Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I didn't get into comics as a stepping stone.
I'm intimidated by anyone with a British accent.
'Ghost Rider' definitely has an appeal that's far beyond comics.
Thankfully, I have a job where it does not matter in the least what I look like.
Chaykin at his ballsiest and most dynamic. This is how the Shadow should be done.
I love working at Marvel, but it was definitely DC that got me hooked as a reader.
From the get-go, 'Original Sin' was always as much a Nick Fury story as anything else.
'Scalped' is representative of the kinds of stories I like to read and I like to watch.
If you liked my 'Ghost Rider' run, you're going to love what they're doing in 'Punisher.'
I haven't really used Loki at all in 'Thor: God of Thunder' or the previous volume of Thor.
Just the idea that no matter what Thor is up to he comes back to Earth is something special.
'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.
The first big long-form work I did in comics was 'Scalped' for Vertigo, which ran for 60 issues.
For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.
There's a high level of communication between all of us at Marvel, and between Marvel and Lucasfilm.
Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories.
Hopefully I'm learning a lesson from every new thing I write, whether it features guys in spandex or not.
Especially those first few years of my comic book career, I had no idea what was going to happen the next day.
I went back and started reading with Thor's first appearance, and my goal is to read all 600-plus issues in a row.
I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.
'Scalped' No. 1 was only the third comic script I'd ever written. I really learned a lot about writing on the fly with that series.
I don't really have any interest in doing Donald Blake stories. Maybe it's just I don't know what to do with that sort of alter ego.
Are you kidding? They had me at 'Star Wars.' The kid inside me would've clawed his way out and strangled me if I'd turned this job down.
Yes, you know Luke Skywalker isn't going to die in issue #3. But that doesn't mean you've seen every Luke Skywalker story there is to tell.
I don't know about young Thor and King Thor getting their own series someday, although it would be nice if I could write three Thor series at the same time.
You can imagine sitting in a room for three days talking about comic books, eight hours a day. It gets wacky and very nerdy. It also gets contentious at times.
I think if we can accept Thor as a frog and a horse-faced alien, we should be able to accept a woman being able to pick up that hammer and wield it for a while.
You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.
I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.
What's nice is between 'Wolverine and the X-Men' and 'Thor,' I get to write two very different kinds of stories. Both of them really seem to scratch some itches for me.
I'm happy I can sit home in my office and make up stories about superheroes. And I only have to deal with a pretty limited amount of people to get those comics produced.
This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR. This is the THOR of the Marvel Universe. But it’s unlike any Thor we’ve ever seen before.
Putting together a list of heroes for 'Original Sin' was a long process, just like figuring out the villains. Along the way, some were taken out, and a few more were added.
As a kid, I was definitely a DC guy. I started reading big time in the '80s at the height of the Wolfman/Perez 'New Teen Titans.' That was definitely the book that hooked me.
I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film.
I think the oldest comic I got when I was a kid was an issue of 'World's Finest' - it had a Neal Adams cover with Batman where he had turned into a bat, and he was attacking Superman.
We had that first Marvel NOW! retreat where everybody came in and pitched their new books, which was probably the most exciting retreat I've ever been to because it was all brand new.
I love characters who are kind of haunted by their pasts, who struggle on despite their flaws, knowing that, at the end of the day, they're not going to shuffle off to those pearly gates.
Over the course of my entire Wolverine career, I went from being a single guy to getting married and having kids, and I think you can see that progression in the way that I treated Wolverine.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.
I wrote and drew my own books on notebook paper, and I'd staple 'em together. I had my own fictional company, and we had our own thinly veiled offshoots of whatever was popular at Marvel and DC at the time.
Overall, I'm happy how 'Original Sin' has come together. It's an amalgam of all I've done at Marvel, mixing the gritty, violent 'Punisher Max' stuff with the zany, light-hearted 'Wolverine & The X-Men' work.
I love the Marvel movies, but I always feel like we should be a step ahead of the movies. One of the reasons those movies have been so good and so successful is that they've been very good at mining the comics.
I just remember how cool and exciting and crazy it seemed when Marvel was giving this new 'Ultimate Spider-Man' title to this crime writer Brian Michael Bendis who had never really done any superhero stuff before.
'Original Sin' is one of those ideas that has been circulating for several years at the Marvel retreats we have a couple times a year. We have all these ideas floating around for a bit before we figure out how to align them.
It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.
Thor is a god who's lived in Asgard most all his life, but I think he still has a sense of awe and wonder about the place. I want us, as readers, to have that same sense of awe whenever we see, finally see, the golden spires of Realm Eternal.
I always liked the idea that Thor was the god who'd wake up every day and look at that hammer and not know whether he was going to pick it up. Only the worthy can lift the hammer of Thor, and I love the idea of a god who was always questioning his own worthiness.
To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.
An important part of any good mystery story like 'Original Sin' is that it's not just a game of 'Clue' with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it's far from the whole story.