I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

Comics are so full of amazing work. And I can’t look at a drawing of a woman without thinking of, for instance, Wallace Wood and his amazing way of capturing beauty.

But I'm not trying to convince anybody how to vote or how to live. Nobody's ever successfully accused me of being realistic.

"Comic book" has come to mean a specific genre, not a story form, in people's minds. So someone will call Die Hard "a comic-book movie," when it has nothing to do with comic books. I'd rather have comics be the vehicle by which stories are told.

I realized that I was about to turn 30, and Batman was permanently 29. And I was going to be damned if I was older than Batman.

The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time.

We live in the shadow of crime with the unspoken understanding that we are victims.. of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, ans always has been, in our hands. We are under siege. He's showing us that we can resist.