I live in New York City, and one day many years ago I was with a poet, Gregory Corso, walking through Greenwich Village. He pointed to a doorway in an alley that he said led to a tunnel under Manhattan, a tunnel he'd use to run from the cops. I started learning about old Prohibition-era speakeasy tunnels under the city, for running whiskey.
There was a Japantown in San Francisco, but after the internment camps that locked up all the Japanese, Japantown shrunk down to just a couple tourist blocks.
I'm thrilled to be taking over Green Arrow. What I adore about the Arrow is his recklessness. He'll shoot off on an impulse, dispatch someone if they deserve it; his heroism is instinctive.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They're like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
I'm dying to fool around with the distance between Selina Kyle and Catwoman. And, you know, the whole double identity thing is endlessly fascinating. I mean, you can always find another riff for it.
Catwoman isn't a 'joiner.' She's a solo operator. She isn't naturally heroic; she's fairly selfish.
I wanted the new Green Arrow to somehow sense his long, brutal past. It's like someone who has past lives they can't remember but feels occasional flashes of.
I know my predecessors have written a Green Arrow who has a lot of thoughts about social justice, but that was a more evolved, older, wiser Green Arrow.
I don't think most people are all heroic or all villainous, so I find ambiguity of motivations to be a natural human condition.
Catwoman has an awesome, iconic personality. It's a blast to write her. You get her; she's an archetype. You can just kind of put on the cat-suit.
People struggle with moments of deep dread about life and moments of surety. Often within the course of the same day. Life is a roller coaster, especially if you take risks.
I'm one of those people who believes you are what you do.
There is an unspoken feminist layer to Katana. She's an aggressive modern woman with traditional Japanese roots. She was in love with her sword because she believed it contained her husband.
I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.
I've never written a character that wasn't burdened by years of pain and trauma. Let's face it: Most comic-book heroes have some serious baggage. Not Green Arrow. He's a healthy guy - imagine that? Carrying your hero around in your head, imagining the world through his eyes, is just a hoot.
Green Arrow has gone through so many changes; he's been right-wing, he's been left-wing, he's been rich, he's been poor, he's been a social justice guy, then when I got him, he was a rich playboy guy. So it was a lot harder to get into a character that has so many personas in the past, and I just looked at his anger.
I walked the streets of New York; I would feel the presence of Daredevil. I would see him up on the rooftop. What you are doing in your life, you start to see in your book. It all starts to merge together.
Is it possible to run a big industrial corporation in a benevolent fashion? We see these days that even the hippest companies hide some rotten practices to make their profit margins work.
Katana is a trained, disciplined martial artist. She removes herself from Birds of Prey to go on a personal journey in Japantown, San Francisco, and pursue a quest for vengeance against the Sword Clan, the men that killed her husband.
When I first started writing comics, in the way-back days, Typhoid Mary was my explosive response to women characters in comics - I made her an innocent virginal type, a clever, dark, liberated woman, and as Bloody Mary, a feminist bent of punishing men - all in one character. She was an instinctual rather than a calculated creation.
