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.

If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.

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 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.

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.

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

Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldnt like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.