JASON AARON

'Ghost Rider' definitely has an appeal that's far beyond comics.

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.

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.

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.

I went back and started reading with Thor's first appearance, and my goal is to read all 600-plus issues in a row.

'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.

I love working at Marvel, but it was definitely DC that got me hooked as a reader.

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.

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.

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.

Thankfully, I have a job where it does not matter in the least what I look like.

'Original Sin' is, for me, a murder mystery with a huge cast that plays out on a grand stage.

For me, especially with the villain, it's not very interesting to write a guy who is just 100% bad.

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.

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.

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.

Especially those first few years of my comic book career, I had no idea what was going to happen the next day.

'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.

From the get-go, 'Original Sin' was always as much a Nick Fury story as anything else.

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.

Just the idea that no matter what Thor is up to he comes back to Earth is something special.

The first big long-form work I did in comics was 'Scalped' for Vertigo, which ran for 60 issues.

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.