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.
— Jason Aaron
'Ghost Rider' definitely has an appeal that's far beyond comics.
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.
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.
'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.
I went back and started reading with Thor's first appearance, and my goal is to read all 600-plus issues in a row.
I'm intimidated by anyone with a British accent.
I've always been fascinated with the history of the Plains Indians and the history of the American Indian Movement in the '70s.
I'm just trying to create characters and tell stories.
From the get-go, 'Original Sin' was always as much a Nick Fury story as anything else.
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.
Hopefully I'm learning a lesson from every new thing I write, whether it features guys in spandex or not.
I didn't get into comics as a stepping stone.
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.
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.
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.
I love working at Marvel, but it was definitely DC that got me hooked as a reader.
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 love characters who are kind of haunted by their pasts, who struggle on despite their flaws, knowing that, at the end of the day, they're not going to shuffle off to those pearly gates.
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.
Putting together a list of heroes for 'Original Sin' was a long process, just like figuring out the villains. Along the way, some were taken out, and a few more were added.
It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
Thankfully, I have a job where it does not matter in the least what I look like.
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 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.
There's a high level of communication between all of us at Marvel, and between Marvel and Lucasfilm.
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.
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.
I like to think I grow as a writer from every new experience.
If you liked my 'Ghost Rider' run, you're going to love what they're doing in 'Punisher.'
'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.
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.
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.
Over the course of my entire Wolverine career, I went from being a single guy to getting married and having kids, and I think you can see that progression in the way that I treated Wolverine.
Especially those first few years of my comic book career, I had no idea what was going to happen the next day.
'Scalped' is representative of the kinds of stories I like to read and I like to watch.
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.
For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.
The first big long-form work I did in comics was 'Scalped' for Vertigo, which ran for 60 issues.
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.
I haven't really used Loki at all in 'Thor: God of Thunder' or the previous volume of Thor.
Just the idea that no matter what Thor is up to he comes back to Earth is something special.
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 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.
