I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.
Jason Aaron
While the whole 'God Butcher Saga' had elements of fantasy, sci-fi and horror all mixed together, 'The Accursed' is very much high-fantasy. Right out of the gate, we've got elves, talk of fantastic worlds, strange creatures, Malekith riding a flying tiger, as well as more dwarves, giants, trolls and elves than you can possibly count.
Thor is a god who's lived in Asgard most all his life, but I think he still has a sense of awe and wonder about the place. I want us, as readers, to have that same sense of awe whenever we see, finally see, the golden spires of Realm Eternal.
If you liked my 'Ghost Rider' run, you're going to love what they're doing in 'Punisher.'
'Scalped' is representative of the kinds of stories I like to read and I like to watch.
I like to think I grow as a writer from every new experience.
Especially those first few years of my comic book career, I had no idea what was going to happen the next day.
I wrote and drew my own books on notebook paper, and I'd staple 'em together. I had my own fictional company, and we had our own thinly veiled offshoots of whatever was popular at Marvel and DC at the time.
I was raised Christian; I was raised in the South where everybody's raised Christian, but at this point, I'm 41 years old, and I've been an atheist, at this point, a little more than half my life.
I went back and started reading with Thor's first appearance, and my goal is to read all 600-plus issues in a row.
The first big long-form work I did in comics was 'Scalped' for Vertigo, which ran for 60 issues.
I didn't get into comics as a stepping stone.
'Ghost Rider' definitely has an appeal that's far beyond comics.
You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.
As a kid, I was definitely a DC guy. I started reading big time in the '80s at the height of the Wolfman/Perez 'New Teen Titans.' That was definitely the book that hooked me.
'Scalped' No. 1 was only the third comic script I'd ever written. I really learned a lot about writing on the fly with that series.
Yes, you know Luke Skywalker isn't going to die in issue #3. But that doesn't mean you've seen every Luke Skywalker story there is to tell.
I think the oldest comic I got when I was a kid was an issue of 'World's Finest' - it had a Neal Adams cover with Batman where he had turned into a bat, and he was attacking Superman.
From the get-go, 'Original Sin' was always as much a Nick Fury story as anything else.
'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.
Overall, I'm happy how 'Original Sin' has come together. It's an amalgam of all I've done at Marvel, mixing the gritty, violent 'Punisher Max' stuff with the zany, light-hearted 'Wolverine & The X-Men' work.
I love the Marvel movies, but I always feel like we should be a step ahead of the movies. One of the reasons those movies have been so good and so successful is that they've been very good at mining the comics.
We had that first Marvel NOW! retreat where everybody came in and pitched their new books, which was probably the most exciting retreat I've ever been to because it was all brand new.
What's nice is between 'Wolverine and the X-Men' and 'Thor,' I get to write two very different kinds of stories. Both of them really seem to scratch some itches for me.
An important part of any good mystery story like 'Original Sin' is that it's not just a game of 'Clue' with surprise after surprise after surprise, but the goal is to tell a story in the midst of that. Even once you know the solution to the mysteries, it's far from the whole story.
I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film.
'Original Sin' is one of those ideas that has been circulating for several years at the Marvel retreats we have a couple times a year. We have all these ideas floating around for a bit before we figure out how to align them.
You're always trying to do something that, on one hand, honors all those stories, that is still in some way the same character that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were doing back in the sixties. But, at the same time, you want to be able to tell new stories and not just rehash what's come before.
I just remember how cool and exciting and crazy it seemed when Marvel was giving this new 'Ultimate Spider-Man' title to this crime writer Brian Michael Bendis who had never really done any superhero stuff before.
It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.
I don't know about young Thor and King Thor getting their own series someday, although it would be nice if I could write three Thor series at the same time.
I always liked the idea that Thor was the god who'd wake up every day and look at that hammer and not know whether he was going to pick it up. Only the worthy can lift the hammer of Thor, and I love the idea of a god who was always questioning his own worthiness.
Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories.
I love working at Marvel, but it was definitely DC that got me hooked as a reader.
I just typed up three, four paragraphs of an idea and dropped it in a box at the Chicago Comic Con in the summer of 2000, I guess, or 2001 - I forget. I just dropped it on a stack of a giant pile of dozens of other entries. Months later, I was thrilled to get a call from a Marvel editor while I was working my crappy day-job.
Are you kidding? They had me at 'Star Wars.' The kid inside me would've clawed his way out and strangled me if I'd turned this job down.
There's a high level of communication between all of us at Marvel, and between Marvel and Lucasfilm.
Just the idea that no matter what Thor is up to he comes back to Earth is something special.
I don't really have any interest in doing Donald Blake stories. Maybe it's just I don't know what to do with that sort of alter ego.
I haven't really used Loki at all in 'Thor: God of Thunder' or the previous volume of Thor.
You can imagine sitting in a room for three days talking about comic books, eight hours a day. It gets wacky and very nerdy. It also gets contentious at times.
I'm happy I can sit home in my office and make up stories about superheroes. And I only have to deal with a pretty limited amount of people to get those comics produced.
Thankfully, I have a job where it does not matter in the least what I look like.
Hopefully I'm learning a lesson from every new thing I write, whether it features guys in spandex or not.
For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.
To me, the more interesting villains are the ones you can, in some sense, relate to or sympathize with at times. Maybe you sympathize with them one moment; the next moment, they do something truly atrocious, and you feel bad you ever sympathized with them in the first place.
I don't go back and read my own stuff too much, but there are times where I second-guess myself and said I could have done something different, like a line of dialogue.
I'm just trying to create characters and tell stories.
Plot-wise, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about 'Scalped.' It starts off as something we've seen plenty of times before: the story of an undercover FBI agent infiltrating a criminal organization and the story of the guy at the head of that organization. The twist was always the setting: a modern-day Native American reservation.
I'm intimidated by anyone with a British accent.
