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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.

Kurt Busiek

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Kurt Busiek
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 16
Comic Book Writer
Comics Artist
Screenwriter
Boston
Massachusetts
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More quotes by Kurt Busiek

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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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The metaphors exist for the stories.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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The metaphor is the story, not the character.
Kurt Busiek
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It's fun to take a piece of formula and go someplace else with it and see what happens.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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When you have a novel set in a fictional history, you still should get your history right.
Kurt Busiek
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I don't view Twitter as a promotional tool but as a really, really, really cool cocktail party.
Kurt Busiek
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I've always been positive about superheroes.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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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.
Kurt Busiek
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I tend to think that the best face of humanity is that we learn. We explore, we study, we think.
Kurt Busiek