Maybe this is because I'm a comics historian as much as anything else, but I really have a deep-seated respect for the characters that have been around since before I was born and are probably going to outlive me.

When you're writing a team book where every character already has his or her own series, you don't have dominion over them as individuals - but what you can exploit is their relationships with one another.

Certainly, your characters - whether they are superheroes are not - should have foibles. They should have problems; they should have things that their powers can't solve. That's what makes them nuanced, interesting characters. They can have intense motivations. They should have intense motivations to do what they do.

When they first asked me to do 'Hulk,' my first instinct was to say no because I didn't think I had anything to say with the character, especially when they said, 'Please do what you did with 'Daredevil,' whatever that was.'

I am just tired of writing about heroes that we're dragging down to our level, and I want to write about heroes that we want to be.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.

I love writing comedy.

If I wanted to write a bunch of comics about 50-year-olds sitting around having a conversation about politics, that would be realistic, but it'd be the dullest comic in the world.

I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.

I love 'Archie' comics.

Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.

What sets 'Archie' apart from the many, many times I've reworked and rebooted long-standing characters is that this time, it was really scary.

Hulk fans are impossible to please.

I'm not as good a prose writer as I'd like to be, but I never aspired to that.

Real science is the greatest, most exciting springboard I have available to me as a writer, and I don't feel the least bit constrained by it.

I respect people of faith, but I'm not one.

When I first did 'Empire,' it was a severe break from everything I'd written up to that point, which is all very continuity-driven, super-heroic, and ethics and morals-infused. 'Empire' was a chance to break away from that.

I'm not a big fan of the George Lucas school of meddling and tinkering. That's a slippery slope.

I'm a big believer that if you buy a comic, you ought to own it.

Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.

If you go back and look at the first issue of 'Indestructible Hulk,' if you have a sharp eye, you'll catch something that I totally forgot to put in there. In my horror, I only realized after the fact that I took totally for granted that everyone in the world knows what triggers the transformation.

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 got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.

Juggling a huge cast is a bear.