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.

Maybe in this Star Wars world maybe subconsciously I was preparing myself. But I've just found all of my ideas I've been coming up with are big sci-fi things, and I wanted to do a big epic, a big space opera, and this is it. This is mine.

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

At the moment, I have it planned as a six or seven year experiment, but the books will only ever appear in bursts like this every couple of years and only with the best quality artists.

I was desperate to work with Stuart Immonen, who I have talked with for several years about doing a project together. So just the stars aligned. I knew that Stuart had a little break in his schedule, where he would be willing to do a project with me. So this year I've been very lucky.

The weird thing is that Stuart's the one guy - Stuart [Immonen ]and Sean Gordon Murphy, they're the kind of guys you can trust, where you don't need to do that because those guys are so incredibly reliable. They're just like clockwork, they turn in the pages just so perfectly on time. But I'm so paranoid, because I've been burned so many times, that I'm still even banking these guys.

I didn't want the headache of having a publisher reviewing everything I wrote in advance.