff out.
The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well.
When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'
All the sudden, I was part of the 'No Man's Land' thing, and there was a bundle of core writers for that, but somewhere along the line, I became the go-to guy after that initial arc.
You have to accept that Batman is a fact of life in Gotham City, and on top of that, you have to accept that somehow this city manages to function with a police force that's 90% corrupt.
I'm a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we're talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.
I think when you're working with a character that another writer is acting as - for lack of a better word - custodian of, your obligation as a professional is to not do anything that violates that 'primary' take.
You know how a nonlethal weapon is supposed to work? A nonlethal weapon works on the basis of three things: It needs to deter, and that's normally done through pain, and that pain creates a byproduct, which is fear.