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.

I prefer to write and draw in the privacy of my home and with total freedom and then take it to the lion's den.

My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.

Gotham City. Clean shafts of concrete and snowy rooftops. The work of men who died generations ago. From here, it looks like an achievement. From here, you can't see the enemy.

The world doesn't make sense until you force it to.

You don't... get it, boy... This isn't a mudhole... it's an operating table. And I'm the surgeon.

She doesn't quite chop his head off. She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.