One of the virtues of 'The X-Men' was that it managed to transcend the expectations and prejudices of the medium. It appealed to a vaster audience than anyone had ever anticipated from any superhero book, much less 'X-Men.'

When you're given the assignment to write, for example, 'Spider-Man,' the concept, characters and environment are all laid out for you. Everything is pre-established, and your sole responsibility as a creator is to craft an exciting, entertaining, hopefully original adventure, to add layers and colors to a canon that already exists.

You know, for a normal kid it might be how to ask somebody out on a date or how to deal with the SATs or just how to deal with the bully down the block. And the X-Men have the conflict of Magneto or aliens or what-have-you.

Superman has always been a battle for hope.

You have an iconic character in Superman. You want to keep him vital and relevant to the audience as it evolves. So there's a creative dynamic.

Like 'Uncanny X-Men,' 'New Excalibur' is the story of people thrown together by fate and wild circumstance who find their way to true and lasting friendship.

I get to watch stories I wrote brought to life by the most brilliant actors in cinema.

I'm an immigrant.

The success of 'X-Men' paved the way, I have to presume, for Sony to make Sam Raimi's 'Spider-Man.'

No creator in modern times is going to stick around with a concept for 20 years. There are simply too many alternatives that writers want to pursue.

There are no heritage concepts at Marvel or DC that are untouched.

The weirdest, most eloquent memory I have of the time on the kibbutz is, every Saturday night was movie night, and one of the first movies I remember seeing there was 'Judgment at Nuremberg.'

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.

Captain Britain is not about representing an empire, he's about standing up for everyone and fighting for the betterment of all.

From Captain Britain's point of view we live in a great, heavily populated omniverse and our reality is just one part of that. In each of the parallel worlds there is a lighthouse on every shore of every England where the champion has his base.

My view of Magneto is that he's the terrorist who might someday evolve into a statesman.

People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

I want to talk about what I'm doing now... I'm not interested in what I've done, I'm interested in what I'm about to do.

I'd rather have Ben Affleck feeling something than twenty minutes of punching CGI Zod. You want moments that resonate with your audience.

I was an actor in New York, dude.

The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants.

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.

If at some point Fox decides that the X-Men properties are no longer lucrative I'm sure that they will cut a deal with Disney.