It seems that most of the projects I'm doing with relationship to Marvel's 80th anniversary occur during my core run on the X-Men titles.

If you're going to create a character, the tools you use to make that character 'real' are the lives you see around you. The people you listen to on the street. The emotions you see on faces and bodies while you're sitting... in a Starbucks, watching the world go by.

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

I actually tried replying to what I thought were some unfair comments on the Internet once or twice, and I never heard back. What seems to happen with some people is they're very much interested in voicing their own opinions, but not in having them challenged.

A lot of people didn't like the 'Fantastic Four' for the first year and a half. It took a certain measure of time for me to find my feet in terms of what I wanted to do with the concept.

I think the biggest challenge is going to be finding a place that sells comics. Ideally, you want someone to come out of a movie theater, look across the street, see a newsstand, walk in and find a copy of the 'X-Men' sitting there. But that's not what's going to happen.

I guess you go back to the old writer's adage that when they do your stuff in Hollywood, you smile sweetly upon your credit - if there is one - and enjoy the show.

When I was little, I used to have nightmares about Godzilla walking out of the Great South Bay, because we had a fire alarm out where we lived that sounded just like his feet.

I wish the 'Dark Phoenix' saga had been done more effectively than it was, but that was out of my hands.

When you're spending $100-plus million dollars, you need to give the audience what they want.

Comics publishers are used to looking in a very, very narrow focused prism. It's like when I started writing 'X-Men.' Our 'meat and potatoes' money was made of newsstand sales, while anything that came through the Direct Market was considered gravy.

The first challenge that every writer or creator of material faces is getting through the crowd so that the person you're trying to sell it to hears the pitch and is able to respond to it.

In some films it wouldn't be surprising to see the United States envisioned as a significant but not primary dominant marketplace, and treated accordingly. But in comics, that's for the governing minds at each of the companies and corporations to find out for themselves.

Look at 'Avatar:' the foreign ticket sales were over twice the domestic returns. The mind boggles at those kinds of numbers, but that's what you get when you effectively reach out to a global audience. If that kind of thing came to comics, it would undoubtedly change how people perceive the mainstream industry.

The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.

On one level, all of the characters in 'Game of Thrones' grow out of George R.R. Martin's imagination. Therefore they are his. As long as they are in the novels they are his. But the moment they step forth onto the TV screen, they become filtered through the showrunners. In a business sense, it's the same way with comics.

All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.

Every writer with half a brain knows to surround himself or herself with editors who are smarter, far more articulate, and infinitely better looking.

For me, one of the things that makes the X-Men so crucial is they are relatively small in number but they have the potential to have a tremendous impact on the society around them.

I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.

The first rule is you have to create a reality that makes the reader want to come back and see what happens next. The way I tried to do it, I'd create characters that the reader could instantly recognize, and hopefully bond with, and put them through situations that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

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

The whole point of 'The New Mutants' was that the oldest of them, Sam, and maybe Dani Moonstar... they're 15. Rahne is 13. They are kids still. The whole point of being kids is half, if not two thirds of the time, they're making mistakes.

I find the idea of the recap page to be something of a waste. It's the page nobody ever reads and it's even worse because it doesn't tell you who anybody really is.