If you ever go to talk to an editor you don't want to be able to turn down a job because you can't do what is necessary.

There are still people who don't like my work and that's okay with me.

It's not Comic Con any more. It's this huge marketplace for the motion picture and television industry. And the toy manufacturer's and the game people. One of the problems with International Comic Con is that tickets go on sale for the next year's event and the place is full of thousands and thousands of kids who have scraped together every dime to get admittance because they want to get all the freebies.

I learned early Jack Kirby favorite movies were the Warner Brothers from the '30s. When you look at Jack Kirby's comic books, or at least when I do, I can make an instant connection. When he said he loved those movies it was like, "Of course."

During the Mavelmania days in the late '60's I got a phone call one evening and I answered it and this voice said, "Mike Royer? This is Jack Kirby. Word is you're a pretty good inker." That's how it started.

If I wanted to own some Jack Kirby original art unless it was something that Giacoia or Sinnott had inked I was too close to it. I didn't want to collect his pages inked by me. Of course 40 years later I'd LOVE to have some of that stuff.

I've been very lucky with the people I've met over the years. Way back in the early '70s I went to [Phil] Seuling's conventions for something like three years in a row from '70 to '72 and I remember at the '72 luncheon with the Academy of Comic Book Artists and talking with John Romita about the kind of brushes he used. Pros ask pros the same questions that fans do. "What kind of pens do you use? What kind of brushes do you use?" I was so amazed that the wonderful work John Romita was doing was accomplished with a Windsor-Newton series 7 Number 4. Not a 2 or a 3, but a 4.