If I could pick any story idea or script I had that I wanted everything to go exactly right for, it would probably be 'Pacific Rim.'
I could be an alternative comic. I could be that really dark - I was - I was a very dark comic to begin with. I could be that guy, and the only reason I didn't is that I wanted to make money. I wanted to be popular. I wanted to be liked more than I wanted to be admired.
I was writing the kind of comic that would make me, at age 26 or 27, go down to a comic book store every month and spend my $2. That was my starting point. I wanted to write a comic that I would read. And that's still my agenda.
I wanted wherever possible to lean into the comic form and do things in the story telling that could only be done in comics and which pay homage to the many strands of comic and visual storytelling tradition.
Walt had a seat-of-the-pants approach on what he wanted musically. We kind of 'read' the boss and had a very high batting average, but there were occasions when he felt we had just written the wrong piece for the situation he wanted. We invariably listened to what he wanted - he was very descriptive in what he wanted and we could read him. We'd go back to the drawing board and work out what he wanted. He was a great inspiration, but a tough taskmaster.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership has the potential to reshape America's relationship with the nations of the Pacific Rim, enhance U.S. leadership in this critically important region, and provide a major boost to our economy.
I made a very concerted decision to go to drama school in the United States. But I did have the opportunity to go to Britain's Central School of Speech and Drama, and my dad and I had a few tense words about that. He wanted me to go to British drama school.
This was a brainchild of mine, to build a shop where you could walk up to everything and didn't feel like you had to keep your hands off. I wanted a shop that you could walk into and feel comfortable in, and I wanted women to feel comfortable in the shop as well.
I did not know much about 'Black Lightning' beforehand, but I always wanted to play a superhero. After getting the part, I went back and read the comic books.
'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.
It's hard to tell if anyone's interested in reading a serialized story. But it's interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They'd write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think "I'll read two more." Then you're like "I gotta find out!" And you read 500 more.
Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.
It's funny: when I go to a school and speak, and when they hear the back story about me, they want to go read the book.
I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.
Where do you go after something like 'Pacific Rim?' Which, for me, was such a moment, to have this thing and see it all come together, and it's big, and it has this cult following... You ask yourself, 'What's next?'
When I was younger, I was a guy who always wanted to get to the rim and attack the rim and just dunk the basketball.