Not sure how I missed this, but The Onion A.V. Club has a pretty excellent series of comic book-centric interviews up at the moment. There’s one with Portland’s own Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man), another with Joss Whedon (who does not live in Portland, but is currently writing the badass Buffy comic), and one with Bill Willingham (whose Fables is one of the best books of the past few years). All are well worth checking out.

Brian Michael Bendis.

Every comic book is someone’s first or their last. If someone’s picking this up for the first time, is it entertaining? Can they follow it? You can have a four-part or six-part story, but you should be able to get right in there and figure out what’s going on immediately, without insulting the reader at the same time. And also, someone might read this and go, “I’m never buying another comic book again, I’m moving on to something else. I like girls.” And they never read another comic again, and it’s your responsibility to make that not happen.

Joss Whedon.

I love working with other people’s characters if they’re characters that I care about. I’ve been reading Runaways from issue one. It was delicious fun for me to dive in and see what I would do with them. Since I am an insane fan of The Office, it was really fun for me to direct an episode, because I had very strong opinions about what everyone was going to be doing in the background, based on all of their history. It’s helpful when you’re a geek. Alien, same deal. Everything where you have something to build off of that you love, it’s fun. There are restrictions, X-Men particularly because it has such a long history, but it also brings resonance that you can only get from a comic book, or a TV show, or a franchise, something that’s gone on for a long time. You say something, and it calls back somebody’s entire childhood.

Bill Willingham.

Pretty much since I started doing comics, I never did anything else. I mean, I was very content to live poorly, even to the extent of, at one point, living in my van, parked in a shopping-mall parking lot every night, rather than get an honest job. Since I started doing comics work, I’ve never really done day-job things. I took a one-year break at one point, because I thought I could make it in Vegas as a professional poker player, and moved out to Vegas on very little funds. I did it for about a year, six months of that as a proposition player for a casino out here, and then six months of just freelance playing in whatever game suited me. I made just enough of a living to scrape by in the very, very worst part of town. Having proven something to myself, or not, I decided it was time to get back into funny books. That was it, that was the only non-comics job I’ve taken on since getting into comics.