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.
— Greg Rucka
A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.
If Portland can truly have a true comics show that doesn't become a media show but retains its focus on comics, I think it's going to serve the city well. If this becomes a big show, it's going to bring in a lot of money for the city.
Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.
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.
DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like 'The Avengers' breaking six hundred million domestic.
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.
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.
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.
Every character needs an adversary - one who is both challenging and a contrast for the hero. The best adversaries reveal something about the character they're contrasting.
Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don't know how to do it. You just do the best you can.
My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.
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.
I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.
Character is made up of a variety of different things. One of those elements is gender.
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.
I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.
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 just know that if you make a Superman movie you can't take kids to, you've done something wrong.
Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.
I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.
For every person who passes on the opportunity to write Spider-Man or Superman, I guarantee there are 5000 hungry writers who would give their eye-teeth to do it. But just because they want to do it, it doesn't mean they are capable of doing it.
Every writer has characters that they become attached to and that they feel very strongly about.
When there's a clear vision, and you've got the creative teams working toward that goal, each on their own, it can then come together quite elegantly at the endpoint.
The stories that are out and the things that have been published are a sample of my interests. There are genres and sub-genres that I haven't waded into but have wanted to, or have waded into in other places but never actually written.
To me, the joy you're going to get in a 'Punisher' story is watching him punish incredibly wicked people. Now, if you can add to that an emotional content, wonderful.
Heroes are defined by their villains - Batman is nothing if he doesn't have Two-Face.
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.
When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that's what I studied, I mean, scholarly.
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.
The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows.
I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.
I write characters. Some of those characters are women.
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.
Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.
Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best.
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.
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 sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.
The goal of 'Revelations' is that once it's all done and finished, and you've read all of it, it is its own story.
For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.
We forget when we're all grown up. 16 was a long time ago. It's hard to remember how freakin' difficult it is as 16! Life is not easy, and you're trying to figure stuff out.
Punisher is scary; he should be scary.
Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.
I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard.
When I was in third grade, I would run home - literally run home from school - and if I could make it in time, I could get home and the put the TV on in time to catch the answering machine message at the start of 'The Rockford Files.'
'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.
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 tend to see - socially, I don't tend to be myself in a male role. I don't know any other way to put it.
