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

I think most people know the concept of difficult family situations. So I try to just ground a very big concept in something we can all relate to on some level.

The success [of the X-Men], I think, is for two reasons. The first is that, creatively, the book was close to perfect ... but the other reason is that it was a book about being different in a culture where, for the first time in the West, being different wasn't just accepted, but was also fashionable. I don't think it's a coincidence that gay rights, black rights, the empowerment of women and political correctness all happened over those twenty years and a book about outsiders trying to be accepted was almost the poster-boy for this era in American culture.

Marvel movies, are seeming slightly less exciting now that Star Wars has appeared and everything.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

Cookbooks are almost a substitution for a lost sense of culture. People want some other life than the one they're living, so they buy a cookbook with pictures and imagine themselves as part of that life.

The lovely thing is, if Marvel had a Spider-Man movie over at Sony or something, they own the rights to the character, and the editors and producers make suggestions and get notes and things. But you're talking about Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. They're two of the best people in the world. The notes are just things like, "This is absolutely brilliant."