Nobody Likes To Be Preached To.

Some Artists, Such As Jack Kirby, Need No Plot At All. I Mean I'll Just Say To Jack, "let's Let The Next Villain Be Dr. Doom" ... Or I May Not Even Say That. He May Tell Me. And Then He Goes Home And Does It. He's So Good At Plots, I'm Sure He's A Thousand Times Better Than I. He Just Makes Up The Plots For These Stories. All I Do Is A Little Editing ... I May Tell Him That He's Gone Too Far In One Direction Or Another. Of Course, Occasionally I'll Give Him A Plot, But We're Practically Both The Writers On The Things.

The Cliché I Tried To Avoid Was I Hated "teenage Sidekicks." I Always Figured If I Were A Superhero, There's No Way On God's Earth That I'm Gonna Pal Around With Some Teenager. So My Publisher Insisted I Have A Teenager In The Series, Because They Always Felt Teenagers Won't Read The Books Unless There's A Teenager In The Story; Which Is Nonsense.

I Remember When I Was A Kid, I Loved Sherlock Holmes. I Thought Arthur Conan Doyle Was One Of The Greatest Writers, Because I Felt I Knew Sherlock Holmes. He Existed To Me. When I Went To England The First Thing I Did Was Go To Baker Street To Look For His House. I Think You've Got To Try To Make All Of Your Characters As Empathetic And Realistic As Possible.

I Think Almost Everybody Enjoyed Fairy Tales When They Were Young, Tales Of Witches And Ogres And Monsters And Dragons And So Forth. You Get A Little Bit Older, You Can't Read Fairy Tales Any More.

I Think Any Comic Book - Or Really, Any Book That You Can Read - In A Sense Is An Educational Tool In That It Helps Literacy. The More You Read, The Better You Get At It. It Almost Doesn't Matter What You Read, The Important Thing Is For Young People To Become Readers.