I tend to forget what I'm doing will ever be read while I'm writing it, and just get on with the task at hand.

Preacher is a book that somehow allows me time by its settling on it's characters, that sort of modern gothic western feel. You're not likely to see the boat veering too far from that.

There's immense fun to be had as long as you can sort of sneak it past DC. I have been told on occasion that I need to have more respect for these characters.

I suppose that Heartland, Unknown Soldier and Pride and Joy represent not a quieter side but more of a serious side to my work, something I've been getting into recently.

The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters seriously.

Wouldn't want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I really wouldn't want to go anywhere near it at all, although on the other had I wouldn't mind having a crack at something like the Punisher.

Howard Chaykin was one of the few who dared to make mainstream comics different back in the eighties; it was guys like him, Alan Moore and Frank Miller who made sure there'd be no going back. Howard's work on The Shadow is amongst his very best: razor-sharp character work, sizzling dialogue and an unsurpassed sense of layout and design.