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Growing up, I always liked Catwoman and Superman; they inspired me.

I'd always wanted to do a Marvel project, and I'd always imagined getting to play one of the superheroes because it's such a hard thing to get. It's the parts that only go to a few people. The flip side of that is the antagonists are pretty awesome.

I was a huge comic book fan. It's weird because the era of 'Marvel' I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it's not the one that anybody romanticizes.

I guess my journey with comics began with stuff like Spider-Man and Batman. I started off with mainstream superhero stuff, which I've never abandoned.

I'm very much influenced by your traditional comic book artists like Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Walter Simonson. Their styles were sort of what I was gravitating towards.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

I love comics and have since I was a kid. That is what gave me the idea to create my own.

When I was a young artist, I liked and was interested in belonging to the mainstream comics group. I didn't introduce myself as an author, but only as a designer.

I was influenced by autobiographical writers like Henry Miller, and I had actually done some autobiographical prose. But I just thought that comics were like virgin territory. There was so much to be done. It excited me. I couldn't draw very well. I could write scripts and storyboard style using stick figures and balloons and captions.

The superhero genre speaks to a vast swath of humanity these days, and studios are in the business of constantly renewing their money-printing licenses. I sense we're nearing a saturation point with some of these icons, where it becomes more about the action figures and Happy Meals than it does the mythological heartbeat of the core ideas.