MIKE JOZIC: Let's start with Jack Kirby's Fourth World. How did you get hooked up with doing covers for the series?

WALT SIMONSON: John [Byrne] asked me when he was getting ready to do it. I talk to John every so often and he asked if I wanted to do covers. I'm a Kirby fan from way back, and I'm especially a Fourth World fan, so I said, "Oh, sure." It was just about that simple.

He also asked me a bunch of months ago if I would be willing to do a backup feature for it, kind of along the lines of theTales of Asgard, and I said sure. So I'm doing a Kanto the Assassin backup right now that just started coming out, actually.

JOZIC: In number nine, I believe.

SIMONSON: That's right. It'll be a four part story.

JOZIC: So you will be just doing the four parts, this isn't a permanent thing?

SIMONSON: It won't be ongoing forever, no. John has done a couple of backups himself, and I think he's just using it to focus on individual characters and whatever back stories he'd like to do with these guys. He called me up, we were talking and he asked me. He knew I liked Kanto the Assassin, an old Mister Miracle character, so he asked if I'd do a Kanto story. And beyond that I pretty much had a free hand.

JOZIC: Throughout your career, you've done many covers for books that you haven't done the interiors on. Do you prefer doing the covers to the interiors, or vice versa?

SIMONSON: I like both really. You know, the nature of the problem you're solving for a cover or interior are somewhat different, and my interest, really, in doing what I'm doing is to not to burn out on the work. So by doing different things, writing some stuff, drawing some stuff, doing some covers, kind of jumping around here and there, that keeps my interest in comics and I think it keeps my work strong.

JOZIC: Another project you're working on is Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, which has just come out...

SIMONSON: The first of 12 issues.

JOZIC: ...and I was wondering if you could tell us a little about the "Moonbeams and Roses" story that your doing the artwork for?

SIMONSON: Well, I could tell you a little bit about it. It's complex enough that I can't tell you everything about it, and also, I don't even know everything about it. I've only read up through, I guess, plot number six. I've got that many from Michael, and I think he may have turned in seven to the office. I'm not sure, I haven't gotten that one yet.

Basically, there's three stories running concurrently in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse. One of them is an Elric story among the moors, and one of them is a Seaton Begg, Metatemporal Detective story which involves a death that occurred in pre World War II Germany during the Third Reich - which is actually based on a real incident, although whether it was a murder or suicide in the real incident is still unclear - and the third story, the one I'm doing, which really is the least linear. I don't know if I'd say the most cosmic of the three, but it certainly has the most characters [and] the most settings, at least up to now where I've got probably a half a dozen or a dozen different characters and different settings kind of jumping in and out. So while the other two stories sort of progress linearly to start with, "Moonbeams and Roses" is kind of all over the map, and it'll probably take a good three or four issue to begin to get enough information on each of the characters to kind of figure out who the heck they are and their relationship to each other.

JOZIC:It definitely was a 'complicated' read.

SIMONSON: Yeah, I'd have to say it's comics for people who actually read, as opposed to people who are looking for eye candy. I would like to make it as attractive as I can anyway, but it really is something that's going to demand enough concentration to remember what the hell you read last issue and then kind of pick up on it and go from there.

For example, one of the characters, The Rose, who was in the first episode, I guess chapter four really kind of covers her origin. Actually, with chapter four we'll really get a much clearer view of who she is, and what her relationship to several of the other characters in the storyline are. Michael himself appears in the storyline as one of the gamblers in the Game of Time at the High Table with Jack Karaquazian, and they're gambling away. So he gets to act as a kind of his own narrator and character in his story at the same time, which is kind of fun. I keep calling him for more photos.

[laughs] Get more reference.

JOZIC: Does the complexity or non-linear nature of the story alter your approach to it visually?

SIMONSON: As a storyline, I'm not sure. I mean, it's non- linear in the sense that it's not a small cast of characters that proceed from point A to point B, sort of sensibly or without complexity. It's a series of characters that are all in different settings.

What I do find is that, Michael, for me, has always been a very visual writer. I mean, when I was reading his stuff back in the mid to late 60's, I always got a strong visual sense off of his stuff, or visual hit, if you will. I find now, drawing his stuff, [with] the scripts he's giving me, I just have a great time drawing all this stuff, but there is so much stuff, it's really hard to draw all of it. I mean, I can't put everything in by a long shot. I sort of feel that any given chapter in this story of the Multiverse, I'm getting in maybe twenty or twenty-five percent of the possible visuals. Simply because there's so much stuff, I just can't squeeze all of it in. If I had maybe forty pages of a graphic novel per chapter, well...okay, then maybe I can.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: There's so much stuff, so basically, I'm having to kind of pick and choose, in a way. And also, some of the stuff is simply undrawable, and I have to bring it down. The Spammer Gain who is this large floating cuttlefish - I don't know what you'd want to call her, or it - in the storyline, the Spammer is really a self-contained universe. Well, it's kind of hard to draw a universe in a comic book panel.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: Even a large comic book panel, so I had to kind of make some definitive choices about what stuff is or looks like, and then just go from there. I've been having a lot of fun, really. And I think it does make my choices as an artist more difficult. I mean, some of the stuff I'm doing, I might do as a solution to certain problems. I don't know if I've altered my work so much as tried to find solutions. Some of the tools that I have to make things interesting. Some of the stuff is going to be stuff that no reader's going to have a clue.

I'll give you one quick one, just because it's amusing. In the second chapter, the Spammer is heading for the ultimate, what's called the Downscale Destination - which is the Oblivion Docks. So I chose to draw where mass condenses infinitely, or some such. The physics is beyond me.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: But basically, in the shot - it was actually pretty small, the Spammer's the main part of the drawing - there's a small shot of some rectilinear buildings. They're really cubes, and some of them are kind of getting smaller and disappearing into the sub-liquid medium, whatever that might be. And my feeling is that because it's the ultimate Downscale Destination where mass contracts infinitely - or whatever it was that Michael said - I've drawn the buildings, instead of drawing them in perspective, I've drawn them in an isometric projection of some kind. I don't know if it's exactly isometric, but basically, it's really a non-perspective drawing that's very small. So most people aren't going to read this and have any clues or see it, but it does have the feel that visually, it represents the fact that substance is contracting infinitely. There is no more perspective in this odd zone. If I have to draw the Oblivion Docks again, and I think through issue six I don't, I'll go back and use the same kind of drawing system.

So, I'm doing stuff like that, which I don't normally do in an ordinary comic because I'm not asked to stretch that far visually.

JOZIC: Are you finding that this is more of a collaborative effort than usual, in that you're having to convey much of the story visually?

SIMONSON: Well, I'm certainly being asked to draw stuff that I don't usually get asked to draw. [laughs] I think in that sense, I have to reach for visual imagery that normally I wouldn't have to stretch quite so far to get. As I said, I do feel that I only make, maybe, twenty-five percent of the reach from what I could be doing. Especially if I had more space. But there is only so much you can cram into twelve pages, so I'm just doing the best I can.

But I am really enjoying it. I do find that Michael's visual sense that he writes with, very much compliments what I think or...It's kind of hard to describe, but basically, I really do feel that I can get at some of these visuals, or I feel him in tune with some of the visuals in a way that I really haven't felt for a while, you know, just doing comics.

Maybe because it's just this weirdo science-fiction from Michael who was writing this stuff back when I was reading this stuff. It may be as simple as just being kind of in line with where he was coming from as a science-fiction writer and a fantasy writer back when I was reading a lot of the stuff - which is to say back in the sixties, and then in the seventies. I mean, he's been writing since then, I've been drawing comics since then, and we haven't collided until now. But for whatever reason, as a writer, I feel kind of in tune visually with a lot of the stuff he's trying to get at.

JOZIC: You once said, I think regarding the Star Slammers, that you saw it as an opportunity to experiment more with your storytelling. You'd done it a bit on the Fantastic Four, and I think you kind of inferred that in your creator-owned project, you were allowed to cut loose and go wherever you wanted. Are you finding that sort of freedom here? I mean, you said you were only getting in twenty-five percent of the visuals. Do you feel like you have a pretty big playing field with this series?

SIMONSON: Well, I think what I've found is, the kind of experimental stuff, if you want to call it that, or when I'll try something that I might not...I might try something in one comic that I wouldn't try in another. I don't know, looking back now, whether it's really a function of being creator owned or so much the demands of the material, whatever it might be. I did do some stuff in the FF, maybe because it was science-fiction based, and also because it was the direction that the stories went, that I hadn't tried in Thor, for example. But I also felt that Thor, as a comic, and I've said this elsewhere, it's kind of backwards looking.

I mean, one of the tensions of Thor, for me, in the Kirby/Lee stuff, was that it was both mythologically based, and to a certain extent, science-fictionally based. So you have, kind of this, visionary material of the future, as well as a rather visionary view of the past. And these kind of collide in odd ways. When you use those ideas, I think it makes it different from super heroes like the Fantastic Four or Superman or Batman or...you name it. But because the central character for me was conservative, and it looks backwards in time to a mythic past, I didn't do a lot of weirdo layouts. I just didn't think it was appropriate. I kept the layouts very straight, for the most part. I've had more than one person commenting [that they] went back and looked at the stuff much later on - I mean read it when it came out and looking at it ten years later - and were amazed at how straightforward the layouts were. They remember all this energy and impact and things exploding outwards, when in actual fact, it's a very straightforward layout.

The FF, bigger approach, forward based, hi-tech, hard-edged super-science. Pulp science-fiction, if you will, at least for me. I did some stuff in there every so often, most notably the time fight between Doom and Reed...

JOZIC: Yeah!

SIMONSON: ...that really was, I think, rather different than anything that had been done, really. Either with that comic or any other comic. I don't think anybody else has tried anything quite as goofy as that, and I think it worked out very well. I was very pleased with the way that worked out, although it was a real pain in the neck to have to tackle.

In Michael's stuff, I'm somewhere inbetween. I haven't done anything I would call really bizarro layouts. I mean, there's splash pages, there's overlapping panels and stuff, nothing that's really unique, exactly. Rather than trying to dazzle the eye with oddball panel layouts, I'm kind of trying to dazzle the eye with the actual visual itself - of either the Spammer Gain or Capricorn Schultz, or whatever it might be - and make that interesting, because the characters themselves are so interesting and the nature of their existence is so strange.

I wouldn't say I'm doing a straight job of layouts, but I'm trying to keep it straight enough that the visuals of these things carry the weight and the message, not the fact that I'm doing some razzle-dazzle layout type stuff. I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm really walking kind of a fine line between doing a little razzle-dazzle because it fits the story, but on the other hand, I know I've only got from ten to twelve pages to cram an awful lot of stuff in, and razzle-dazzle takes up a lot of room.

JOZIC: I did notice that each character seems to have their own definitive look and style.

SIMONSON: Well, there are so many characters. In mine, there are a lot of characters and I go both for Michael's descriptions. He's really not heavy-handed at all with his stuff. I mean he gives me a kind of lightly once over, and then, really, I'm on my own. I've gone back to some of his novels and dug out more description of some of these guys than I get from the plot I'm getting from him.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: At the same time, the characters, visually, are quite differently drawn by Michael - I don't mean literally drawn, although he has done sketches and has sent them to me, on reference from things - but for example, one of the characters, Boudreaux Ramsadeen is the owner of the Terminal Cafe. He actually shows up in the first issue, but doesn't have a name. He's flipping some dice, watching the Rose and Jack Karaquazian fly off in a real, but highly unusual boat-plane. Ramsadeen doesn't have a name in that shot, but I think in the third episode he's actually in it and does get named - whether people will recognise him or not, I'm not sure - but he's flipping some dice, and there are two things about that. One is that, in reading Michael's description of the character I ended up drawing him, essentially, as one of the restorations of neanderthal man. The way he was described he seemed very neanderthal to me. And so I went back and dug up some neanderthal reference. I mean, there's a lot of different ways that neanderthals have been interpreted visually, but I picked one and did a variation of it for this character in that shot. It turns out, later on, I was reading through one of Michael's prose works somewhere, and he's got a description of Ramsadeen as a neanderthal. Now whether he meant literally a neanderthal or just neanderthal looking, I don't remember off the bat, but basically I picked up on just a few hints in the script and ended up in exactly the same visual place that Michael had started from, without realising it.

The other thing that's going on in that shot, and nobody has mentioned this yet, if you look at the dice he's flipping in his hands, one of them has a seven on it. Well, dice don't have sevens. So, he's playing the game of time and he plays the way we play poker, or craps or anything else because we use dice or cards. [laughs]

So, I like the first issue because there's stuff like that tucked in and around it. You know, it'll be somebody's master thesis in college in thirty years. "Oh, I wonder what's all this weird stuff that's crammed around in the corners". But that's partly [because] I'm trying to make it visually rich with things that either Michael has suggested, or things that suggest themselves to me, having read Michael's description and then jumping off from there. There's no secret meetings of the Rosicrucians in any corner anywhere, but I am trying to give it enough richness as a visual world that, as the real world has an awful lot of stuff going on at any given moment, no matter where you are and what you see, you could see zillions of things. I'm trying to cram some of that sense into the story. It's a world, or universe, or series of universes that has some similarities to ours, and some differences as well. I'm just trying to mix some of those in.

JOZIC: Traditionally, a series that challenges the reader or makes them think doesn't do all that well commercially. Do you find that, being the book that Michael Moorcock's Multiverse is, it isn't going to fare as well commercially, or is there a very specific audience that this book is targeted at that will be picking it up?

SIMONSON: You know, I'm not really sure. I think there are going to be two audiences, and I think they're probably going to be buying the book at different times. And as a result, it's probably going to be a couple of years before we have the answer to your question.

On the one hand, I think we're going to have a comic book audience who will maybe be passingly familiar with my stuff - although these days, probably not that much...

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: Well, I haven't done any regular work for a while, and if you're off the radar screen for eight seconds, you cease to exist, except in the minds of older fans. You know, Michael isn't all that well known as a comic book writer, although he actually wrote some back in the mid-sixties for Fleetway, and he's had a couple of things in print here and there. Craig Russell's got an Elric job coming out right now (Elric: Stormbringer from Dark Horse Comics & Topps Comics respectively).

I think comic fans will pick it up. The anecdotal evidence that I've got, which is from a couple of comic shops from where I live on the east coast, and out on the west coast as well, seem to be that it's selling pretty well. On the other hand, the initial orders were not stupendous, so I think it'll do okay in the comics market - although guys who buy comics for eye-candy and want giant fights between large characters hitting each other and that's about the end of it, this is not going to be their book. But there will be people who like to read comics who will come in [and will see that] we've cut back in some ways on the eye-candy audience, and are kind of moving back to a reading audience again. They might find it pretty interesting.

The other segment of the audience, I think, that is not going to find this book are all the science-fiction and fantasy fans who know Michael's stuff. I don't know how many of them walk into comic shops, [although] there is, of course, sort of a cross over audience. But I think what will happen there is, if and when - I kind of expect this although no one at DC has said, "Yes, this is going to happen" - I'm kind of assuming there'll be some kind of collection of material eventually. If and when that happens, I really expect to get more into book stores than just in the comic shops, and at that point I expect science-fiction fans, and Moorcock fans who might not frequent comic shops, to get a hold of it. And if that happens I expect it to sell again, to a bit of a different audience, which is why I think we're going to have to wait a while before we really know how this is going to turn out sales-wise.

JOZIC: It's going to slowly seep into the mass-unconscious.

SIMONSON: Or just find different audiences a year and a half apart.

JOZIC: Yeah. So is this maxi-series sort of testing the waters for the Multiverse, or do you even know if there are plans to do another if this series is successful?

SIMONSON: Oh, you know, I haven't a clue. It would be sort of up to Michael - well, Michael and of course DC. I mean, if it does well, I'm sure DC would like to do more of them. Whether Michael would want to do more after this or not, I haven't a clue. I know that I'm having a great time doing it, I know that Michael's really enjoying doing it, and I'm having a great time working with him so, who could truly say.

If it does well, it wouldn't surprise me if DC wanted to do more of them, but again, Michael does have a real job as a writer writing prose. [laughs] So, I don't know how that would turn out. We'll see.

JOZIC: Is working for Helix - DC's creator owned Sci-Fi imprint - any different from working for the mainstream DC, or is it pretty much the same thing?

SIMONSON: You know, I haven't found it so. I work for Stuart Moore and I've given him plenty of grey hairs already over deadlines, but I did it to my regular mainstream editors as well. The process is the same. If anything, I've maybe been in closer cooperation with Stuart and Tatjana Wood - who's the colourist - than I might normally be on mainstream books. At least the ones I've worked on. But that's also a function of the fact that I'm getting crankier in my old age and want to talk to all the people that are doing this kind of work. There's no difference in that. The difference is that it's a Helix book, it's got a different imprint on the cover - and I think maybe that makes it perceived somewhat differently on the marketplace - but as far as actually doing the work and working with the editor, working with the staff at DC, the assistants I talk to and stuff like that, it's really been no different at all.

I've done a lot of work for DC off and on over the past year, and it's been a really good experience all the way through. And it hasn't mattered whether it was mainstream with Paul Kupperberg, John Byrne and Jack Kirby's Fourth World, or the Helix line with Stuart.

JOZIC: You're obviously a big science-fiction fan...

SIMONSON: A big science-fiction fan of old stuff. I have not kept up with the science-fiction field in the last twenty years, believe me.

JOZIC: It just seems to be that a large part of your body of work is in the realm of science-fiction. Is this a genre you prefer to work in?

SIMONSON: I go through stages where it seems to infect the work that I do and there are stages where it doesn't.

JOZIC: It seems to seep into your super-hero work as well. Like in your Avengers and FF stories with the Time Bubble.

SIMONSON: Well, for the FF that seems...I mean, science-fiction seems to me to be really what sets the FF apart from Superman or other super-hero comic books. The way mythology sets Thor apart. So I did Thor and there was some science-fiction here and there. Beta-Ray Bill certainly evolved out of a science-fiction background mixed in with mythology. But I think on balance I probably emphasised the mythology more than the science-fiction in Thor at the time I was doing it.

In the late seventies, I went through a period where I seemed to be the science-fiction artist of choice at Marvel, or even beyond Marvel, actually. I had a hand in Battlestar Galactica, in Star Wars [and] I drew the adaptation of Alien for Heavy Metal. I think there wasn't a science-fiction book that I hadn't at least touched briefly at that period. And then afterwards, I really didn't go back to science-fiction until I was maybe on The FF, or The Avengers. The Star Slammers of course, was also science-fiction - that was about '81. X-Men/Teen Titans was straight super-heroes with some New Gods stuff and some X-Men stuff mixed in.

But it's certainly a strong influence in the stuff I do. I don't know that it's any stronger than some of the fantasy elements that I was influenced by earlier on. Certainly, The Lord of the Rings, for me, remains in many ways kind of a seminal book about how I think about creating stories and the worlds the stories inhabit. I took a lot from Tolkien's work, and that's where a lot of my ideas came from about creating secondary worlds in a persuasive fashion. I read a lot of fantasy, and I read a lot of science-fiction in the mid-sixties probably through about the mid-seventies, and that certainly comes up in a lot of my work. The last batch of years, I wrote a ton of murder mysteries. Haven't done any of those yet in comics. I'm not quite sure why [laughs], it just hasn't come up yet. But I do have strong science-fiction roots in the stuff that I read and was kind of interested in, especially early on, and it does come up in my work every so often. Sometimes more than others.

JOZIC: I remember reading somewhere that your first job in comics was in 1972 doing some work for DC Comics...

SIMONSON: That's right.

JOZIC: Is that what you would call your big break?

SIMONSON: Well, actually it was my initial break. I've really had two breaks. The first was that I got work at all, which was great. I went to New York in august of '72 - so this past august is my twenty-fifth anniversary, basically, doing comic books - and I took in some early Star Slammers that I had done. That was my portfolio. The first job I did was actually a World War II ghost story for a book called Weird War Tales, written by Len Wein. I then, because of my science-fiction samples, ended up being 'typed' as a science-fiction artist, and so I did several little back-ups, mostly for Archie Goodwin at DC for Star-Spangled War Stories. I drew a few things here and there, and then I did a couple of Twilight Zone jobs for Gold Key. And somewhere in there, I did a three page job with a friend of mine about the Alamo.

Well, I didn't learn this until years later, but on the basis, really, of that job - and the fact that I'd worked with him for a while - Archie Goodwin offered me a new strip he was creating called Manhunter, that he wanted to run as a back-up, and a complement, really, for Batman in Detective Comics. And that was my second break. I did Manhunter with Archie.

JOZIC: Who has just recently made a surprise appearance in Legends of the Dark Knight #100.

SIMONSON: That's right. Well, [Archie] asked me if I would do a pin-up for him of Manhunter, and I said, "I could manage that."

So I went ahead and took the Manhunter gig from Archie, and we kind of co-created it from that point on, [even though] it was really Archie's idea to start with. I worked on it for a little over a year. It was a bi-monthly book - Detective was - and we did seven chapters. And really, Manhunter made my professional reputation. Before Manhunter, I was not widely known in the field, but after Manhunter, editors really knew who I was. This was really before fandom, the way it is now. There weren't like, 'Hot Artists' and 'Cold Artists' or whatever, there was guys doing comics. But after Manhunter, I was known professionally, so that was my big break, really. That strip.

JOZIC: Did you ever want to do anything other than comic books?

SIMONSON: Not really. Only in that I originally wanted to study dinosaurs and palaeontology, but I blew that off after going and studying at some college. I like telling stories, and I like drawing. And, really, in comics, you have a kind of freedom that's not offered to you in hardly any other medium, and you also have a complexity of challenge in what you have to be able to do well to do a good comic. I enjoy rising to that challenge, and I haven't found that challenge anywhere else. A couple of years ago, I designed a comic book type character for ten seconds of animation for a Campbell's soup commercial, and that was kind of fun. I designed a character and a background about two winters ago. You know, occasionally I do stuff like that.

I wouldn't mind trying my hand at some other stuff once in a while. I wouldn't mind trying some storyboards just to see what that's like sometime, to see if I could do them. But I don't have any ambitions to go out and be a film director as many guys in comics do. As many parallels as are often drawn between film and comics, there are many great differences, and I like comics, so I don't...I'd like to be really, really good at doing comic books, and that takes a lot of practice.

JOZIC: Do you have a favourite type of story or character that you like to write or draw?

SIMONSON: I don't think I have one. I think I'm kind of beyond the point where, you know, you say "What's your favourite colour?"

"Blue."

Well, today it's blue, tomorrow it's orange. The ones that I've done that I'm proud of: I'm proud of Manhunter, I'm proud of the adaptation of Alien, I'm proud of Thor, I'm proud of The FF. I did a Robocop/Terminator story with Frank Miller that I thought really came out well. I'm probably forgetting a million other things, but I've done stuff along the way that I'm real happy with, or I look back later and go, "Mmmm, that wasn't so bad." As long as I can say that, or look back and feel I'm maybe incrementally better that I was four or five years ago, or doing something a little bit different, orwhatever, that's what I'm looking for, really.

I like the Star Slammers. That's something else I enjoyed.

JOZIC: I think a lot of people would probably just assume that Thor was your favourite, considering the amount of times you've returned to the character since leaving the series.

SIMONSON: I don't know if I've done Thor that much, myself. I mean, I did him for a cover of New Gods, because that was the story John was telling. I don't know if I've done Thor anywhere else, have I?

JOZIC: The "Into the Time Stream" storyline in FF...

SIMONSON: Well, that's because he was in The Avengers. I was the writer on The Avengers, and the stories I told in the FF were the stories I would have told in The Avengers if I stayed on the book. I got off The Avengers largely because I found that, at least when I was writing it, I was being required to match Avengers continuity to other books with some of the Avengers characters, which became a pain in the ass, basically, after a while. I would be in the middle of stories, and suddenly I'd be told, "Well, yeah. Drop this character out of the story, he's off in space this week", or something else happened to this guy. So, over a years worth of story - it was like, eleven months - I was constantly lengthening stories, shortening stories, fitting in other peoples continuity. After a while, I just thought that was no way to tell a good story. So I got off the book after eleven issues, but I had the whole "Time Bubble" storyline ready to go for the Avengers, so basically...

JOZIC: You just picked up where you left off?

SIMONSON: Moved everything right over, including Thor and Iron Man. I did throw them in because I enjoy drawing Thor and Iron Man, so you're right. I had forgotten that, but Thor's in the first four or five issues and then I popped him and Iron Man back to earth, and I just kept the FF. That really came out of The Avengers. If Thor had not been in The Avengers at that point and time, I'm not sure if I would have used him. I'm not sure it would have occurred to me, really.

JOZIC: And then in your Heroes Reborn Avengers, you seemed to overtly bring back who I assume is the 'real' Marvel Universe Thor.

SIMONSON: Thirteen years later you got me. Well, seven years.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: It's true. And I did end up doing two Thors for a while. I had a Heroes Reborn Thor and a Marvel Thor, basically. My understanding of the Onslaught stuff that led to the Heroes Reborn universe, was that the Marvel characters - you know, the non-mutants - were sucked into the Onslaught energy, or whatever the hell it was, into this new universe, with Thor being one of these guys. The Heroes Reborn Thor that Rob and Extreme were doing wasn't really the Marvel Thor to me. I thought it was actually not a bad take on the character - making him kind of a barbarian guy who wanted to go out drinking and wenching and clubbing people upside the head - and I thought that would actually be an interesting story to do. I had fun doing him, but I also felt the rest of the characters in the Heroes Reborn universe seemed pretty much to be the characters that they had been in the Marvel Universe.

JOZIC: Just cosmetically changed.

SIMONSON: And I didn't see how, without a complete personality transplant, I could make the Heroes Reborn Thor into the Marvel Thor. It was really a different character for me personally, if not for other people. It's kind of funny how all the fans in comics are continuity cops, and the odd thing about that to me, is how many people apparently assumed that once I began writing the Heroes Reborn Thor, I would just change him into the Marvel Thor. You know, it was like, "Geez, Simonson's still writing this awful Shakespearean dialogue, it's really terrible. Has he forgotten how to write!?!" One guy demanded I get a King James bible and go back and read it again. Apparently I've forgotten how to use english as a writer, so I was being castigated for that. Then when the Marvel Thor showed up two months later they went, "Oh, I guess he's writing this guy deliberately like this." Thank you very much for your perception. I sort of felt that continuity suggested - in the Heroes Reborn material - that I keep the "barbarian" Thor the "barbarian" Thor, and not just have him undergo a personality change from issue seven to issue eight.

I also had the idea for giving him a heroic send-off, and I thought it would be more effective dramatically if you wouldn't be set for it. I mean, here's this guy, everybody kind of laughs at him [because] he's a clown, [and] the weird english he speaks, so in a sense, you don't take him seriously. And then when he's the guy that stands up and enables the Avengers to win the battle by croaking, it seemed to me to be a more dramatic moment than if he had a personality transplant, became the noble Thor and then die four issues later.

JOZIC: How was it working on The Avengers, post-Rob? Was it kind of short notice coming on to the book?

SIMONSON: It was very short notice coming on. Michael Heisler called me up from Wildstorm - he was the editor-in-chief at the time - and I'd known Mike [from] when he used to work for Marvel. So I thought about it for twenty-minutes, because we didn't have much more time than that, and then said, "Okay, sure."

My work was all done through Wildstorm [and] there were no parameters within which I had to work other than, "Hey these books are late, lets get going." And the fact that I was told coming into it, that issue twelve was going to be a Galactus cross-over. So, I designed a four issue story arc that used the first seven issues as raw material and then tried to make a storyline as if the seven issues had been leading up to this stuff. And that was really what I was trying to do.

Some guys really enjoy it that way. I just read a thing on the web yesterday where a guy was just ripping it to shreds. How I just butchered Rob's great comic book - obviously a Rob fan [laughs] - and not done whatever Rob had in mind. And actually, I never knew what Rob was going to do. I had no idea what Extreme Studios was planning with either that or Captain America. I think I read somewhere in Wizard that there was going to be a marriage in the last issue, which I kind of assumed was Hank and Jan, but I don't even really know. I didn't get any notes or have any contact with Extreme or with their plans, so basically, the idea was, "Here are these seven issues, it's time to tell a story."

JOZIC: Just work with it.

SIMONSON: And that was really it.

The only problem I really ran into was that some of the stuff I did was apparently edited by somebody at Marvel. There were not a lot of changes, but there were a few changes in my dialogue. And I mean really, more changes than I've ever had by anybody in the time I've been writing, and they were done, essentially, anonymously. I have no idea who at Marvel was doing it. So, you'd have to say I wasn't overly pleased about that. I didn't think that was a very effective way to edit. You're not going to win fans and influence people that way, but that does not seem to be Marvel's intent these days.

I did the five issues through Wildstorm, [and] I really enjoyed doing them. It was kind of a short run to see how it would go [and] it went just fine, but I'm not sure I would do it again.

JOZIC: Were you offered to continue on the book after the Heroes Return?

SIMONSON: No, no, no. No, in fact, they're doing a thirteenth issue which I guess James Robinson is going to do...

JOZIC: And then Kurt Busiek takes over.

SIMONSON: Kurt takes over. But, no...I never got a call from Marvel. I did get a call from Marvel, maybe a month ago, about doing Thor again, but considering my experience on The Avengers in five issues, having never been edited that heavily - it wasn't even heavy editing, but it was more than I've ever gotten before - I thought, "This was five issues, mmm...this is not where I want to go and do professional work for the time being. I quit working for Marvel a long time ago because I felt their editorial directions were not where I wanted to go and my experience on The Avengers seems to confirm that it hasn't changed a whole lot.

JOZIC: So your work on the Heroes Reborn Avengers was handled through Wildstorm? You were hired by Wildstorm?

SIMONSON: Yeah, my paycheques were through Wildstorm. I had a Wildstorm editor [and] she kept track of the stuff on her end, and I dealt on the phone in person, so to speak. My dealings with the Heroes Reborn Avengers were all through Wildstorm, that's why I said I was edited anonymously by Marvel, but I have no idea who did the actual editing.

JOZIC: So had it not been for the 'editorial intervention', would you have gone back to Thor, or would it have been a "been there, done that" kind of thing?

SIMONSON: I would've given it more consideration. I don't know that I would've gone back, but given the way The Avengers was edited I just thought, "I don't have any interest in doing this." I've never had this happen before in twenty-five years - and say seventeen years of writing - it won't happen again, as far as I'm concerned.

JOZIC: A lot of people think that your run on the series could be characterised as the 'definitive' Thor, and that it just hasn't been the same, or even quite so good, since your departure. Do you have any opinions on where the series has gone?

SIMONSON: Frankly, I've never read it.

JOZIC: After you were done, that was it? You'd washed your hands of it?

SIMONSON: After I was done I was done.

The thing you have to understand is that when you're a writer or an artist on a book, my view is that essentially, there's a very large sandbox where, you know, the Marvel universe exists, and you're given a small corner of the sandbox to fool around in. And you build your sandcastles, and you dig your moats, and you put your men-at-arms over here, you have fun, you do what you want to do - and mostly, you get what you want to do within the limits of mainstream comics. And then when you leave, you have to be kind of prepared for the fact that somebody else has the book, and really, the first thing they're going to do is come in and kick your sandcastles over, and build they're own. God knows, the Thor that I did didn't have much to do with the Thor that preceded mine.

JOZIC: That's true.

SIMONSON: It aint like I came in there and honoured all the previous fifteen years of continuity carefully. Because really, I did what I thought honoured the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Thor, and I didn't do anything obvious to screw up the previous continuity. I had one story where I did do a little fudging with Odin's origin, simply because I wanted to bring in a little more of the mythological stuff, rather than Roy's version of it. Even there, I did not write a story where I retconned Roy's version, or denied that it exists, I simply said there were a couple of different versions, take your pick for where you think Odin came from. So, I kicked over the castles as gently as I could, but I was not at all surprised to see the castles I built kicked over pretty soon after I left. And that's just what work-for-hire's all about. You know, there's not much more you can do about that.

JOZIC: Yeah. Is that why you...

SIMONSON: Basically, if Chris Claremont can be fired off of the X-Men, the rest of us have no shot.

JOZIC: [laughs] Is that why you seem to prefer to stick to a story with a beginning and an ending? You say your piece and gracefully step down?

SIMONSON: I haven't had any offers of anything that has appealed to me as much as doing Thor or The Fantastic Four since I worked on those books. I've taken a lot of shorter gigs maybe because they do have beginnings, middles and ends. I mean, my chance at The Avengers - not the Heroes Reborn, but when I first wrote it, which was back in '89 or thereabouts - I did run into a lot of continuity problems where I had to kind of adjust stories in the middle of them in order to fit someone elses ideas, which I wasn't real big on. And in some cases, I actually ran into problems that really did not sit well with me.

When I was writing The Avengers, Steve Englehart was writing The Fantastic Four, and Steve had written Reed and Sue out of the Fantastic Four. And at the time he did it, he really planned to leave them out - this is what I remember about it, maybe Steve would have a different version of it, I don't know. This is how I remember it. So, I thought Reed and Sue were just too damn cool not to have them in a Marvel comic book somewhere. And also, since they weren't being used anywhere else, I wouldn't have any continuity problems trying to match them being in a story, where I might have a problem with Thor. I talked to Steve, I talked to whoever was editing The FF at the time - I don't know if that was Ralph, I can't remember who it was - [and] basically, I got permission from the powers that be at Marvel Comics to pick up Reed and Sue, and put them in my comic book - in The Avengers.

So, this is like six months before I wanted to do it. I really wanted to get it all cleared. So I got it cleared, [and] just as I was starting the storyline, I was informed that, "Oh well, you can't use them. Tom has decided he wants them back in The FF. And I was pretty p.o.'d. The initial thing I got was, "You can't use them at all," or "You can use them for one issue". And one of the things about continuing comics is you want to have a story thread that will interest readers for more than twenty seconds. That's why they come back to read the book afterwards. So I put Reed and Sue in for one issue as guest stars. They're not going to worry the readers. "Oh my god, these guys are going to be in The Avengers!" So I got permission to use them for like, three issues, but I was pretty cranky about that because I really had cleared it in advance.

I mean, in the Heroes Reborn Avengers, I had cleared several months in advance - let's say last april or may - with Wildstorm that I would be able to use the Hulk in the last couple of Avengers issues because I wanted to wrap up issue eleven - which was the end of my story arc, going into the Galactus story - with the original members of the Avengers, plus Cap. I thought that would be cool. It'd be cool to have the Avengers lined up as Cap, Thor, The Wasp, Ant-Man, Iron Man, and the Hulk. And just as I got to the point where I was doing those, "Oh, by the way, you can't use the Hulk, he's being gas-bombed over in Iron Man", or whatever was happening. It was somewhere else. "Somebody else was using him so you can't use him." Which was really reminiscent of what happened to me on The Avengers, the first time I did it. So one of the problems of The Avengers to me is that kind of stuff.

But basically, it's one of the things you run into on those kinds of books where, in many ways, we seem to have reached a point in mainstream comics where it's important to keep a kind of oddball continuity going. And the books exist to make that continuity work, not to tell good stories on their own.

JOZIC: Were you conscious of that during your run on Thor, seeing as how he was a member of The Avengers at the time?

SIMONSON: I never had a problem with it back then. Nobody cared back then. I mean, it wasn't like if Thor's in Asgard for three months, he'd be out of The Avengers because, God forbid, he couldn't be in two places at once. This is fiction we're writing after all, and my feelings are [that] there's somewhere out there, there's some berzerko fan that's going to figure out how the timeline works so that Thor can be in The Avengers this month, and also be in Asgard. And that's fine. That's the way it should be. But when the point of the stories becomes the following of continuity, you've lost me. I'm no longer interested.

One of the reasons I've done the work that I've done, I have done it where I felt I could do good work. The places I've gone, the places I've worked, the projects I've taken on, are places I've gone and projects I've done because I felt I could do them well. And for the past seven or eight years, it's been for a variety of companies and a variety of projects. And one of the advantages to shorter projects is nobody is up there screwing up your continuity by saying, "Oh you can't use this guy, he's off in space," or something this week.

JOZIC: Jumping from the work-for-hire for a bit, I wanted to talk a bit about the Star Slammers.

SIMONSON: Okay.

JOZIC: When Bravura was first formed, why was the Star Slammers the project you chose to do under the imprint?

SIMONSON: Because I knew them very well. They were a concept that I was very familiar with, that I'd always wanted to do more with. I would do a series of graphic novels a little like Moebius' Blueberry series, with a series of stories over a period of time. It's never worked out like that, schedule-wise or company-wise, which is a shame. But I always have it at the back of my mind to go back and do more stories with them, so this gave me a chance to do that.

JOZIC: In the ten year between the graphic novel...

SIMONSON: It was a twelve year gap, I think. About '81 or '82 to '94, or something like that. But it was about twelve years. I kind of hope that it won't be twelve years again, but it may very well be, the way things worked out.

JOZIC: [laughs] Why the move from Bravura? Why did Bravura break down? Was it because the purchase of Malibu by Marvel?

SIMONSON: You know, I think that had a lot to do with it. I was not a fly on the wall at Malibu, I was not a fly on the wall at Marvel. Certainly, as we were going along, Bravura - and I think Legend, to a certain extent - were all started just as sales were starting to drop in comics. Within a year or so of those things getting underway. This is when the "big bust" began to happen in comics. It was happening pretty fast in the beginning, and it seemed clear that Malibu was losing interest in doing a creator owned line of comics as we went along. There was a lot of interest and a lot of support right in the beginning, and as time went by, that interest and support, really visibly diminished.

Now, in retrospect, it turns out that it was diminishing at the same time that Malibu was talking to Marvel, and I think also to DC, about being bought by them. And I sort of think a lot of their creative energies were focused on the business end of things. I mean, when they first got bought by Marvel, there were a lot of happy guys at Malibu. They were going to get to use all these Marvel characters, and do all this stuff, and us old cynical guys sat around going, "It doesn't work out like that." But I do think that the timing of Marvel buying Malibu was such that it did seem to me that a lot of the diminishing interest in creator owned work pretty much timed out with Marvel's purchase of the company.

So, that's my guess. But it's really only a guess, based on time and my knowledge about Marvel and a little about Malibu.

JOZIC: So who instigated the move to Legend?

SIMONSON: Four issues of the Slammers had come out, I did not do a fifth through Malibu because by that time, they were owned by Marvel, and to have done the fifth issue through Malibu, would have given Marvel a certain number of business rights to The Star Slammers that I was willing to cough up to Malibu when they were an individual company, but was not willing to cough up to Marvel when Marvel owned them.

And somewhere around the fourth issue, Frank Miller got a hold of me - Frank and I used to be studio mates back in the mid-80's, and I've known Frank a long time, we worked on Robocop vs Terminator a few years back - and Frank asked me if I wanted to come aboard Legend. In fact, he'd spoken to me back when they were forming Legend, but at the time he talked to me, Bravura was already a going concern, so I was committed to Bravura when I first found out about Legend. So I got re-asked to up at a time that I could. So that's how Legend worked out for me.

JOZIC: So now that the original Star Slammers limited series has been completed, will we be seeing more of them any time soon?

SIMONSON: I don't think any time soon. Partly because of Michael's project. The Moorcock Multiverse is a twelve issue series that [even though] I'm not doing the entire issue, I'm doing a substantial chunk of each issue, so I'm looking at a good six to eight months of work down the line, maybe a shade more. So until that's done, I wouldn't be doing anything like writing or drawing another series. Even a limited series.

Somewhere after that, it would be a possibility. If someone walks up to me and says, "Walt, heres a million dollars, how about doing this," I might go, "Oh cool!" I just don't know. We'll see how it works out.

I do have an eight issue Star Slammers plot up on the computer that I would very much like to do. It's not a sequel to the five chapter story I just did, but it does take place after that story, and it's the same character - it's old Rojas - which would be the first time I've done the same Slammer character twice.

JOZIC: Didn't you also do an eight page story featuring Rojas in an issue of Dark Horse Presents?

SIMONSON: The black and white story that I did for Dark Horse Presents occurs before the Malibu/Dark Horse mini-series, but it foreshadows events and the series of stories that I'd like to do that would occur afterwards.

JOZIC: But didn't Rojas die?

SIMONSON: Well, he might have. Maybe he'll get better. You never know.

JOZIC: Who really dies in comics right? [laughs]

SIMONSON: [laughs]

JOZIC: One big constant in a large portion of your work is Mr. John Workman.

SIMONSON: That's right. Ever since Alien.

JOZIC: Very rarely do you see a writer/letterer team work together, and so well, for so long. I mean, it's not unheard of - Chaykin and Bruzenak and Claremont and Orzechowski come to mind - but where does that come from?

SIMONSON: What happened originally was John was the art director of Heavy Metal, and he was the guy that asked me if I'd be interested in drawing the Alien adaptation. He lettered it because he was Heavy 's principal letterer as well. At the time there was a lot of foreign material that [they] were doing, and as a result, they had to be re-lettered in english. So John did a great deal of that. John lettered Alien [and] I thought he did a beautiful job with it. He has a very graphic letter/font/style, as well as a graphic and both typographic and telegraphic sound effects style. Very formal in some ways. But it's very graphic, and I thought it looked great on my stuff because my own work is very graphic, so ever since then, whenever I could, I've used John as my letterer.

JOZIC: I could honestly say that John is the only letterer in the field that I will specifically buy a title for. It doesn't matter who's writing it, or who's drawing it, if John's working on it...[laughs]

SIMONSON: There's also a couple of guys out there doing "John Workman", which is interesting as well.

JOZIC: Yeah.

SIMONSON: But I love John's lettering. He's also a very sharp letterer. I mean, I'm sure every other letterer is sharp as well, but I must say that with John - again it may have something to do with being on the same page most of the time, say me and Michael or me and Archie - when we're doing stuff, if I screw something up, John is usually able to catch it, or figure out what the hell I meant, even though I'm not very clear on it. So I have to say that I have a great deal of confidence handing my stuff over to John and knowing it's going to come back looking great.

JOZIC: You mentioned the Thor layouts earlier, and how people said there was more impact the first time around. I remember these wonderful "DOOM" sound effects that grew gradually larger as the story progressed. It really stood out, and that's probably one of the things that has the most resonance with me.

SIMONSON: I don't remember for certain now, [but] I think that the first two "DOOM"s - the one in issue #337 and the one in #338 - I lettered myself. #338 I'm almost certain I did it myself because it was almost a visual part of the anvil that Surter was working on, which I'm sure John could have done, but I think I had something in mind for it. And I've used it before John, really. I often did my own sound effects. Once or twice, I did my own lettering, and I was just to slow at it and not good enough to really do it well. But I did the sound effects, and I did that for most of the work I inked up until I met John. So, I think for the first couple of Thor's, the "DOOM"s were probably mine and then after that, John knew the direction I was going. I'd just turn them over to him and he'd letter them in great.

JOZIC: What about those page long, panel bridging "SCHKRRAACKEKKKLLLAALLLL!" sound effects. Who was responsible for those?

SIMONSON: Well, I'll type them in the script that I hand him, and usually on the overlays, or however I indicate to him where the sound effects are supposed to go, I'll greek in a rectangle for where I want the sound effect to go - you know, horizontal, tilted or whatever - and once I do that, then it's really up to John to kind of squeeze that in there. But it's also with the understanding that I may have a lot more letters in the sound effect in the script than he can squeeze in, so he drops out whatever doesn't fit.

JOZIC: So do you like doing your own lettering, or is it something best left in the past?

SIMONSON: I did some in the very beginning of my career. Actually, I lettered one of Chaykin's comics, Ironwolf. But I really haven't done much lettering since. Once in a while I do a couple of things. I think there's something in the second Moorcock chapter where I had a caption, or maybe a couple captions. And there's some weird stuff in the third one. Some aliens are kind of talking, and I lettered those. I had a particular thing in mind for it and they were very short, and it was easier to do it myself, than to explain to John what I was looking for. If I have to do much more of it, I'll copy out the font and just send him a copy and [tell him to] "Do it like this." [laughs]

But I don't do my own lettering on that score hardly at all.

JOZIC: So who are your influences?

SIMONSON: Besides all the old Marvel guys - like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Don Heck and the guys who did a lot of work for Marvel in the mid-sixties - Moebius would be a big one. Otomo, to a certain extent. Mézières, a french artist that did Valerian over in france in the early seventies. A major influence was Jim Holdaway, who was the original artist for the newspaper strip, Modesty Blaise. Holdaway died about 1970, but probably of all the artists whose work I look at from time to time, I can still be refreshed by his work in a way that's not so true of everybody else. It still seems new and unique to me. I think he was just a wonderful artist. He died young. He was about forty-five when he died and I'm still pissed.

JOZIC: [laughs]

SIMONSON: Let me see, Frank Bellamy, an english artist who did Garth. Sergio Toppi, an italian artist whose work I'm just totally blown away by. Palacios did a couple of El Cid books over in spain, which I really liked a great deal. Then he did some western stuff called Mac Coy which I've got a couple of, but I like the El Cid stuff better, and look at a lot.

I'm probably running out of guys by now. I'm sure I'll think of more later, but that's enough to get started on.

JOZIC: What about your writing influences?

SIMONSON: Tolkien would be a very major influence. My wife, because she was one of my first editors, and a very good editor. [She] had a lot to do with how I write. After that, I've just read a ton of stuff. I don't think there's any author whose work I try to emulate, but I went through all the fantasy stuff. The Lord Duncenay and Evangeline Walton. A lot of the Ballentine fantasy series back in the late sixties, early seventies. A lot of science-fiction writers - the Heinlein's, the Asimov's. The classic stuff. Moorcock stuff. I read a lot of stuff and I think I took a little here and there and yonder.

Archie Goodwin, actually, was a major influence. Archie's work is so incredibly smooth that I think I always try to emulate that kind of smooth quality where the balloons and the information, the words always seem to flow so naturally between the emotional states and exposition in a way that you're just not aware that you're being fed information. So I think that was a big influence. And, you know, Stan [Lee], obviously. That's probably enough for now.

JOZIC: Do you prefer the writing side or the drawing side of your work?

SIMONSON: Yes. [laughs]

JOZIC: 'Nuff said.

SIMONSON: You know, the other version of that question is, "Which is more important, the writing or the art?" And my answer is, "Which is more important, breathing or drinking water?" If you quit breathing you'll die a lot faster, but if you don't have any water, you will die eventually. So it's hard to say that air is more important because you'll die faster, but really, you die the other way too. The end result is the same, so...

JOZIC: Does each job dictate whether you're going to write or draw a particular project?

SIMONSON: No. For example, Frank called me up one day out of the blue to see if I wanted to draw this Robocop/Terminator project he'd been offered. We thought we'd work together much earlier on a Daredevil story but that never panned out, but we had thought about it ten years earlier. He had this thing come up and he thought I'd be a good artist for it. We had always wanted to work together, so it came out of nowhere and I said "Sure" instantly.

Other projects I've taken and asked people to do or I've been asked to be on: X-Men/Teen Titans was a book I walked into Weezie's office one day - she was the editor on the book, she and Chris were discussing the project - and I walked in just in time to hear them say, "Well, we could use Darkseid as a villain." I said, "You guys use darkseid, I'm drawing the book." It wasn't quite that simple, but basically that was one that I pursued because I thought it would be a lot of fun to do. Alien was a book that the art director of the company called me. John Workman called me out of the blue from Heavy Metal. Mark Gruenwald asked me if I would do Thor.

So, a lot of stuff I've been asked to do, some I've asked to do myself, or generated myself like the Star Slammers. You know, it varies. And whether I'm writing it or drawing it also varies. A lot of the writing that I do that I don't draw myself, I'm usually asked by someone to do that.

I just wrote a GEN-13 Bootleg, [which is] my script over Aaron Lopresti's artwork. I know Aaron, we've wanted to work together for a while. Karl Kesel was supposed to script it - the plot was primarily Aaron's - karl, I think, got busy and just didn't have the time to do it, so they asked me if I would jump in. I like Aaron's work, and I thought it would be a fun thing to do so I said, "Sure."

So that's kind of how it works. It just works in every way you can imagine.

JOZIC: Who are your favourite people to work with?

SIMONSON: Well, not necessarily in preferential order, but the ones I could think of off the bat would be my wife - we did X-Factor together for a couple of years. Archie Goodwin. I've probably had a more sympatical relationship with Archie - between writer and artist - than I've had with anybody else, and I've just had a great time. We haven't done that much stuff together - Manhunter, Alien, Star Wars a long time ago - but I just love working with Archie. I would do it again in a second.

I have to say that I'm having a great time working with Michael Moorcock. Michael and I are having a great time working together and I don't know if we'll go anywhere after this, but it's really fun while we're doing it.

I like working with Frank a lot. On Robocop/Terminator I thought we did a good story.

There's a few guys for some short takes. And I'm sure I'm offending all the other guys I haven't included - I'm sorry.

JOZIC: Do you have a particular technique or approach to your work? Any strange habits?

SIMONSON: No, not really. All I could say about that is that my decisions about everything from how I ink something to how I break it down are really determined by what I think will tell the story best. That's my bottom line yardstick. We'll just tell the story the best way possible.

JOZIC: When you're not working, what do you read?

SIMONSON: Dick Francis stories. I love Dick Francis. That and Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai.

JOZIC: Is that pretty much the only comic book you read?

SIMONSON: Well, I read other comic books. I'll grab a mitt-full of something and read through it, but really, I think at this point, probably the only comics that the minute they come into the house I read them were Usagi Yojimbo and Groo the Wanderer. Of course, now I'm down to one.

JOZIC: I hear there's going to be a new Groo book coming out.

SIMONSON: I hear there is. And Sergio's had a book come out of Sergio's stuff which is kind of fun. But I love Groo, I just thought it was hysterically funny, and I think Usagi Yojimbo is a wonderful little comic book.

JOZIC: Are there any stories, characters or titles that you haven't done that you'd like to do?

SIMONSON: You know, I get asked that once in a while and I don't have a clue. I don't think there are. I mean, nothing leaps to mind when I get asked that question because, really, I've done a lot of characters, either in their own books, or in guest books like Iron Man, or Iron Man 2020. But over the years I've done Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Thor, The Hulk. I'm the first guy who ever drew an Alien in a comic book. I've done a lot of characters. So, I don't have anything that goes, "Yes, you must draw this book!" If it gets offered, I wouldn't mind doing some more Fourth World stuff somewhere down the line.

JOZIC: What's the best part of your job?

SIMONSON: Not having a real job. [laughs] Of course, when the work really piles up, it isn't entirely true. It is a somewhat disingenuous answer. But being able to work at doing something I love, and being able to make a living at it.

JOZIC: What's the worst part of your job?

SIMONSON: Oh, probably deadlines. [laughs] But having said that, again a certain disingenuousness in that. Because if there were no deadlines, I wouldn't get any work done.

JOZIC: Very true.

SIMONSON: So, there you go.

JOZIC: Any parting thoughts?

SIMONSON: Mmmmm...Well, how about a plug. Read my stuff. If you can find it, read my stuff. Because it does tend to appear in all sorts of weird places all over the map, so...I'm a hard guy to pin down.

But my only parting thought, really, is that I've been told recently that comics seem to be getting incrementally a little better right now as far as sales are concerned. We've been in the toilet for so long, and it would be nice if that continued. So go out there and buy a few comics that you like, and try a few comics that you're not sure about.

JOZIC: Alright.

SIMONSON: There you go.