Tom King

“Not to get political, but it seems like every day I read the paper, and you're reading about nuclear war and Russians taking over the country and Nazis again. It's like every once in a while, the world blinks for a second, and it goes, 'Darkseid is!' The world has changed, and it's changed in a 'Darkseid is' way.”

“I'm a firm believer in putting your experiences in your writing, of bleeding into the page.”

“I grew up your classic nerd who was not good at throwing balls or kicking them. I was good at reading stories by myself. That was my specialty as a child.”

“I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.”

“I've been the desperate writer before. I wrote a novel, and they paid me for it, and I've had those calls from my agent, and I'm like, 'Do you need me to ghost-write a vampire novel? What do you need? I'll do Transformers... tell me!'”

“When I was dealing with a lot of Iraqis, lies were constant; people constantly lied to you. It's a part of their culture. They wanted to please you so much, they were willing to lie to you to please you.”

“Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.”

“That's what's great about the Batman universe. When you explore Gotham, when you explore the villains, all of them point to this one character. This iconic American symbol for how we deal with pain and loss and how we move forward after it.”

“When I was 12, I used to ride my scooter two miles to a comics shop, which I can't imagine letting my kids do by themselves through the city.”

“I love continuity. I was a continuity nerd growing up. I loved buying a comic in the middle of something and loved digging for back issues or going forward and trying to figure it all out.”