The metaphor is the story, not the character.

At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do.

The Hulk is rage personified, just, "I don't like something. Break it." And that's a great concept for a seven- or eight-year-old.

I tend to think that the best face of humanity is that we learn. We explore, we study, we think.