On Stan Lee's "writing":

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Stan Lee comes up with an idea: “Right, next issue of The Fantastic Four , like, what if there's some really big powerful threat from space, sort of – or according to some people, what if in the next issue, the FF – the Fantastic Four – fight God”. And Jack Kirby goes away, and he thinks: “Galactus…Galactus eats planets…and he's got this herald…and it's this silver guy on a surfboard and he goes before him…and this guy's so frightening that solar systems will switch off their suns so that he doesn't notice them, they'll black out their entire galaxies so that he'll pass them by, and yeah, The Watcher, he intervenes and fills the Earth's sky with illusions to keep this creature away, but it doesn't work…”. And you've got Kirby, he'd pencil five pages a day…he just wasn't human. He'd just sit there pencilling five pages a day, six pages a day, nine pages a day, and in every panel – so he'd be breaking it down into stories, he'd be breaking it down into a continuity of images, he'd be inventing the characters, he'd be writing the dialogue suggestions – very crude, very quick, but sometimes quite detailed. Then this would go to Stan Lee, who would look at the story that Jack Kirby had written , would dialogue it in his own unique way – he would put in a lot of ‘thees', ‘thous', ‘face front true believers', footnotes, and then it would go out as ‘ Fantastic Four created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby', but it was only one of them who had a share of the action on the characters, and that was…the smiling one. And that's probably why he was smiling, come to think about it.

And the Marvel method – I've heard people – Archie Goodwin, who was a lovely man, a great comic writer and somebody I respected a great deal – I once said to him: “I can't see any advantage in the Marvel method”. And he said: “Well, sometimes it allows for serendipity”. That may be true. But I would say that it would be so infrequent – and I mean looking at the vast output of Marvel comics during the last thirty years of the twentieth century – those moments of serendipity were pretty few and far between. I'd say that the disadvantages of the method outweigh whatever slender advantages there might be. It's lazy. I've gotta say, it's lazy. And it leads to homogenous product because think about it - I mean, if the artist has no real idea what anyone's gonna be saying in a particular panel, then how can he put a particular emotion on their faces while they're saying it? So you have to go for this kind of – the emotional range of Marvel characters is generally ‘mouth open – mouth closed'.




On Morrie's Arkham Asylum:

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And so I had to sit down and think: “Why? Why does this book not satisfy me?” Brian's art's lovely, you know it's better than most of the post-modern Batman books…”

DW: Arkham Asylum…

AM: Well I wasn't gonna mention any names…but yeah, I didn't really like Arkham Asylum .

DW: That's interesting, because that didn't seem to work as much as anything I've read…and I'm not sure why.

AM: Not to slag anyone off, but at the time, I met Dave McKean after Arkham Asylum came out, always a difficult time, the book's come out, by someone you know and get on with, and you don't happen to like it, then, you have to choose between honesty and diplomacy, and I remember saying to Dave McKean that I hadn't liked Arkham Asylum , I thought his art had been beautiful, lovely, but it was the story that the art was in service to…

DW: Perhaps it wasn't really a story…

AM: Well it wasn't much of a story, the story didn't really resonate for me on any level, and the fact that it had got Dave's beautiful sumptuous artwork appended to it, I said to Dave that it was like putting an exquisite golden frame – and I said your art is an exquisite golden frame, it is, it's exquisite – it's like putting that exquisite golden frame around a dog turd. I said it's not gonna make the dog turd look any better. In fact the dog turd can make the exquisite golden frame look a bit – an attempt to polish a turd. It's like, the artwork, if it's not in service to something which has depth, it can be the most gorgeous stuff in the world, and the more gorgeous it is, the sillier it will look. Because you'll be thinking: “Someone expended all this effort and created all this beauty on this story”. It's like the gap between the story and the art is vast.



On The Big Lebowski:

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AM: Yeah, I don't like voiceovers in films anyway. Much as I'm a big fan of the Coen brothers, the cowboy narrator in The Big Lebowski was to my mind one of the major flaws of the film – it was a distancing device. Devices like that make it much more obvious to the reader that they are reading a story.