Tell us a bit about how you started out in Hollywood.
The first thing I ever did was a little movie with Michael J. Fox called Teen Wolf. In the same year I did a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger called Commando. So, people didn't know what to do with me. I'd written this teen comedy and also this big action movie. At their heart, they were both big comic books which seemed obvious to me - but I guess not to anybody else. (laughs).
They both had their own enjoyment to them - I don't really have a niche that I like to put myself in, that's what's led me through my career - not quite wanting to stay in any one place at any one time.
I've always been a comic book fan, since I was a kid. I started collecting rather obsessively at the age of ten and now have this collection where my garage is supposed to be, much to the chagrin of my wonderful wife.
I was working on a Flash (the fastest man alive) movie for DC Comics and Warner Brothers which never came together. Jeanette Kahn, the publisher at DC Comics asked me, if I wasn't going to do the movie, would I like to do the comic book.
It was a little bit like Santa pulling up in front of the house and asking would I like to go for a ride on his sleigh on Christmas Eve. So, of course, I said yes. Now, for someone who had been collecting comics as long as I had, I was remarkably naive in terms of the way comics are produced.
I thought very much like television there would be a bunch of freelance assignments that would be open on top of whatever the regular writer was doing. So I told DC I wanted to write Superman. They said, "Well, we have someone who's already writing Superman." So I said, "Well, fine, then Batman." They said, "No, we also have people writing Batman". We finally got around to the Challengers of the Unknown, which even I hadn't heard of, but you have to start somewhere.
What came out of that was that I met an artist by the name of Tim Sale, who I collaborated with for years. That led to a number of things. We're probably best known for Batman: The Long Halloween, a year-long detective serial we did for DC featuring Batman. It won numerous awards, including the Eisner, which in the world of comic books is equivalent to an Emmy.
We also did Superman for All Seasons, which was a graphic retelling of the Superman origin in a pulp-spun Norman Rockwellian kind of way. Between those two things, while I was still writing and producing movies and television, I suddenly had a new career in the comic book industry.
