I don't think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I've always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.
Brian K. Vaughan
I love other movies that have been made since, but I think more than any comic book movie, 'Superman' just totally seemed to capture superheroes in ways that others have not.
I remember when I was a kid and I would go to the comic-book store, I would have no idea what was going on in that month's issues. Sometimes I wouldn't even know what comics were coming out until I walked into the store.
There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.
For a lot of arcane shipping reasons, new comics, even digital ones, have a long history of only being released on Wednesdays.
Print and digital comics will always coexist.
As much as I'm enjoying stuff out here in Hollywood, I will always think of myself as a comic-book writer who does film and television, not a film and TV writer who occasionally does comics.
In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.
I wanted to write a story about a future where everyone has a secret identity, in part because the Internet no longer exists.
My parents grew up during the space race, and I think they imagined the future would be us living on moon bases and everyone has rocket shoes.
I'm totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I'm also happy for 'Ex Machina' to only ever exist as a comic book.
I love doing research. I'm a film-school geek.
It's interesting - I think superheroes get much more unfair derision. There are so many good superhero books being done. Science fiction is almost more reputable, I guess, at least a step up from poor superheroes.
By the time you have your protagonist attempting to assassinate the Pope, you've sort of signaled that everything is on the table.
There's always that relief you feel when you're working on your own series that you can actually make it to your planned ending and that your audience will still be there to support you - and that your publisher will still exist.
I was only ever part of 'Lost' - a very small part of an extremely talented writers' room, where as a writer, it's sort of your job to sublimate your ego and work in the service of the show and the show's voice.
I don't think I have discipline when it comes to anything.
It's cool because I think 'Ex Machina' is a little bit under the radar, which is always when I do my best work - when I feel like no one's paying attention.
Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.
I sort of jumped out of movies and into the lifeboat of comics. I loved it right away. It was the opposite of film school. Whatever was in my imagination could end up in the finished product. There were just no limitations.
I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.
I never liked working on editorial-driven comics. I just didn't see what was the point. They don't pay well enough for me to write other people's ideas.
I am a big theater fan. It's mostly just being pretentious, I think, and trying to look smart.
After 9/11, I knew I wanted to write about power and identity and the way Americans on all sides of the political spectrum often mythologize our leaders, which are themes that the superhero genre has always handled really well.
Because it's in and about New York City, I knew 'Ex Machina' was going to have to continually mix the mundane and the fantastic.
I never like to talk about my own politics, but whether you're left, right or center, the 2008 race was definitely good drama.
When I wrote 'Runaways,' I was a naive kid who thought that all parents were evil. Now that I'm a wise old man with children of my own, I am certain that all parents are evil.
Having children changes you forever, as a writer and as a human being. I hope it's for the better on both counts, but I guess we'll see.
Fantasy/science-fiction stories have been around almost as long as each genre, but every hybrid now lives in the shadow of 'Star Wars.'
That was the appealing thing about comics: There literally is no budget in comics. You're only limited by your imagination.
All writing is the same: It's just making up lies until it starts to sound like the truth. That's what I do.
The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.
I like animal sidekicks. They seem to be a pretty cool trope of post-apocalyptic fiction - just because if you're going to have this lone protagonist, they're going to need someone to talk to. Dogs are overused, and cats are dumb. So that leaves monkeys.
I grew up with a sister I was very close with and a mom who was a powerful influence on my life. I was always close with women.
I guess my journey with comics began with stuff like Spider-Man and Batman. I started off with mainstream superhero stuff, which I've never abandoned.
I've always seen 'Y' as an unconventional romance between a boy and his protector. It was always about the last boy on Earth becoming the last man on Earth, and the women who made that possible.
Fans of my books have just been supremely nice.
Not many people read my stuff, but I really like the ones that do.
I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again.
I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It's a form of self-help.
I never want readers to be comfortable, to feel like we're in a comedy or a drama. Life is never just one of those things. Life is a balance of all those things.
Comics brought me to the dance. It'll always be my first loyalty.
