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I just thought it was time I did it. I've been so busy. I'll always do comics - I love the form, I love what you can do with them, but it was getting onerous. I'm thinking I should be doing other stuff, people have been getting in touch with me and saying will you write this movie, will you do this, and I was losing interesting avenues to explore. So I made this decision that I'd made enough money off JLA to do other stuff that I've been putting off. So I'll do the books and I'll do the films and then that will give me a new buzz, because it's a different way of working and I can bring something new back to comics. A friend of mine wanted to know about the time you wrote yourself into the Animal Man comic - was that some kind of bid for immortality? No, no, it was the whole theory again. I was doing the same thing, trying to get into that world. Back then I had this notion that I could go in and talk to the characters, but I went in as myself. I've been really refinin' the notion since then. What I thought I could do, was I could go in as anything, 'cause it's me who's making them talk. So I can go in as Batman and say something to Superman that's totally unexpected. I developed the concept of fiction-suits, and you can go in wearing fiction-suits. So if we can go in there as characters, who's coming in here to tell us stuff, and who are they dressed up as?
Getting back to that hideously-intelligent-comic-guy-who-shoots-up-heroin-and-carries-a-knife thing, do you ever feel like you're expected to dumb it down, or that someone misses the point entirely? That happens all the time, yeah... How do you feel about that? For me it's not dumbing-down. If I'm not communicating, then I'm trying too hard. I should be trying to communicate. That's what I'm saying about postmodern theorists. It's a great theory, brilliant ideas but it will not communicate. I've got to get this to a point where I can walk into a pub and explain it to anyone, or else I'm not communicating. The Invisibles has been a gradual refining of very bizarre ideas. In the first book, I had to explain it in high-falutin', floral poetic, very scientific ideas, but by the third book I'm getting it down to where you can say it in the pub. I wanna concretise the vision enough that it makes sense in general conversation. I've found the best way to do that is through analogies an connecting it with other things. It's parables, it's what Jesus did (laughs), he got very difficult ideas and he tried to get it to where he could explain it to a child. I didn't really get any sense of dumbing down, I was just wondering if you'd ever been asked to do that. People are constantly telling me they don't understand, no matter how hard I try to make them understand. I don't have anything to say to those people. I've just decided I'll only talk to people who get it. Links:
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