This is something I learned when I was working at a newspaper: when you put something on paper, whether it's words or pictures, and it's staring back at the reader, they are now alone in the room with them for as long as it takes them to turn the page. Whereas on television, the images fly by.

When it was announced that Spider-Man was going to be in Captain America: Civil War, "Miles Morales" was trending on Twitter for like a week. More people than I ever thought had heard of it. Listen, people go to Build-a-Bear and make your Miles Morales Build-a-Bears and tell everybody that's what we want!

I didn't know why I was coming to this room. Someone just told me to go to Sam Raimi's office. I knew that I uniquely had the comics version of his job, which was to take Spider-Man and put him into the modern day. But I thought, "Maybe he wants to tell me to cut it out." So I come in, it's in his office, and then Stan Lee comes in, and I'd only ever met Stan as a fan, not as a professional. And then they sit us down on a couch, and roll in an AV cart with a TV on it and go, "We're going to show you the first cut of Spider-Man."

Well it's been about 100 years and every attempt at a comics writers' union has failed miserably. There is, sadly, a long history of short-term thinking and self-destructive behavior among my fellow comic book creators. No matter how many horror stories they have heard they won't even go so far as to hire themselves a lawyer when they need it. It breaks my heart. I am a very proud union member of the Writers Guild. And I can't imagine my fellow comic creators being able to pull something like this together.

In my mind jealousy would come with seeing people do something that makes it all look extremely easy when it's not, like artists who can draw better than I can. In college, I was different. I was so hungry that anyone else who was published - I couldn't deal with it.

From my personal taste, it needed more of a visual style. It's so hard when you're adapting something that's so visually scrumptious like Mike Oeming's drawings. They're so unique to comics, but they're a voice.

I didn't write superheroes for the first 10 years of my comic career. I was just doing fan fiction. I wasn't thinking about superheroes at all, even though I loved them. I was raised by Watchmen and Dark Knight, so I was raised in with it's all been done, they don't worry about that.