She was like John Rambo meets Polly Pocket; Dakota Fanning crossed with Death Wish 4.

I wanted to portray very, very dark subject matter and a deceptively complex story in the brightest colours and simplest lines possible to leave the readers reeling.

There probably aren't a lot of new superheroes around, so whenever one appears, it makes a bit of noise. Really, most of the people who are my friends write characters they loved as children. I get that, as well, because that's why I got into comics. But I'm also taking this massive liberation creatively, going off and doing new stuff. The first and foremost reason I do it is because I think they're fun, and I can do anything I want. I'm not constrained by continuity.

You kind of worry for the characters in a way that you don't normally in sci-fi, because sci-fi tends to be about the ideas, and this is about people.

Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.

There's almost a universe as big as the Marvel Universe with X-Men. I mean, Deadpool is something I think everybody was taken surprise by, except for the people who read the comic book.

Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.