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.

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.

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.

I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, "Well, you've got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, 'Well we love this, but we can't publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person." The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you're still making a living in comics, that really helps because you're not desperate for someone's permission to write for a living.

The political vibe of late-'40s Hollywood through the mid-'50s is something we're seeing a lot of echoes of right now, and in a scary way, where I'm wishing for an Edward R. Murrow to stand up and start somehow calling people on stuff. But as far as the way the industry works, I feel like we're in a place where you see companies slowly moving back to only doing their own stuff.

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.

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.