I'd have all these crazy sort of 'who would win battles' with my friends who were big fans of other comic book characters, and I'd always find a way for Batman to win. It was deep for me, man.

For me, Iris West was traditionally white in the comic books. So, you know, comic book fans are very opinionated, very vocal. So it was very scary stepping into that role when I started the show.

I also love the zombie genre, my zombie fandom going way back to 'Night of the Living Dead.' And 'The Walking Dead' is truly the ultimate representation of that sensibility in the comic book genre.

I'll be on the street and go up to people - 'Have you read a comic book before? Well, here's one.' You've got your pro-life people, your pro-choice people, your feminists. I'm a comicbooks activist.

I sent in tons of submissions and proposals, and I collected my share of form rejection letters. Eventually, I found myself working at a comic book shop, where I met my future collaborator Brian Hurtt.

I had never been a comic book person before, really, because I had no access to them. Once I had access, I thought that these are just another avenue for telling stories and delving into the imagination.

We had a comic book in Denmark called 'Valhalla,' and I read it every time I had the chance. So I remembered the authentic stories from that comic book - Thor and Odin and Freya, I know all those stories.

One of the greatest joys of doing 'Comic Book Men' - I was so thankful - was that my wife Carol was able to appear with me. Being able to share that experience with Carol was such a monumental joy for me.

When I was at Marvel, they were in bankruptcy, which is hard to believe now with 'Avengers 2' out, but it was during the 1990s. It was a troubled place. Comic book sales were dropping. Work was scattered.

So in the pro wrestling world, everything is massively over the top and every reaction that you do in the ring is kind of corny if we're honest - it's not supposed to be serious - it's a comic book world.

I think it's good that we're not embarrassed that we're comic book creators anymore. It's good that people are able to make a good living at doing it, and not doing the traditional sort of mainstream fare.

What I had noticed is that there weren't a lot of women lining up to see a comic book movie, but they were going to line up to see 'The Devil Wears Prada,' which may have been something I wanted to address.

I'm hoping that fans will enjoy finally having a 'SpongeBob' comic book from me. All the stories will be original and always true to the humor, characters, and universe of the 'SpongeBob SquarePants' series.

It's one thing to be a comic book fan, but when you have to create a character and put him in a suit and keep the story grounded in reality, the challenge sometimes is making sure he actually uses his powers.

The main fear comes from playing a character that so many people know from the comic books, and there's a long history of people unhappy with movies and TV shows who make alterations to comic book characters.

The more time you spend with any character, whether it's from a comic book universe or a really naturalistic universe, the more time you spend, the more that character just becomes another aspect of yourself.

Hip hop fans are obsessed, and they're geeks about hip hop. Comic book fans are also geeks, and when you can meld the two, then you open the world up to, I think, communities that will just take to each other.

For screenwriting, when you're writing, you're talking to hundreds - hundreds of people who might be interpreting what you're saying. When you're writing a comic book, you're really only talking to the artist.

A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they're striving for some kind of realism, like 'Iron Man' or 'The Dark Knight,' or they're very stylised and gritty, like 'Sin City' and '300.'

I love the comics so much, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character - probably, I think honestly, the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on.

For some reason, I tend to take on the stuff that people are really passionate about. If you make a list of people you don't want to offend, it's Vonnegut readers, comic book fans, and Coen brothers enthusiasts.

My life has been one gigantic comic book, and on the other hand, it's been one gigantic book of laurels and amazing accomplishments, and on the other hand, it's been a book full of horror stories. It's a big book.

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.

What I love about 'The Walking Dead' is it's a human story, which is to me what makes the comic book so good, but once you jump from the pages of the book to the screen, the gore and the zombies have to look great.

When I was a kid... if I couldn't get a ride to the comic book store, I would walk a mile and a half each way to get the latest issues of 'Batman' and 'Spider-Man' and 'X-Men.' I could not choose one over the other.

Then is when I decided to take it to Archie to see if they could do it as a comic book. I showed it to Richard Goldwater, and he showed it to his father, and a day or two later I got the OK to do it as a comic book.

We're sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers. He's a guy that wants to serve his country, but he's not a flag-waver. We're reinterpreting, sort of, what the comic book version of Steve Rogers was.

I worked with many directors in my life, but Tim Miller is definitely my favorite. He not only has a beautiful sense of directing actors, but he also shares a great love and passion for the comic book world, as I do.

The first time I shopped at a comic shop, it was because I had been published in a comic book. As I became more involved in comics, I started going more and more, usually to support my friends or lady-friendly comics.

I grew up reading comics - mostly Marvel - Doctor Strange was my favourite comic book and has remained my favourite as an adult. It's the only comic book movie property I've ever gone after. I felt uniquely suited to it.

I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.

Comic book heroes are an important part of our culture, so I think we're actually utilizing comic book heroes in a much more in-depth way than before. They have such potential, and I think we're maximizing the potential.

I brought samples in, because I didn't have any comic book samples, and I brought all these illustrations that I had influenced by Norman Rockwell and a couple of the other big boys. That's all I had, that's all I brought.

My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories.

Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called 'Cement Shooz.'

It works in the comic book, but as the audiences have gotten older and more sophisticated, I think the stories need to grow up with them. This is a story about a couple of rival gangs and what goes wrong in a couple of days.

Maybe every other American movie shouldn't be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.

If you were a kid in the 1950s, and you got nightmares from a story in a horror comic book, you have Al Feldstein to blame. If you were a kid in the '60s or '70s, giggling at 'MAD's prankster wit, you have Feldstein to thank.

The majority of comic book villains are pure evil, but Curt Connors is an exception. Curt Connors is a good man who initially wants to save the world, but he gets hungry and greedy and reckless, and he pays the price for that.

Spiderman was my favorite comic book character growing up. I'm a geek, so I love the fact Peter Parker is into science. And I gravitate towards short guys. I'm 5' 9" now, but in junior high, I got picked on because I was 4' 8".

In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again.

At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

I'm a comic book writer, so I work with a lot of artists. Sometimes, you get art back, and you're like, 'Oh, no.' Sometimes, you get art back and you're like, 'That's exactly what I imagined in my head,' and you're happy about that.

It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing?

I'm a fan of characters wherever they come from. Truth be told, I wasn't a big comic book fan growing up. Maybe that helps me bring a fresh perspective to things because I'm not trying to match anything that's been done in the past.

It's great finding a comic book character that doesn't care about following traditional comic book rules by breaking the fourth wall and being explicit about everything. This gives Deadpool the arrogance which you just have to love.

I wouldn't say design has become strictly functional. A lot of cars these days look downright comic book to me, and the info-gadgets with which late industrial people spend the most time - phones, music players, etc. - are blobjects.

The great thing about writing 'Deadpool' is that he can demolish expectations and typical comic book conventions with monster truck force. There are few other characters who can transition so easily from one type of story to the next.

I think there's a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, 'The kids love this!'

I concentrate, more than I think virtually any comic book artist has in the past, on the so-called mundane details of every day life - quotidian life. What happens to a person during a working day, marital relations, and stuff like that.

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