The biggest direct influence on my career is Ben Edlund, who gave me my first real professional break and, through his friendship and example, turned me into a writer and a more critical thinker in general.
Shirt Club isn't just a series of shirts that say 'I Love The Monarch' on them.
'The Green Lantern' seems a little calculated to me. It's like, 'We've got to get on this gay bandwagon and make this character gay.' Like anything else, there's earnest expressions in the culture and then there's kind of bandwagoning.
I accidentally saw David Byrne's last two songs in Prospect Park at a free concert because I came out of a movie late, and he was still playing.
My generation has a hard time being genuine and enthusiastic. There's a lot of irony in our culture.
Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called 'Cement Shooz.'
Fundamentalists are crazy. They're the real world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don't believe in that, if you can't relate to that, it just seems crazy.
I don't think a lot of people are able to relate to genuine patriotism, a genuinely good feeling about our country and its meaning to the rest of the world.
The thing that always struck me about 'Jonny Quest' is: What kind of parent brings his kid to the Amazon so that yetis can throw boulders at him?
Around 2000, I was working on cartoons like 'PB&J Otter' and 'Doug.'
I hate hearing me talk when I'm not in character, and I can barely deal with hearing me as a character.
I would have really loved to have gone on a hiatus to write for Daredevil.
The basic idea of 'The Venture Brothers' was taking the world of 'Jonny Quest' and jumping back into 30 years later, seeing how someone who grew up like Jonny - with that kind of space race enthusiasm and disregard for other cultures - would turn out. Dr. Venture is a boy genius who didn't grow up to be what he should have been.
Cristin Milioti! Who you might know from 'How I Met Your Mother' or 'The Wolf of Wall Street.' A pure delight.
The Monarch is the Big Bad to this one family of former adventurers, but we've always known there is a bureaucracy of villains that is a workman-like aspect to them.
Guys like the Monarch are not unique, and there are guys like him all over the world torturing dumb scientists.
Shore Leave is the one who evolved the most - because he started as a one-off joke because we were gagging on how the G.I. Joe vocationally specific-themed characters reminded us of the Village People. We made a sassy Village People kind of guy, and then we brought him back.
There's a million jokes about what's going on with Batman and Robin. It's a classic thing to call out the homoerotic nature of the men's adventure show.
I dressed as the Riddler once, when I was little too heavy to do. I would wear tights. My brother was in a hair metal band, and he had Riddler tights made. My brother's a geek, but he was in a heavy metal band, so I'm a chubby fifteen-year-old, and I borrow his Riddler tights and wear them to school with the package. That wasn't a good idea.
I don't think I would want to do an animated movie because I've already made so many hours of animation that what's the point? I'd want something new and weird to challenge me in a different way.
