For 'Inhuman,' it's a 'chess game' series. You have a lot of pieces moving different ways at once, and it's about what they do on their own and what happens when they collide into one another. It's about long-range planning, new character creation, and trying to really build things.
Charles Soule
I make no secret of the fact that writing She-Hulk can serve as an opportunity for me to sneak in some really cool characters that I personally love. Some will be obvious fits, but others will come out of left field - but that's what's fun about the Marvel U - the bench is deep.
Of all the things I've done, the first 'Strongman' story was one of the easiest things to write. It was almost fully formed from the get-go. It's almost a 'Dark Knight Returns' riff, except you have a battle-worn Mexican wrestler instead of Batman.
Here's a list of some of the folks who have written Swamp Thing over the years: Alan Moore, Len Wein, Scott Snyder, Brian K Vaughan, Joshua Dysart, Rick Veitch, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar. That's not even a full list, but you see my point - ol' Swampy has had some seriously brilliant people behind the keyboard in his time.
I actually imagined 'Thunderbolts' as a straight-up comedy book in a lot of ways, like a very dark comedy book, whereas 'Red Lanterns' is more of a cosmic saga that has some jokes every once in a while.
I was an enormous fan of Dan Slott's run, and John Byrne's run was a big deal for me. I found Slott's version of 'She-Hulk' first, and then I went back and looked up some of the older stuff because I liked it so much. And it was so good. It was perfect. It was my perfect comic book at the time that I found it.
The Inhumans are almost a mythological creation unto themselves. They're royalty, and are always involved in Marvel's cosmic events. But with the explosion of the Terrigen bomb and these new Inhumans coming to light, it brings a new street level aspect to add to the royalty aspect.
I've always loved the idea of mythologies linked to or underlying everyday life, like the kami gods of Shintoism, where every rock, tree and stream has its own little god associated with it.
Black Bolt is typically a stoic leader, part of a larger cast of Inhumans who get their hands dirty in ways that he doesn't.
The Inhumans, just as an idea - the idea that you were an ordinary horseman until you were exposed to this catalyst that is a very rare element - is a neat idea in and of itself.
I like writing characters that seem different from one another. So if you were to hypothetically look at a bunch of lines from books I've written, just out of context, hopefully you would be able to determine who said what. That's the goal, anyway. I try to strongly differentiate through dialogue.
Specifically with respect to the Inhumans, they are almost a mythological creation in and of themselves - the way they work, the way they operate, the fact that they're royalty - and they've always been involved with a lot of the big cosmos events that Marvel has done.
The Marvel universe is a deep, weird, woolly place, and getting to expose strange corners of it is part of the fun of 'She-Hulk.' Honestly, it's part of the fun of any Marvel book.
'Thunderbolts' I was mostly attracted to because I really wanted to write Punisher and Elektra and Deadpool, who are characters I have always really enjoyed. But the funny thing is that over time, I came to really like Red Leader; he became one of my favorite guys in the book. Sometimes characters surprise you.
The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.
I love comics work, and I hope I never stop doing it. But at the same time, I have my own law practice that I've built up over quite a while - it's been more than a decade that I've spent building that business - so it seems a little premature to just shut it down after nine months of working at a high level in comics. We'll see.
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.
It's kind of like when you have guests coming over to your house, and you haven't really picked up in awhile, and you look around and say, 'Wow, my place is kind of a mess, but I never noticed it because it's what I've been living in every day.' That's kind of what Supergirl is to the Red Lanterns.
The thing about Red Lanterns is that, while they have light powers and they have a power battery, they also have this weird shamanistic kind of blood magic side to them.
I had always thought that I would do something that was connected to music as a career, or possibly Chinese, which was my major.
The first comic I can remember ever reading was a 'Fantastic Four' issue that my dad bought out of the drugstore once. The thing that struck me about it was that the ending wasn't an ending. It was essentially a cliffhanger. It was the first time I had ever read anything like that, where you read a book, but the book isn't the book.
I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.
I think to this day, 'Superman/Wonder Woman' is probably one of the trickiest things I've been working on. It's like being asked to write a 'Star Wars' movie or something like that. You don't know how you're going to handle it; you don't know if you can. You don't know if you should be the guy.
I've been a Marvel reader since I was just a kid, and I've dreamed of being a Marvel writer for almost as long, so being tapped to officially join the team is truly something.
There are fantastic stories yet to be told featuring Marvel's characters, old and new, and I'm thrilled to be part of them.
When Marvel approached me about possibly bringing back a She-Hulk solo series, a few touchstones for a take immediately popped into my head - make her an attorney. Make her charming and fun, not weighed down by the various things life will throw at her. Give her a vibrant social life.
This might seem impossible to believe, but some lawyers actually like lawyering.
I'm an attorney when I'm not writing comics, and have been for years. That's a side of my life I don't always associate with pure creativity, but it's all worked out nicely.
We'll see She-Hulk fighting evil everywhere from the boardroom to the Bowery, using her mind as much as her fists.
You can't be a practicing attorney without being very disciplined and detail-oriented and having good time management.
'Superman/Wonder Woman,' people expected, I guess, a lot of romance, or maybe something that wasn't emotionally deep. Who knows?
One of the things that's been really fun about my run on 'Swamp Thing' is putting him in all kinds of different locations around the world, and seeing how his exterior foliage changes based on his location.
