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.

I don't know, maybe it's just timely, or maybe it's the fact that I live in a house with four women, but I just find my thoughts kind of skewing that direction at the moment.

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.

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.

He [Stuart Immonen] and I have known each other over email for 18, 19 years or something, so to finally work with him is like kissing the girl that you always wanted to kiss.

I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.

If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.