The only damn thing I ever learned in all my years in art school was a piece is never done, it is just finished. You have to trust your inner voice, your instincts, when they tell you pencils down. And you roll up your sleeves and you start over again.

Write. Write every day. Write honestly. Write something that doesn’t exist, and you wish did. Read. Learn. Study. Watch people. Listen to what they say, listen to how they say it and listen to what they do not say. Surprise yourself. Scare yourself.

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."

It was a very excellent day over there at HBO/Cinemax when they bought 'Powers' . I felt like I graduated television college, because they make amazing television. The person who said yes to Veep said yes to us, which made me feel very good about myself for five seconds. Which my self-loathing doesn't usually allow me to feel. Even I could not say that that wasn't a fun day.

One of the things I like to do is people's hearts are on their sleeve, whether it's a good or a bad heart. And I think that's one of the things living in a world with Powers would do: it's too theatrical not to express yourself constantly. It would change them socially and sexually, everything would be altered because of superheroes.

I was there when Sam Raimi showed Stan Lee the first cut of the first Spider-Man movie. I was on a couch next to Stan, watching how special effects had finally caught up to his imagination. It was insane. And I'm thinking, "He had to wait until he was 80 years old for that to happen." When they announced 'Powers' and 'Jessica Jones,' I thought, "Oh, that's nice!"

In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.