A lot of the work I did with WWE had very strong comic book ties that were more than just a wink at the audience. There was a period of time when I had a clear protective face mask and a hood over my head that correlated with Doctor Doom.

I can say pretty confidently that I am not the right guy to do a superhero movie, just because I was not a comic book kid. I don't know that mythology, and I don't have it ingrained in me in the way that a lot of these other directors do.

I'm a huge comic book collector. When I was a kid, I had both Marvel and DC. I was my own librarian. I made card files. I had origin stories of all the characters, and cross-referenced when they appeared in other comic books. I was full on.

If you're a comic book fan, you know that any epic book, you would open it up - as a kid, I would just go through and look at who was fighting who. I'd stand there in the store for 15 minutes until the guy told me to buy the book or get out.

All of us who grew up reading comics love the memory of sitting under an apple tree with a comic book in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other; the tactile sensation of the paper on the skin and so forth is part of the experience.

It feels to me like 'Shazam' will have a tone unto itself. It's a DC comic, but it's not a Justice League character, and it's not a Marvel comic. The tone and the feeling of the movie will be different from the other range of comic book movies.

He's this amazing ambassador for all superheroes. What we've made as a film not only examines that but is also an amazing adventure story. It's been an honor to work on. As a comic book fan, Superman is like the Rosetta Stone of all superheroes.

It wasn't until I went to my first comic convention while I was in high school that I got to see actual comic book artists and original artwork in real life, up close. That was when I first realized that this is what I wanted to do for a living.

'Comic book' has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call 'Die Hard' a 'comic-book movie,' when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.

I'm very lucky that I started out as a reader of the comic book and a viewer of the show. And I try to remain that, and make 'The Walking Dead' that I love watching. Luckily, I have the source material that I love, and I want to serve that as well.

I used to go to the comic store all the time. I was into comic cards, which are essentially baseball cards for comic book heroes. They have these cool stats on the back. I had collections of these things. I still have a lot of my collection at home.

Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.

I really want to work on characters that have a lot of complexity and you don't always get that in comic book movies because they're not character explorations. I have nothing against movies like that, but I do see them as kind of like a cheeseburger.

The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.

Alan Moore does have a sheen of class. He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it. the main reason he was doing a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company.

I read 'The Last Wish' and really loved it. But I never would have called myself a fantasy writer before this. I've done some comic book shows, I've done a lot of drama. So when I read the book I loved it but never thought I should adapt it personally.

'New Mutants' is the absolute definition of a broken down jalopy, and I took it on, and I just remade it... That's why I was so cocky and confident: because I was like, 'I just turned around this broken down comic book with products of my imagination.'

You know, I'm a big comic book fan. As a kid I used to collect them until there was a horrible mudslide in Hollywood and I lost my collection, but I was also at an early age the voice of 'Jonny Quest;' it was a cartoon; so I am kind of a latent fan boy.

There's a lot of comic book inspiration and stuff I do that people probably won't recognize. I grew up in the '70s, so there's a lot of little things, like 'Three's Company' and 'Gilligan's Island.' Those shows were the foundation of my comedy in a way.

In comic books, every character exists in this comic book world, and the wrestlers were the same thing. They were responsible for creating that world and putting it out there - having the confidence to go forward and do that and behave in a certain way.

A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you're playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you're playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you're playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.

My theater nerd world and my comic friend world are colliding... That's the thing that I was nerdy about, was theatre. I wasn't as much into the comic book stuff. So it's fun to see there are people that are into that that are also theatre nerds like me.

Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.

Thanks to the comic book publishers. Batman and Captain Marvel were responsible for my learning to read at least a year before I showed up at school. They got me interested in writing. Started my first novel at about eight. The title: 'The Canals of Mars.'

'XIII' is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to 'The Bourne Identity.' I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn't be published in English.

We can make this industry and this environment and comic book shops and comic book conventions and comic books themselves, we can make them a thing that is accessible to everybody so that nobody feels unwelcome, and nobody feels like this isn't their place.

What I love about Popsicle and the moments I can be with Camden is that their whole philosophy is family and these moments that it can create to just sit with my son, read a comic book or go outside on a hot day, take a swim and have a Popsicle treat with him.

When 'Watchmen' was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.

I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they're all somewhere in the basement of my folks' house.

Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection.

Comic book fans have loved Wolverine, and all the 'X-Men' characters, for more than the action. I think that's what set it apart from many of the other comic books. In the case of Wolverine, when he appeared, he was a revolution really. He was the first anti-hero.

I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

When someone says 'comic book movies', what they inevitably mean is a summer superhero blockbuster, with heavily-muscled and tightly-gluted men (plus the occasional token woman) in tight-fitting costumes punching the living daylights out of one another for two hours.

I like talking about comic book process, and one of the things is that I have plans going ahead for years, and the plans constantly get thrown away and shifted. There's a difference between planning and what actually happens in life, and comics have a life of their own.

I don't think of myself as having any freedom when it comes to how 'Monstress' is structured and how the story is going because a comic book has to be even more tightly structured than a novel, because there is no room for mistakes. Once the art is done, the art is done.

Over the years, I have attended comic book conventions and met people that are die-hard fans; they'll come up and say, 'Clue' is my favorite movie of all time.' It has definitely resonated in some way with people and just continued to build up over the years considerably.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

I grew up in the '70s, early '80s as a kid, and when we first immigrated to this country I went to a 7-Eleven and for the first time in my life I saw... back in the day they had this little spinning comic book rack, and there were comic books and I was basically drawn to them.

My favorite comic book growing up was 'Thor.' It was one of my three, favorite comic books. Obviously, Marvel is such a huge name, but for me, to book a role in a Marvel movie, and for it to be 'Thor.' When my manager told me I booked 'Thor,' I literally didn't know what to say.

When I write a screenplay - and I think it's one of the reasons why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter - I'm not thinking of it in terms of words on a page; I'm thinking in terms of visual images - basically, a comic book. I'm thinking of it in a series of shots.

Once I found out that I was playing 'Deathlok,' I unearthed my old comic book collection. I was going home for Christmas, and I have a collection of thousands of comics. I was surprised to see that 90% of them were Marvel. So, I wanted to go through my collection and start there.

Yes, the Bechdel Test. It's named for Allison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes.

It may be that a majority of superheroes are white males. But that's because they used to all be white males, except for Wonder Woman and Black Canary and maybe one or two others. Now there are Spanish, Puerto Rican comic book superheroes, black superheroes, and women superheroes.

When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the 'Ghost Rider' comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn't get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening - 'How is this possible, this duality?'

Writing 'Deathstroke' presents a number of challenges to me. As a Christian, as a minister, it's difficult for me to write a comic book that all but glorifies violence. So my take on 'Deathstroke' has been to not so much celebrate violence but to deal with the consequences of violence.

One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.

The privilege, and the challenges, of taking on Black Widow have never been lost on me. I worked on the first 'Spiderman' game as well as 'Fantastic Four,' and I had always wanted to be able to tell more of a character-driven comic book story than was possible to fit into a game narrative.

The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story. Digital comic books, of course, can be interactive in many different ways, allowing the reader to feel like a participant in the story.

I wrote this 12-page 'Luke Cage' comic book for Marvel once, and I got to create a villain. His name was Lone Shark, so there was this running thing of whether it was spelled L-O-A-N or L-O-N-E. I like the idea of 'I'm a lone shark,' and then people are like, 'You are here to collect a debt?'

My relationship to comics isn't nearly as strong as some people's. Ha! I mean, I grew up with a comic book fanatic. My older brother was, and still is, obsessed. And I was obsessed with the fact that he was obsessed, because I was obsessed with him. But not necessarily with comics themselves.

Share This Page