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.
The majority of the DC and Marvel comic lines are white male characters, and the minute you make Thor a woman or Captain America a black guy, the Internet is filled with hateful comments and people saying, 'That's not what Captain America is supposed to look like.'
You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book.
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 don't want to see Superman replaced with Superboy.
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'm not a big crossover person, I'll be honest. I try to keep 'Hellcat' separate from the larger Marvel world because I want it to be a book anyone can read, not just a hardcore comics fan.
I don't think you can be a comic book fan and not hate change.
When I approached 'Animal Man,' I approached it as if it wasn't a reboot, as if the Grant Morrison and Jamie Delano stuff happened. I mean, as much as I could make it all make sense, it still all happened.
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.
Gene Hackman's portrayal of Lex Luthor did not exist in comic books. This is not my Lex Luthor, but I really like it.
Luckily, what you trade off in not being part of the comic book canon and not having some literature that you can use to your benefit, in terms of figuring out who you are, you gain in the ability to just be whoever you want to be.
In my opinion, I feel like all versions of 'Deathstroke' are valid. Just like with 'Black Panther,' I felt like it wasn't good for a writer to say another writer's work was invalid or never happened.
What 'Flashpoint' does is examine the inherent inconsistencies in Shade's past and attempt to explain it and give it some logic.
There are no heritage concepts at Marvel or DC that are untouched.
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.
I love continuity. I was a continuity nerd growing up. I loved buying a comic in the middle of something and loved digging for back issues or going forward and trying to figure it all out.
The main fear comes from playing a character that so many people know from the comic books, and there's a long history of people unhappy with movies and TV shows who make alterations to comic book characters.
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.
Superman has evolved continually in the comic books over the course of 75 years. He couldn't even fly for years in the original comic books. Kryptonite wasn't added until the '60s. All sorts of things like this. If a character is going to remain vital, he does have to change with the times.
'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.
The primary goal for me in doing a superhero series is to make it new-reader-friendly, so it might not be front-loaded with all this history, but you can be sure it will show up!
For me, Iris West was traditionally white in the comic books. So, you know, comic book fans are very opinionated, very vocal. So it was very scary stepping into that role when I started the show.
