Superhero Narrative Quotes

I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of 'Supergirl' and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don't want it to be the same as the Superman story.

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

We're hip to the fact that Superman never saved no black people.

Marvel does a fantastic job about bringing human stories - because you're telling big stories with a heart at the centre of it - and that's what connects all of the characters to our audience members.

I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.

I was not creating icons when I wrote the 'The X-Men' and the 'The New Mutants.' I was creating people.

The most questionable thing I did was make Superman a government agent. If this had been a Superman story, I'd never have done that - and I know that, because I have a Superman story I want to tell someday. In this story, Batman was the hero, so the world was built around him.

Invisible Boy was fun. Everybody else's character, they knew where they were at already as a superhero. But invisible boy's character, you kind of grow up with him within the movie.

Every significant book at Marvel had its key antagonist. 'The Fantastic Four' had Doctor Doom; 'Spider-Man' had Doc Ock, among others; Thor had Loki, if not Surtur. Without Magneto, the X-Men had nobody.

The difference between 'Watchmen' and a normal comic book is this: With 'Batman's Gotham City,' you are transported to another world where that superhero makes sense; 'Watchmen' comes at it in a different way, it almost superimposes its heroes on your world, which then changes how you view your world through its prism.

The superhero shows and movies are always having the spotlight on the superheroes themselves. It's never about the people who are living in that world and then trying to go about their life without the superheroes involved. It's about what that actuality would be like.

Marvel is at its best when we see how an ordinary person has something extraordinary happen to them - whether it's Tony Stark or Bruce Banner or Peter Parker.

I think we need a superhero in India that needs a great amount of writing and character behind it. if someone manages to crack it and approaches me, I would love to play a superhero which has a number of series behind it.

What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.

I think it's refreshing to have a character-driven 'Batman' story that isn't just about action and getting out of scrapes.

It's always difficult with the superhero stuff because you're working with characters who have been written by 100 to 200 people over the past 20 years, at least, so they never sound the same or act the same. The best approach is to try to draw the best fitting line through all of the interpretations.

The 'Ms. Marvel' mantle has passed to 'Kamala Khan,' a high school student from Jersey City who struggles to reconcile being an American teenager with the conservative customs of her Pakistani Muslim family.

When State Way Gardens and The Robert Taylor Homes were being torn down, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use that as a backdrop for the development of a super hero narrative.

The secret to 'Year One' is that it's a Jim Gordon story. It's a great Bruce Wayne story, don't get me wrong, but Jim Gordon is the focus of that book. To me, that's the stronger emotional arc. It's not that the Bruce Wayne stuff isn't masterful, because it is, but it's Jim's book.

The beauty of Captain America is that you didn't have to come from a distant planet, like Superman, or he didn't have to be born into a family of billionaires like Bruce Wayne. He happened to be in the right place at the right time, and someone gave him a magic potion, and he grew muscles and became a superhero.

Lots of things that go on in mainstream superhero comics are just stupid. They just show up on the page, and no one makes any mention of it.

The important information you need at the beginning of an issue. Like way they did the old Frank Miller Daredevil issues in the first five pages he always had to state his origins and how he got his powers.

If you want to be able to use the powers of Flash and Wonder Woman and Cyborg, you have to have bad guys who are up to snuff and give them what they can really kind of get their cars out on the track and open up the accelerator a little bit.

When I asked myself what I'd want to see in a comic about a Pakistani superhero, the first word that came to mind was 'relatable.'

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.