Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always, always got to be the last man standing.
I love working on 'Superman' and 'Batman' dearly.
I love what Brian Azzarello did with Wonder Woman.
Jordie Bellaire knows how to tell a story with color.
Sometimes, all it takes is a few words to change your life.
I had to fight for wingdings. Batman needs to curse sometimes!
I grew up in New York City, so I have, like, an inherent fear of trees, I think, in general.
My favorite Batman stories were very much in conversation with the zeitgeist over the years.
One of the things that's great is that Batman is a character that lends himself to very personal stories.
A post-9/11, modern take being Batman training people to be the heroes they know they can be on their own.
I read THE WICKED + THE DIVINE last night, and no matter how high your expectations are for it, its better.
My favorite Swamp Thing stories have always been about a man wrestling with monsters both internal and external.
On this global stage, Superman is someone that we can all look up to and he's almost kind of ultimately American.
Duke is a character who believes that heroism and the Robin mantle can exist entirely separate from Batman himself.
With books like 'AD: After Death' and 'Wytches,' a lot of those things are inspired by reading things that terrify me.
I really wanted to make sure that if we set Duke up, that he's set up the right way and he's his own hero for the right reasons.
- If I tell you, will you let met go? - You bet, partner. [...] - You promised! - Nope. I said "you bet." You did ... and you lost.
Does it matter how long they were together that night? To lovers, an hour can last a century. But even for lovers, every hour ends.
I love everybody in Gotham. Gotham suits me really well. I'll write anything from 'Nightwing' to 'Batgirl' and any of the villains.
You have a book like 'The Shining,' where the hotel is scary - but scarier because it's the haunted house of Jack Torrance's heart.
The only way to write Batman, if you get the chance - and I hope everyone out there gets the chance - is to imagine you made him up.
Having that North Star for every story [about Batman] is really key for me. It allows me to go farther and farther off the reservation.
In a post-9/11 world, 'Batman' is less about scaring bad people into the shadows than he is about bringing good people out into the light.
The thing that really interests me is characters facing challenges that are emblematic of the things they are most frightened of about themselves.
I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.
With this particular series [The Cursed Wheel] I'm going farther in that direction than I've tried before in terms of the elasticity of the mythology.
KGBeast starts chasing our heroes in a big way, and you get the return of an old character from the mythology that I think people will be really excited to see.
It's one of the worst nightmare situations we could create for a young character, having the people who are supposed to believe in you keep telling you you're nothing.
Batman is the one you go to for answers and Clark Kent is the one you go to to really do the right thing. He stands as a shining example of what to do in any situation.
I feel like no matter what I'm on, whether it's 'Tiny Titans' or 'Swamp Thing' or 'American Vampire,' there will be an element of horror in it. Which would be fun for 'Tiny Titans.'
Monsters can be scary, and they're great, but they're only really scary when they're reflections of us and they show you the things you're scared of might be true about your own nature.
If I know what something's about, and I can always have that touchstone, I feel like I can reach for really ridiculous humor and also go really dark in terms of the things I'm afraid of.
You take the thing that is the worst thing that could have happened to you, the worst challenge in your life, and you turn it into fuel. You don't give up. And that's what Gotham is about.
"The Cursed Wheel," which Declan [Shalvey] is starting here, is the one constant. It's a story in the backups that will go through the whole year and be the one consistent narrative. It anchors the entire [book].
I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that.
Bruce sees in this character - who fought all the way through "Superheavy" when his parents were missing, and now is determined to fight even though his parents are telling him he's worth nothing - the essence of Batman.
The fun of superhero comics is finding ways to turn the pieces that you know so that they're suddenly about things that you want them to be about, as long as they're true to the core and true to the DNA of the mythology.
[Duke] is the same way that Harper Row is a character who doesn't want to know who you are beneath the mask, and that makes her interesting. She'll show up and help Batman, but she never wants to know if he's Bruce Wayne.
The hope that they have legs. That's the biggest fear you always have creating new people. You love them, but then they kind of dissipate. Sometimes you don't get to write them as much as you'd like, like me and Harper Row.
With 'Batman,' I actually had a really bad period when we started 'Zero Year,' right at the beginning, I just wasn't taking care of myself at all. I was up too late all the time, I was working too hard. I wasn't exercising.
I've said before, I've always had difficulty with anxiety and depression. I've been on medication for it since I was about 18 years old, varying degrees of medication. I've had big ups and downs with it and very bad periods.
One of my favorite books was 'The Book of Immortality' by Adam Leith Gollner, which talks about cheating death and life extension and frames with a story that David Copperfield finds a fountain of youth on an island he bought.
"The Cursed Wheel" is the heart of the whole year on All-Star. All-Star is a series that's largely compartmentalized so that every artist can reinvent a villain and have Batman go up against the villain in a way that's pretty singular.
There's nothing comparative to Damien [the current Robin] or any of the other characters. I love those characters. And this isn't, "This is better than that." I think a couple of people misread what we had said in the first issue about that stuff.
Beware The Court of Owls, that watches all the time, ruling Gotham from a shadowed perch, behind granite and lime. They watch you at your hearth, they watch you in your bed speak not a whispered word of them or they'll send the Talon for your head.
What Batman is saying is that, "I want to try something new that's more about this era and this moment." And I do think that it speaks to a modern take [as opposed] to a 90s take or a 2000s take being maybe the older program about having a sidekick.
I use a lot of narration; I have a very prosaic style. I like to get you invested in the character first and do a lot of work in the first pages of each issue to try to re-establish things and keep the symbolism of a story very tucked beneath the surface.
That's what everyone thinks--they think being a cop is about punishing people for doing wrong. But that's not true. You know it isn't. It's about believing in people, believing in the good. In the will of people to do what's right despite their own instincts.
There's an element of ego to writing the Riddler. You research a lot of things that you end up jettisoning as a writer, and Riddler was a lot of fun to get to have that sort of annoying know-it-all personality lording over the city. He's a lot of fun to write about.
When I've gone through those periods of depression or anxiety, it's almost like your body is telling you constantly with these panics that the world really is the terrible place that you think it is, and all the things you fear are true about yourself have to be true.