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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.