Kate Leth Quotes

I'm a big veteran of being able to, in one comic, explain to you everything that you need to know to get forward in the story without you having to refer back to years of continuity and a universe in these superhero comics.

I like all of the books I work on to be ones you can pick up without knowing the entire history of the character, because then, not only can you enjoy it as is, but it encourages you to look into the history of that character and their world.

When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.

The fun of superhero comics is finding ways to turn the pieces that you know so that they're suddenly about things that you want them to be about, as long as they're true to the core and true to the DNA of the mythology.

Batman's not mine. He doesn't necessarily belong to me. As a character, he belongs first to the audience and second to the hundreds of writers who have been writing him in comics for 75 years.

It's just that... working on 'Green Lantern,' I saw how difficult it is to make that concept palatable, and how confused it all can be when you don't really know exactly where you're going with it or you don't really know how to access that world properly - that world comic book fans have been accessing for decades and falling in love with.

The Marvel universe is a deep, weird, woolly place, and getting to expose strange corners of it is part of the fun of 'She-Hulk.' Honestly, it's part of the fun of any Marvel book.

I had a great experience working with Dynamite on Masks, and had just gotten started on a stint on The Shadow with them when they floated the idea of a Captain Action series. I've been a little obsessed with the character since I was first introduced to him in the pages of Amazing Heroes back in the early 1980s.

I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.

I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

On a book like 'X-Men,' you have to stay true to the established fiction, working with editors to ensure continuity, sometimes across multiple titles.

I guess my inspiration is this - I like to pretend that every story that ever happened to 'Batman' was real and is part of this one guy's life.

When I first got the audition for Shado, I went online and subscribed to DC Comics and read a bunch on Shado and the Yakuza, just to get to know her character better.

If you read the whole Vertigo 'Animal Man' series of 89 issues or whatever, each writer has a completely different take on his origin. If you try to put them all together, they contradict one another. I had to pick and choose to make up a new origin that makes sense to new readers.

That's one of the things that I've loved about 'Spider-Man' and Marvel in general. The characters all have dimension.

There are so many things we have not seen in 'Spider-Man' yet... I want to use bad guys never seen in movies. The first films were so traditional and so scrupulously followed the character's classic plot... So there's a lot of stuff left in stock. 'The Clone Saga,' for example.

I'm sometimes asked if I get bored with talking about 'Kevin,' and of course, the short answer is yes. Nevertheless, after a long slog in the literary trenches, I never take a single reader for granted and always remind myself that for new readers the unfolding story is fresh.

The challenge is, in terms of a canon like 'X-Men,' it's more like 'Harry Potter' and Hogwarts, or 'Game of Thrones.' It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.

I'd quite like to write a book about comics, actually. But trying to write about comics as literature, which I don't think anyone's really done before. Sometimes they're more like fan books, and I'd quite like to write one about the Marvel universe over the last 50 years. It's an unprecedented achievement to create that length of continuity.

'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.

In 'ABCD1,' it was only me. The character I play has his own charisma. But In 'ABCD2,' the film has gotten bigger with stars like Shraddha Kapoor and Varun Dhawan teaming up with me. The story is also completely different, so viewers can expect something totally new.

I would love 'Patsy' to join the ranks of superhero comics that have something for everybody and are new-reader-friendly, with an adventure every issue.

The great opportunity with Deadman was that you had a character that nobody had really done anything with - Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino created the character, which is terrific, but Carmine only did one issue with him - and it gave me a chance to do things that I hadn't seen done in comics all of my life.

What impresses me the most about DC characters is how long a lot of them have been around.

On film, it's really nice to see that transformation from the beginning, reading the script, to know where he starts and where he ends, and be able to plan for that.