You can sit and write in your room all you want, but until other people see it, until you see it produced for television or film or something, you're not 100 percent sure if what you wrote is actually going to work.

It's a lot easier to make a living as a writer in Hollywood than it was probably 10 years ago, though there's still just as many unemployed people in Hollywood as there ever has been, but there's so many more avenues to sell things, because of digital, and Amazon, and Netflix, and all these different platforms. That's crazy and exciting in a creative way, and we'll see where that all stands five years from now. But on the corporate side, I still see that pendulum swinging back in that other direction, which is a little not comforting.

If you don't have that empty white space around everything in the comics, the border of the page, then it feels like you're a little claustrophobic.

I vividly remember being in my mid- to late-20s. That part of life is very emotional, and exciting, and dramatic in a way that your late 40s are not. That's different and dramatic in other ways, but I wanted to tap into that angry youth vibe in Kill Or Be Killed that I remember feeling at that time, instead of my angry middle-aged vibe that I've been churning out for a few years.

There's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point. It's like a 90 percent chance for each project that it'll never happen. Every project has about a 10 percent chance of getting made, unless you're like a Quentin Tarantino or somebody who just gets whatever they want to get done. But those are the rare cases.

The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.

With comics, you can only really learn what you're doing wrong or what works best when you see your work published. I've been publishing comics since my 20s, and still, when I flip through any of my new comics, I still only see the things that I wish I'd done better. But that's how you learn, by seeing it.