Kurt Busiek Quotations

At one point, I worked up a list of five requirements for a superhero: superpowers, a costume, a code name, a mission, and a milieu. If the character had three out of the five, they were a superhero. But that's just my definition.

The reason I quit being a sales manager over twenty years now is because I hate elevator pitches. I want to write stories and show people what's in them when they read them, not tell them all about it ahead of time.

I created lots of characters in high school and college, and the first character I created in pro comics was Liana, Green Lantern of M'Elu, for a backup story in 'Green Lantern #162,' my first professional sale.

I like superheroes. I like the drama of it, the stirring, larger-than-life aspect.

Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldn't like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.

The most fascinating powers don't mean a thing if the guy's poorly motivated or dull, and the most generic powers won't hurt a well-motivated character. Personality and motivation are what make Magneto, Magneto and not Cosmic Boy. The powers work for him, but it's his motivation that makes him the character he is.

You've got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what they're like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

I tend to think that the best face of humanity is that we learn. We explore, we study, we think.

I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

I'm a writer. I just love telling stories.

When I realized that people actually wrote comics, that it was a job people could do, I thought, 'Gee, these things are only 17 pages long! I could probably finish one of those and find out whether I suck before I've spent five years of my life on it.' In stumbling into comics that way, I discovered that I loved the form.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

Marvel's got a crowded universe, and there are already so many characters hogging the spotlight that it's hard to break through that. First off, whatever character you're creating, odds are, there's already someone similar in one way or another.

Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.

I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

Mainly, what I like to do is keep things varied and not get in a rut, not tell the same stories over and over.

When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.

I love creator-owned comics. Most of my favorite books these days are creator-owned, from stuff DC publishes, like 'Fables,' to books like 'Saga,' 'Fatale,' 'Hellboy,' and 'Courtney Crumrin.'

Between 'Avengers,' 'JLA/Avengers,' and 'Trinity,' I've gotten down and dirty in the big universes and had a hell of a time playing in those sandboxes.

If I won the lottery tomorrow - which would be a real trick, since I haven't entered - and was independently wealthy for the rest of my life, I'd write comic books, because it's what I like doing.

It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens.

I seem to like playing with form, and the superhero genre has an awful lot of formula to it. It has a lot of formula to it that I don't think it should be limited to.

The metaphor is the story, not the character.

I think James Bond is a spy. He's not superhuman. Calling him a superhero is like calling James Bond movies "comic-book movies."

There are a lot of discussions where people will decide that James Bond is a superhero, because he's a larger-than-life hero who beats the bad guys by doing larger-than-life things. And I don't think that's a useful definition.

I've always been positive about superheroes.

Superhero creators who engage in deconstruction fall into two categories: There are the guys who do it because it's easy, because it gets an audience reaction if you point out that superheroes must be a bunch of psychotic nuts. And there are the guys who do it because they're actually interested, and they're trying to get at what's going on underneath. They're interested in the process and the results.

I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?

"Superhero" is a term that's been borrowed in order to say "big and larger than life and loud and active and dumb." And I don't think that's a useful definition. That's more a dismissal.

I think that the superhero-as-metaphor involves a superhero being some sort of intellectual, emotional, or other such concept writ large. But I don't know that it's a necessary part of the appeal that the superhero be superior.

I think the Hulk has always appealed very strongly to much younger readers than Spider-Man, because Spider-Man is an adolescent character, and the Hulk is a very childlike character.

The Hulk is rage personified, just, "I don't like something. Break it." And that's a great concept for a seven- or eight-year-old.

I'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do.

Maybe I had a 'secret identity,' but then when you think about it, don't we all? A part of ourselves very few people ever get to see. The part we think of as 'me.' The part that deals with the big stuff. Makes the real choices. The part everything else is a reflection of.

The characters are, by their nature, archetypes that can serve different metaphors.

If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.

Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldnt like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.

Youve got to leave the reader with more than just a name and a costume - they need to know who the character is, what theyre like, what kind of attitude they have, what sort of role they play.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.