Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.

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.

I guess I've been naive my entire life.

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.

When you're paid $29 for something and 30 or 40 years later you're seeing it on eBay with pages going for $199 or more, it's like, "Dammit!"

It was just too hard from my standpoint to apply myself properly for the lessons from art school and also work 6 hours a day at the Ben Paris restaurant in downtown Seattle. There was just no time to have a life.

People ask me who my favorite inker is and I tell them my favorite inker was Joe Sinnott...but I was the best. Now I don't mean that as any kind of egotistical thing. It's just that I did what Jack wanted.