If I won the lottery tomorrow - which would be a real trick, since I haven't entered - and was independently wealthy for the rest of my life, I'd write comic books, because it's what I like doing.
I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity.
It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens.
I seem to like playing with form, and the superhero genre has an awful lot of formula to it. It has a lot of formula to it that I don't think it should be limited to.
The metaphor is the story, not the character.
If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.
The metaphors exist for the stories.
The characters are, by their nature, archetypes that can serve different metaphors.
I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.
I think the Hulk has always appealed very strongly to much younger readers than Spider-Man, because Spider-Man is an adolescent character, and the Hulk is a very childlike character.
The Hulk is rage personified, just, "I don't like something. Break it." And that's a great concept for a seven- or eight-year-old.
I think that the superhero-as-metaphor involves a superhero being some sort of intellectual, emotional, or other such concept writ large. But I don't know that it's a necessary part of the appeal that the superhero be superior.
I think James Bond is a spy. He's not superhuman. Calling him a superhero is like calling James Bond movies "comic-book movies."
"Superhero" is a term that's been borrowed in order to say "big and larger than life and loud and active and dumb." And I don't think that's a useful definition. That's more a dismissal.
There are a lot of discussions where people will decide that James Bond is a superhero, because he's a larger-than-life hero who beats the bad guys by doing larger-than-life things. And I don't think that's a useful definition.
Superhero creators who engage in deconstruction fall into two categories: There are the guys who do it because it's easy, because it gets an audience reaction if you point out that superheroes must be a bunch of psychotic nuts. And there are the guys who do it because they're actually interested, and they're trying to get at what's going on underneath. They're interested in the process and the results.
I've always been positive about superheroes.
I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?
I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.
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