I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.
The great thing about 'X-Men' is that it takes characters that are quite firmly established in the comics and puts them in new contexts.
When Nixon opened the door to China in the early 1970s, Chinese artists got their first view of the West. Suddenly five centuries of Western art lay before them as a stylistic smorgasbord. Chinese artists could reinterpret it out of admiration or try to replace it. They choose the former.
When I hear something new, mostly in rhythms, I often find it interesting to recreate it in a studio in a completely different way.
Shakespeare does a great job of taking 5,000-year-old stories and turning them into modern pieces that are true to the original essence but are completely remade.
There's no recreating what Michael Jackson and Diana Ross did in 'The Wiz'. We're trying to figure out who these characters are in 2015. How would these times change their motives, change the things they would say and do?
I think that you can treat a classic like a museum piece -stuffed and mounted- or you can make it a living, breathing narrative that is unfolding right then and there.
My views on music, and life in general, are completely out of step with everything that's going on. I've always been out of step. The only thing that interests me is history, reviewing the past and making something out of it.
With any cover, I like to choose songs that affected me strongly already. So it's tough sometimes to take a song that you love so much and put your own spin on it because you get such a strong feeling from the original.
I don't want to say I hate remixes, because I don't, but I hate what instantly comes to mind now when people say 'remixes.'
Slightly forgettable movies can sometimes make great musicals.
In the theatre, every form once born is mortal; every form must be reconceived, and its new conception will bear the marks of all the influences that surround it.
I just love storytelling. I write music to tell stories. So when I'm done writing a song, I take it and go, 'Okay. How can I interpret these lyrics differently?' I love taking lyrics that were so close to me at a certain point in my life and then revamping them. I always want to take things to the next level.
I love the challenge of taking established, iconic comics characters and showing readers why they remain contemporary.
I thought some of my earlier cartoons were not exactly great shakes at the time I drew them. Now I see a certain innocence in them. The humor has a kind of purity to it, I guess. And it works better on some level for me now.
Most people don't know that I am an accomplished dramatic actor... But I've performed in several Shakespeare productions including Hamlet, except in this version, Hamlet lives in an apartment with two women, and has to pretend he's gay so that the landlord won't evict him.
I like to say that I do covers of my own songs. And I have about a dozen bands all over the world. That's no exaggeration. I have a South African band, an Australian band, Swedish bands, English bands, American bands. They're all notable musicians, too.
How do you make something the same but different? That's the question I had to deal with in my approach to the cover painting for 'Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes.' I wanted it to have many similarities to 'Percy Jackson's Greek Gods,' but I knew they couldn't be too similar.
To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone.
Some of the things I love the most are when a writer or a visionary takes on sort of an iconic character and then spins it. Like with Frank Miller, Batman was this one thing for basically forty years, and then Frank Miller came along and said he can also be this other thing. And Christopher Nolan came along and said he can also be this other thing. The idea of taking iconic comic book characters or superhero characters or mythic characters and subverting the genre or coming up with a new idea is something that's really interesting to me.
My great longing is to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like - but truer than the literal truth.
All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.
The coolest thing about doing live shows is I'm able to give the songs a new life. So even thought they're old, I'm able to do them in a way that's modern.
Art is the reordering of nature - the qualities of space and time - in new perceptual and material form.
It's fun to see how other artists adapt my work.
