It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens.

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.

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.

It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens.

Superhero creators who engage in deconstruction fall into two categories: There are the guys who do it because it's easy, because it gets an audience reaction if you point out that superheroes must be a bunch of psychotic nuts. And there are the guys who do it because they're actually interested, and they're trying to get at what's going on underneath. They're interested in the process and the results.

"Superhero" is a term that's been borrowed in order to say "big and larger than life and loud and active and dumb." And I don't think that's a useful definition. That's more a dismissal.

I think James Bond is a spy. He's not superhuman. Calling him a superhero is like calling James Bond movies "comic-book movies."