Every time I got 'Amazing Spider-Man' or 'Fantastic Four' or another book firmly on the rails, we got pulled into some big event book or crossover and it cost momentum and messed badly with the pacing and structure of the book.

There can always be new beginnings... even for people like us.

Growing up as a kid, we moved all over the country on a fairly frequent basis, from New Jersey to Texas, California, Illinois... we moved 21 times in my first 17 years.

Everyone in the entertainment business gets crappy contracts when we start out, and into the middle of our careers. It's the nature of the business.

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind.

Did Alan Moore get screwed on his contract? Of course. Lots of people get screwed, but we still have Spider-Man and lots of other heroes.

When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don't extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.