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When I was at Marvel, they were in bankruptcy, which is hard to believe now with 'Avengers 2' out, but it was during the 1990s. It was a troubled place. Comic book sales were dropping. Work was scattered.

The decision to work with Marvel for a while isn't any sort of denigration of DC. I had a fantastic time there, I was treated extremely well, I have strong positive feelings about all of my editors and the DC universe of characters, and I look forward to hopefully working with them at some point down the road.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.

The direct market has evolved into a machine that is very good at selling corporate-owned superhero titles published by two main companies: DC and Marvel.

I think in the wake of the domination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everyone is now looking for a grand plan.

It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing?

That became a big time in comic books because it's when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.

There are no easy answers for the balance of how you protect the core business of the books with what the digital future will look like, but that would be our job with DC Comics, to figure that out and experiment and take some risks while always protecting the core business.