I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

It's hard not to be enthusiastic when you like what you're doing and I love what I do. I love writing stories, I love coming up with ideas for new projects and I love the people I work with, because I work with great writers and artists and directors and actors.

In the entertainment industry all that anybody wants to do whether it's music or stories or dancing or comedy or whatever, they want to entertain the public. And they do it any way they can. Sometimes they concentrate simply on entertaining people and they don't care what message they are giving.

From 1940 to about 1960, I had been writing just regular comics, the way my publishers wanted me too. He didn't want me to use words of more than two syllables if I could help it. He didn't want me to waste time on worrying about good dialogue or characterization. Just give me a lot of action, lot of fight scenes.

I think it's just the challenge. It's not that all my life I've wanted to do characters [in Marvel] , because I never particularly thought about it, but the challenge of saying, "How could they be done differently that may be more absorbing or more effective?"

People like stories that are bigger than life, about characters with unusual powers. And when you get all the characters in the zodiac, it's so colorful, and it's so rich in different attitudes that the characters have.

Maybe there will always be a market for the regular comic books because you can read [them] at your own pace. You can save them, collect them, [then] go back and read them again.