Heroes are defined by their villains - Batman is nothing if he doesn't have Two-Face.
Greg Rucka
I'm a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we're talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.
The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.
I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.
I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.
I met one of my best resources because I cold-called the local FBI office one day early in my career with questions. The agent who took the call knew someone who knew someone who was ex-Army, trained in personal protection. The resulting introduction was one of the best, most enduring friendships I've ever enjoyed.
I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.
There are still plenty of people who want to burn me at the stake for my Wonder Woman run. And I can't really blame them, you know? That was my take on the character, and when people are invested in the characters, they see them very clearly and in the way they like.
A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.
Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn't mean you know how to write.
The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.
Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don't know how to do it. You just do the best you can.
I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.
There was a time in my career when my hackles would really get raised if someone came in and said, 'We need you to do this or that.' But the fact of the matter is, you're working in a shared universe, and all elements of the universe are, ideally, going to mesh and work together. That's my goal. I want to be on the team.
I think when you're working with a character that another writer is acting as - for lack of a better word - custodian of, your obligation as a professional is to not do anything that violates that 'primary' take.
I'm not a huge Lovecraft fan as far as that goes; I think there are some stories of his that are really quite wonderful, but for the most part, I have great difficulties with his prose - and the more you know about the man, the harder it is to separate him from the work in many ways.
DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like 'The Avengers' breaking six hundred million domestic.
When we're 16, we have lots of heavy thoughts. And these are the heavy thoughts, where, when we're in our 30s, we look at 16-year olds and sort of scorn it.
Some of the best moments I've ever written have come about because someone, somewhere, blew my preconceptions out of the water and dropped a detail in passing that took the work in an entirely new, entirely unexpected, direction.
You know how a nonlethal weapon is supposed to work? A nonlethal weapon works on the basis of three things: It needs to deter, and that's normally done through pain, and that pain creates a byproduct, which is fear.
If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character's nature fit in? How does that manifest?
I showed up pretty much at the exact right moment to end up with a lot of work on my plate very quickly, because I was young and foolish, and so I wrote very quickly.
The goal with 'Alpha' was to run towards the cliches and then to break through them, and that doesn't change depending on the medium.
I'm sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.
We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.
My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.
The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows.
There are so many great characters because one of the things that makes Batman fantastic is that Batman is tragic. I've said this elsewhere; I've said it over and over again, but the beauty of the character is that he's a Don Quixote.
There are a lot of people in the medium who came and got into the industry and work in the industry, and these are people who were raised on comics and loved comics. Comics are their religion. To such an extent, that they don't know anything else.
You have to accept that Batman is a fact of life in Gotham City, and on top of that, you have to accept that somehow this city manages to function with a police force that's 90% corrupt.
I think that Batman loses his efficacy and mythology if he's got too many people around him. That's what the Justice League is for, you know what I mean?
Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.
'Alpha' is a very fast-moving book. It doesn't lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to.
There is a sequence in my 'Detective Comics' run where you can't find consecutive issues by the same artist. That's intentional. That was done on purpose.
I think Batman has the Wolverine problem. I think he's overexposed.
Like nightclubs and sporting events, entry into an amusement park is a permission to become someone else. We come for the experience and to relish it.
We wanted to talk about death in the DC Universe, and how some people go to get a pass and come back, and some people didn't. That opened up a whole other topic about legacy. We wanted to talk about what was required to be a hero, what were the elements of true heroism?
It's funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.
Fear is one of the elements of nonlethal weaponry. You're going to get hurt, and you don't want to get hurt. Pepper spray hurts. You don't want to be sprayed. That's why it's a useful deterrent as a nonlethal weapon - I'm not advocating spraying people randomly.
I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime 'ouvre,' there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.
I love 'The Omen,' just as a piece of plotting.
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.
All the sudden, I was part of the 'No Man's Land' thing, and there was a bundle of core writers for that, but somewhere along the line, I became the go-to guy after that initial arc.
I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn't be definitive answers.
I like the 'Keystone Kops' storyline. It didn't actually go quite the way I wanted to, but it was another great way to show how different life was in these two different corners of the DCU, being on the ground in these different areas.
I am the product of Denny O'Neil in many ways, I carry forth a lot of what Denny instilled in me.
I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.
When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'
I write characters. Some of those characters are women.
