"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 could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity.

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.

I seem to like playing with form, and the superhero genre has an awful lot of formula to it. It has a lot of formula to it that I don't think it should be limited to.

Youve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what theyre like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.

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.