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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIt's been two years since Matt Fraction's psychedelic superspy series Casanova, one of the greatest and strangest comic books of the last decade, went on hiatus, and yet we haven't gotten any better at telling people what it's about without sounding like a mumbling public-transit lunatic.\n\nRoughly, though: Hedonistic master thief Casanova Quinn is the black sheep of a family of spies. His father Cornelius runs the international spy agency E.M.P.I.R.E.; they don't get along. After Casanova's sister Zephyr, a high-ranking E.M.P.I.R.E. operative, is killed in the line of duty, a mummified psychopath named Newman no, head of the Pynchonianly-monikered crime syndicate W.A.S.T.E., uses a mysterious reality-altering text called the Fakebook of the Cosmos to kidnap Casanova from his dimension and drag him across spacetime to a parallel universe where Casanova Quinn is a dead good guy and Zephyr is alive and well and reporting to no as a double agent. no puts the morally-compromisable Casanova of Timeline-909 to work as a mole inside the Timeline-919 version of E.M.P.I.R.E., and, uh, all manner of cross-purposes black-ops weirdness ensues. Cloak, dagger, sex-robots.\n\nIt's not as confusing as it sounds. Okay, it's almost as confusing as it sounds, at first, but most of the what-universe-is-this-again heavy lifting takes place in the first issue; more importantly, the book is funny and twisted right off the bat, a kill-box of ricocheting pop-culture references (PowerPoint, Rubber Soul, Morris Day, Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Mountain Goats, Liquid Swords, Eames furnishings, giant robots, George Saunders' \"Buddha Boy\" story from GQ) that does more to reinvigorate the superspy genre for the 21st century than a hundred movies about Daniel Craig gritting his teeth through cock-and-ball-torture ever could.\n\nSince Image Comics published the first issues of Casanova, Fraction's become a high-profile writer at Marvel Comics, entrusted with lunchbox-franchise characters like Iron Man, X-Men, and (beginning this September) the Mighty Thor. This July, Marvel's Icon imprint, home to Mark Millar's Kick-Ass and Ed Brubaker's Criminal, is republishing the first fourteen issues of Casanova\u2014the frantic, head-wrecking Luxuria arc, followed by the sadder, deeper, no-less-head-wrecking Gula storyline\u2014as an eight-issue series; all-new stories begin this fall. (Click here for a nine-page preview of Casanova #1.) We talked to Fraction about working for Disney, the sad decline of Brian Wilson, Lady Gaga, Holden Caulfield and\u2014oh, yeah\u2014comics.\n\n1. A PINK SO PINK, A BLUE SO BLUE\n\nGQ: So Casanova is relaunching as an Icon book, which is part of Marvel Comics, which indirectly makes it part of the Walt Disney family of products. Here is my first question: How fucked up is that?\n\nMATT FRACTION: Yeah. [laughs] I can say that the entire transition has been pretty exciting, so far. There's not been a single editorial note, [laughs] which is the biggest relief. I think that was everybody's concern\u2014that suddenly we were going to be getting notes from people we'd never heard of. But it's been great so far. Everyone at Marvel was excited and energized by it. I also suspect there's maybe a little bit of that Rorschach thing going on\u2014like \"We're not locked in there with them, they're locked in here with us,\" y'know? So, no\u2014so far so good. But yeah\u2014I was trying to figure out, for the editorial asides in Casanova [when Image Comics editor Eric Stephenson popped up as a talking head to explain pieces of the plot], it can't be Eric anymore, so I was trying to figure out who to replace that editorial voice with. I did think it would be awesome if we put Mickey Mouse in there. But I decided, maybe let's not rock the boat, so early in the relationship.\n\nThat would be great. \"Hi, kids!\" But it does seem like Marvel's putting its weight behind creator-owned properties in a big way, and giving guys you and Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker the chance to publish these weird, autonomous books.\n\nThey're clearly looking to flex the Icon muscle a little more. Mark Millar is launching Kickass 2, and Nemesis, and Brian [Bendis] and Alex [Maleev] are doing Scarlet, and Ed [Brubaker] is doing more Incognito. And then Casanova came into the fold. [Marvel] Its output is basically going to double, I think in the next six months, as a line. I think it just speaks to the mood that all of us are in, too, after a couple of years of working a lot on the work-for-hire side of things\u2014which for all its rewards and all its excitements, isn't the kind of garage rock that got us all playing in the first place.\n\nYou've said that one of the reasons it's been two years since the last all-new issue of Casanova is that you and your artists\u2014the Twins, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba\u2014needed to go off and do some work that actually paid, for a change.\n\nYeah.\n\nWere you being facetious, or was the hiatus actually an economic decision?\n\nNo. Money hadn't really started coming into the twins until well into [Casanova] Volume 2. Gabriel drew the first six or seven issues without seeing a dime. With the exception of when [Fraction's 2003 graphic novel] Last of the Independents was optioned\u2014there was a little check for that\u2014I've never made a dime on my creator-owned stuff. Or if I have, it's been very few dimes. Little enough to not actually know. But Casanova I know for a fact I've not made a penny on. It's all gone back to the twins, to try to pay back their page rate and get them to a point where they've not been working for free. But, I mean, Gabriel drew all of his volume without seeing a dime and Fabio did his. Now those checks drib and drab in, call them minor at best, it's no way to make a living. People do, people get lucky, but we're not those guys. We did not catch that lightning in a bottle.\n\nAt the end of the day, those guys are too talented to be working for free. And that's exactly what happened. So [editor] Scott Allie at Dark Horse looked at Casanova, and said [to Moon and Ba] \"Jesus Christ, you should draw Umbrella Academy.\" Or Joss Whedon saw Fabio's stuff and said \"Hey, let's go do Sugar Shock.\" And then [editors] Bob [Schreck] and Karen [Berger] at Vertigo said, \"Oh, hey guys, you're brilliant. Why don't you pitch us a series?' And [Moon and Ba] did Davtripper. For all the bravado and, what you call it, callow youthfulness behind the idea of \"Do it yourself!,\" at the end of the day, there's a time in your life when you absolutely can, and there's a time in your life when you're married and you have a mortgage and a baby or two babies and you need diapers and food and it's just like, \"I can't do that, I can't work for free anymore.\" It's not like anybody's getting rich. It's not like \"Well, I need a BMW.\" No\u2014I need to pay my light bill. That's the reality of it.\n\nSo the idea was, let's go off, and just build up the bank and get to a point where we can do seven issues for free again. Luckily, we haven't had to. Luckily all three of our stars were in the ascendant and people at Marvel were really big fans of the work, and were excited to make Casanova an Icon book, so we're very lucky\u2014nobody has to work for free, and we still own Casanova and still control it. It's the best of all possible worlds\u2014and it's now being published by Marvel, which is owned by Disney, which is kind of the biggest media conglomerate in the world, so we're all right. It's pretty great.\n\nIt's gotta feel kind of awesome that you've somehow convinced the Mouse to put out your weird, fucked-up, quasi-incestuous, sex-with-robots spy comic.\n\nIt should put rest to the rumor that Disney has any kind of editorial interest in telling Marvel what they can and cannot do. Casanova is coming to Marvel? Ok\u2014the end. That [settles] that. But yeah, it's great.\n\nAnd you're putting it out in full color, as opposed to the black-white-and-green or black-white-and-blue of the initial Image run\u2014but you've found a way to make it look as striking and weird as those first issues did.\n\nYeah, it still doesn't look like any other comic book I can think of. We knew for a long time what we were going to do [with the full-color art.] I knew what it was going to look like, and I talked to the twins about it. But only the three of us could see it. We knew what it would look like, and we knew it was going to be great, and we'd describe it to people and then we'd see them sort of go \"Oh\u2014what?\" But we could express it to each other internally, in our weird Casanova-speak. \"It'll be this, it'll be that. It'll look like Chris Doyle shot it,\" or whatever. Like a Wong Kar-Wai movie. And when I saw it\u2014I was like, \"Yeah, perfect.\" It looks insane, it looks crazy, it somehow looks Day-Glo, it somehow looks fluorescent, but it still looks like it's only one color. I've never seen a pink so pink before. Greens! It's just fantastic.\n\nThe reds are pretty incredible, too.\n\nWhen there's violence, it's really violent. That blood pops. I've seen the next issue, which is all done, and that is even more breathtaking. The Agua Pesada stuff, the city that is run by weird sex robots? That city is colored insanely. It looks completely berserk. There's this really brutal fight scene. I could not be more happy with how the color looks and how the color is working. Would our fortunes have been different had we put it out in full color the first time? Absolutely. But we were young and stubborn and we wanted it to be like what we wanted it to be, and we wanted the direct market to conform to our most capricious artistic whims and\u2014you win some and you lose some. And in my weirdly fatalistic way of doing things, I have to believe this is the best of all possible worlds. This is the way it had to be because this is the way it had to be. Like I said, it doesn't look like anything else, it doesn't feel like anything else out there. It still looks as insane and singular as it did with one color.\n\nYou had trouble selling it when it was just three colors, right?\n\nI had retailers refer to the book as black and white, to my face. But that was part of the reason we went with that blue in the second volume. That blue was pure cyan, pure C\u2014a pure C channel in the CMYK. That was the bluest blue that blue can be in print. And we said to ourselves, \"Well, at least no one will call it black and white anymore. You'll be able to flag down rescue helicopters if you crash in the Andes with this book.\" But we were still dealing with that kind of mountain to climb, where people would call it a black and white book and ordered it accordingly, and ordered it as though it were a black-and-white book. And again\u2014not to sound crassly commercial, but there are caps on how black-and-white books perform in this day and age.\n\nIt's also a non-superhero book. I have no real way of knowing, but it seems like, with the success of stuff like Scalped and Criminal and Walking Dead, there's more of an audience than ever before for non-superhero comics. Do you feel like the climate's changed since the first time you launched this book? Is there more room for a cool spy comic than there was three years ago?\n\nI hope so. It's interesting that when Ed will do something like Incognito, it does better than Criminal, because Incognito inherently is about a superhero. At the end of the day, the direct marketplace is designed to sell Batman. The numbers in [comics-industry trade magazine] Previews, before you get hard data, they're all based on this numeral, where there's a 1.0 [base], and books can do 1.5 or 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 or .99 or .75 or .01 or whatever, and 1.0 on that chart is Batman. Batman is the constant on the direct market and wherever Batman is, Batman equals 1. So that's what [the direct market] is designed to sell. That's the business we're in. And [selling a non-superhero comic] has always been trying to sell oranges at the apple store. But I think there's a patience there\u2014I think retailers know that the quality is there, and that the audience will come. We're already selling better than we did at Image. So already, things are different, things have changed. I think our profiles have been raised, and that helps, but I think maybe the market has expanded a little bit over these last four years. I mean, look, there's a graphic-novel bestseller list in the New York Times every Sunday. Things are different, for sure. You're always going to have more luck and an easier time selling Batman than selling anything else, because that's the metric. But there's still work that can be done, and you don't have to do it for charity.\n\nI didn't realize there was an actual ceiling, and Batman is on that ceiling.\n\nYeah, there's sort of the preliminary order numbers before they give you what the hard data is\u2014it's like a thumbnail metric, and Batman is always 1.0 on that chart. It's like, \"Okay. What's the Batman number? Great news, boys\u2026we're at 3.5 Batmans. We've sold 3.5 kilo-Batmans.\"\n\nI forget what the chronology was\u2014had you already started writing for Marvel when you wrote the early issues of Casanova?\n\nI was working on Casanova, but it hadn't come out yet. Casanova and Five Fists of Science came out right around the same time, and that was before the Marvel stuff came out. Not by much, but a little bit. The guys at Marvel who knew me and kind of got me in at Marvel knew the stuff that predated Casanova, which was all graphic-novel stuff. So it all started close to the same time, weirdly enough. I think my Punisher stuff started in the fall, and Casanova started in the summer, in May or June, somewhere in there, and then my Marvel work started to come out in September, October, somewhere in there. It was all very close, all happening at the same time.\n\nI ask because, on re-reading the first issue\u2014a lot of the stuff Cass complains about seems like you venting \"freelancer angst,\" to some extent.\n\nYes. Yes. Yes.\n\nWhen he's talking about outsourcing the job intel, going into a situation with bad information\u2014it feels like your own work situation must have informed the way Cass talks about his job. Were you still working at MK12 [the motion-graphics studio Fraction founded with some friends from college] at that point, doing advertising and videos and stuff?\n\nYeah. That was kind of the other thing about me breaking into comics, and being on this easy slow boat\u2014y'know, I had a pretty great day job, so I wasn't particularly hungry, or rather I wasn't particularly desperate. I was hungry, but I wasn't desperate. So I think I walked away and said 'no' to just as many pitches as I ever pitched myself or actually went after. And when the stuff I went after took turns I didn't like editorially, I was like \"Ah\u2014I understand why you're doing this, but this isn't what I want to write, so I'll go make [a video with Kanye West] or whatever.\" I think it was very much just being part of an entrepreneurial thing. At MK12, we were five dudes who had no idea what we were doing. That's the angst of business. Business-owner angst. So that's less about comics, I think, and more about general job ennui. Though I suspect now looking at it with a little bit of distance and a little bit of a history, that it's a story about a guy who has one job but really wants another job. It's perhaps a little telling. [laughs] These still waters run awful deep.\n\nIf there is something I'm wrestling with there, when I look back on it, I think it's \"Be happy with what you do.\" At that point, I think I knew I didn't want to make commercials all my life. I think there's definitely a subtext, a restlessness, a professional restlessness there. But I look at [those early issues of Casanova] and I'm just amazed\u2014I was convinced it was going to be the only comic I was ever going to get to write. The only ongoing series I was ever going to get to write. I thought maybe I'd write a graphic novel once or twice a year, if I could find people who could work on it. Just slowly put out graphic novels, and that would be my hobby. \"Oh, I write graphic novels on the weekend.\" Which was kind of what I'd done, up to that point. I'd have free time, and write a couple pages, and give it to an artist who would draw it when they had free time, and three years later a comic would come out. But at that point, Casanova was going to be a series, it was going to be a continuing monthly, floppy, staples-in-the-middle, couple-of-bucks series, and I was convinced I would never get that chance again. So I look at those early issues and just see someone trying to put everything he ever wanted to do into a comic. [laughs] You know what I mean? It has, like, an exuberant panic to it, like those game shows where you have to roam through the store and throw everything in your shopping cart. It's this! It's that! There's a completely insane, fearless, ten-directions-at-once kind of mania to it. Because I was like, \"Listen, you're going to get one comic. If you're going to get like three issues or four issues of a comic book out, like, who the fuck wants to write Batman? Go crazy, be the fucking Velvet Underground instead of Green Day or whatever.\"\n\nRight\u2014those first issues are insanely dense. It's like pilot-episode dense.\n\nAnd also, we knew, it was in that format\u2014it was in that farkakte two-dollar sixteen-page format, so I didn't want anyone to feel ripped off. I feel the worst thing in the world is to read a 16-page comic book of five-panel pages with three or four words on each page. I wanted it to be an experience. I wanted it to have that kind of '70s cosmic head-comics sort of vibe, where you really had to sit down and make a little bit of a meal of it. So part of it was deliberate\u2014not so much just out of panicked mania, or whatever, but just a stylistic choice. Knowing this was going to be a two-dollar comic that's sixteen pages, I wanted it to take twice as long to read as anything out there. To make people feel like we had earned that two dollars. Which sounds completely stupid when I say it out loud. But that was kind of the plan. \"Like, well, listen, it's going to be sixteen pages, but it's going to feel like it's 32 pages, and you're still going to pay half as much.\"\n\nYou were asking people to do math, kind of.\n\nI was asking us to do math. And it's like, \"Fuck it, wait a minute\u2014you're paying half as much. You get 16 pages, you're going to like it.\" When Casanova comes back, it's going to be all splash pages. Just lazy lazy lazy storytelling.\n\nAll pinups.\n\nThis issue: Casanova takes a nap!\n\n2. BRIAN JONES WANTS THE BEATLES DEAD\n\nThe rhythm of the book changes a lot between the first arc and the second. The story is still really crazy, but the pace is more meditative, relatively speaking.\n\nYeah, and when the third arc comes, you'll see that it's got a third tempo, and the fourth arc is another. Each storyline is going to have its own kind of feel and vibe, I hope. At least the first four are very discrete, very different beasts. But, yeah, volume 2 is very different from volume 1. I hope it's just as rich and engaging an experience, but it's a much different direction. That first one is kind of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, and the second one isn't nearly as diffuse. It's as much intensity, but focused on a much more narrow kind of band. I hope. After awhile, you just burn out. You can't tell stories like that for seven issues, or for what will now be the first four issues. You can't keep that up. As a reader or a writer or an artist, that's just not fun. [laughs] There are those stories about Steely Dan actually destroying master tapes during their recording sessions because they were doing so much overdubbing that the tape heads started peeling the emulsion off the tape itself. It becomes like that. Like, \"OK, guys, it's not fun anymore\u2014you're physically destroying the properties of the medium.\" I think seven issues is about as much of that as can or should be done, because after awhile I can't imagine it would be fun to read, and I know it wasn't fun to write after awhile.\n\nYou can't keep up that level of bombardment and you can't expect people to roll with it.\n\nYeah, yeah. And also, at the end of the day, there's only just so much stuff in the world worth talking about. At the end of the day, it's like, what's left to talk about. I kind of went through this phase where anything that was super spy-ish, I would buy. Anything I could find, anything I could look for, anything I hadn't heard of, I would check out. And after awhile, it becomes an adventure in diminishing returns. It's one thing when it's The Ipcress File. It's great to find an Ipcress File. It's a revelation, it's fantastic. Or Danger: Diabolik\u2014that's great. But it's not so far from Matt Helm, and those movies are awful.\n\nThey kinda are. I did the same drill-down on the whole superspy genre, because of Casanova, so honestly, I kinda blame you for the fact that I watched those movies.\n\nThey're awful, they're sad. Dean Martin looks terrible and is just drunk and unhappy the entire time. They're unfunny and unsexy and just miserable. And you're stuck watching them, and you're like \"Oh, God\u2014I bought a box set of this?\" [laughs] Do you want to know why you've never heard of the great spy stuff that no one's ever heard of? 'Cause it's not there.\n\nRight. It's one of those genres where all the cream is on the surface.\n\nMy wife and I were talking about the Exile on Main Street reissue. And the Rolling Stones are one of those bands where the B-side stuff, the unreleased tracks\u2014there tend to be reasons that those tracks are unreleased. No one's sitting on the White Album. Like [the Beach Boys'] Smile. I think that was the thing about Smile that was so intriguing to people\u2014the idea that it was a lost masterpiece. But\u2014no. There's a reason why it didn't come out. There's a reason why \"Free as a Bird\" didn't come out. There's a reason why the Beatles never finished that song. There's a reason why Cocksucker Blues never got released. It's not that good.\n\nIt seems like Smile is the only one that came close to living up to the myth, when people finally heard it.\n\nAnd even then. I don't know\u2014did you see that tour, did you see them live?\n\n I didn't. The contemporary version of Brian Wilson sort of bums me out.\n\nYeah, yeah. You see it live, it's really clear that [the finished version of Smile] was a Frankenstein project assembled by Brian Wilson fans who are very gifted musicians. But he's like a zombie. My angle on the stage was kind of from the far right, and there were times when he wasn't even playing the piano, but was just sort of pantomiming with his hands. You know what I mean? It was like, \"Oh\u2014Brian Wilson's a robot. He's not there anymore. Brian's gone.\"\n\nAnd he also has a very different relationship with that record than Beach Boys fans do. He's said\u2014I think he actually said this about Pet Sounds, but I'm sure it's the case for Smile as well\u2014that, like, everyone loves these records, but they just remind him of being on drugs.\n\nYeah. It made him crazy.\n\nIt takes him back to a place he's probably not all that psyched to be revisiting.\n\nYeah, and you go back and listen to the stuff, that exists, the extant bootleg material from that time, and you can hear him going in one direction, and you sort of look at the final piece, and their decisions\u2014and this is the ultimate voice of the entitled fan, but there's stuff I don't necessarily think was supposed to be that way. It came together in a way that I'm not sure it was supposed to. It's just a sort of weird hunch and you can't really articulate it. It is what it is, and it's a fine piece of work. But yeah, that's the thing\u2014B-sides and rarities stay in the vault because they're not that great. You don't want to hear the Rolling Stones be \"not that great.\"\n\nThe extras on the Exile reissue don't really do it for me. Nor does the remastering, honestly.\n\nYeah, man, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. It's also not really my favorite Stones record. I kind of liked that it sounded like shit\u2014that's sort of the thing I liked about it. I think Beggars Banquet is much more my speed, Let it Bleed, maybe. By the time they get to Exile, I'm kind of tuning out. But also, it's fascinating to me that the Stones have never been able to escape the Beatles. You know what I mean? I don't know if there's any way you could necessarily quote-unquote prove it, but, like, how is this [Exile reissue] not a response to the Beatles remasters?\n\nI hadn't thought about that, but you're probably right.\n\nEven if it was just a reaction to the announcement [of the Beatles box set]\u2014it's how it is with everything with the Stones. Acting and reacting with the Beatles. How is this not a response to that? They don't own the Atco stuff anymore, so they can't remix anything before, what, Beggars Banquet? They can't remix the early stuff, because they don't own it anymore.\n\nI went through a big Satanic Majesties period this winter, which I actually think is sort of underrated as a response to the Beatles, or among works of art produced by Beatles envy.\n\nMatt: I agree, I agree. I went through a phase when I was building this completely arcane sort of weirdly hauntological playlist where I was just doing action/reaction records. I was trying to trace from mid-period Beatles on through\u2014how far did I get? It was one of those things where you start with Rubber Soul and then you go to Pet Sounds and then you go to the back-and-forth between the Beatles and the Beach Boys up through Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's. And then the Kinks come in with Village Green Preservation Society. I was trying to put it all in order chronologically\u2014this led to this, and this led to that. This inspired this, and these guys were listening to that. It's a fun ercise to hear all these different ideas bounce off each other. Also, it's just fun to remind yourself that this all happened in four years of music. From 1967 to 1971, these were the records that came out. And yeah\u2014it was never more fun than when Brian Jones wanted the Beatles dead. And Satanic Majesties is a sort of awkward fit on them. It's a weird record for them, to see them in those costumes on the cover. But we never really had that over here. We never had that real piss-take kind of stuff\u2014we never had that culture over here in the way that the Brits did and still do.\n\nRight. We don't have chart wars.\n\nYeah, chart wars, and using album covers as weapons. John Lennon making fun of Ram inside of Imagine.\n\nWe should probably get back to Casanova at some point.\n\nWho's the worst and most disappointing interview you ever had?\n\nWorst and most disappointing are separate. Most disappointing I would have to think about. But the worst was probably Josh Hartnett. \n\nOoooh.\n\nAnd it wasn't his fault. He wasn't a dick to me at all. And if somebody's a dick, sometimes that's actually more interesting. It was one of those things where he really wanted me to see what a smart guy he was, so we had to go walk around the Dubuffet/Basquiat exhibit and have him sort of tell me stuff about the paintings.\n\nWow.\n\nWhich is not necessarily who you want to do that with. You don't want the guy from Pearl Harbor telling you all about Basquiat. \n\nI don't know, Alex. This could have been your M.I.A. beef. What's her name, and M.I.A.\u2014\n\nLynn Hirschberg. \n\nLynn Hirschberg, that's right. You could have written about Josh Hartnett eating truffle fries and talking about Basquiat.\n\nThat Hirschberg M.I.A. piece was crazy. I found it kinda hard to root for either of them.\n\nMatt: Exactly, exactly. Like, \"What's that? A piece of shit calling a piece of shit a piece of shit? Well great.\" I knew\u2014I mean, of course M.I.A. is too good to be true, of course it's thin and clever sloganeering. Look\u2014Jimmy Iovine's not actually going to be in business with a terrorist. His multi-billion dollar media conglomerate isn't going to actually do business with someone who is the person she purports to be. I get that. Like, I understand you don't get to make videos, your song doesn't get onto the Pineapple Express soundtrack if you're actually a terrorist. So it sort of reminded me of those, \"Well, you know, Jack and Meg White aren't really brother and sister\u2026\" kind of pieces. Like, \"I'm just going to take the fun out of all this, and make you feel guilty for thinking it was fun in the first place.\"\n\nRight, that's the thing I like about M.I.A.\u2014what's cool about her is how heedless she is about throwing that revolutionary iconography around. That's what's fun about her.\n\nBut I don't understand what Maya was thinking\u2014if she thought, \"Oh this is cool, we're going to go to my house next to my other house.\" Like, don't you tighten up your message for [the New York Times]? And then there was that amazing Lady Gaga piece in the Times of London, that previous weekend. Those were two amazing, like, alpha and omega pieces. It was great to read those two back-to-back\u2014one where the subject so clearly repulsed the interviewer, and then one where the subject so clearly intoxicated her. It was just great to read those pieces side to side.\n\nThat Gaga story was amazing. Like, logically, at this point, I should be way over hearing her talk about herself and hearing other people talk about her, but I'm not. At all.\n\nIt speaks to, like\u2014I suspect we all want her to be David Bowie so badly. Like, we're waiting for her to turn into the real deal, you know what I mean? There's such anticipation and expectation. If she puts out another party record, I'm actually going to be depressed. If she puts another record about drinking and fucking, I'm going to be bummed out. I'm ready for what comes like\u2014please be the real deal, please grow. Please don't just be Madonna and do songs about drinking and fucking until you're 50 years old. Please be something real.\n\nYeah\u2014I want it to be one of those sophomore records that fails horribly, from a commercial standpoint, because it's so weird.\n\nI want it to be The Bends. Like, destroy the audience! Go somewhere new, start telling different stories. She's great. I love everything about her and just hope it's not just\u2014I hope she's not Maya. Or M.I.A. Is that how you say it? The new record is called ///Y/?\n\nI've never known how to say her superhero name out loud. I also can't get my head around Ke$ha with the dollar sign and the fact that it's \"Kesha.\" I want to say \"Keisha,\" every time. \n\nI got into [M.I.A.'s] \"Galang\" when I was doing a Kanye West video, that had a budget of $50,000 dollars, and it ballooned to $300,000 on set, because of Kanye. In 72 hours, I grew to hate hip hop, hip hop culture, and everything related to it. I was walking around New York trying not to have a nervous breakdown because this thing was so out of control. And I grabbed a couple of records from my co-director, and was just walking around listening to stuff\u2014literally just walking up, starting from Wall Street and walking up into Midtown, the long way, trying to clear my head and I came upon that record and I was just like\u2014ahh! Reborn, saved. And again\u2014I knew it wasn't necessarily as advertised. But that [Hirschberg] piece was just so mean, so ugly.\n\nYou had a negative Kanye experience long before America did! \n\nYes, yes. Listen dude, I had 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' as my ringtone. That's how much schadenfreude I had for Kanye West. I called Hurricane Kanye, years before. I was the guy saying the ice is going to break. I saw that up close and personal.\n\n3. STRONG ENOUGH TO SHOVE YOUR MOTHER DOWN A FLIGHT OF STAIRS\n\nSo, okay. Casanova. I think my favorite issue of the first arc, the one where it really starts to work on multiple levels for me, is issue 2, where Casanova Quinn, your postmodern James Bond figure, confronts Winston Heath, the rogue spy who's kind of a straight James Bond analog. The whole book is full of confrontations like that\u2014in the second arc, Cass' sister, Zephyr, meets Suki Boutique, who's kind of a Modesty Blaise figure, and has a history with Heath. And that happens when Zephyr's in this relationship with Kubark Benday that weirdly mirrors the Suki/Heath partnership. The story plays out like this ongoing meta-commentary on the spy genre itself, with different archetypes are kind of literally battling it out. How much of that is deliberate? \n\nIt wasn't meant to be \"Casanova comes gunning for James Bond,\" you know what I mean, but a creation comes gunning for a creator. I remember there's an issue of [Warren Ellis'] Planetary where one of the characters kills this sort of John Constantine look-a-like, and then he shaves his head, so he starts to look like Spider Jerusalem [from Ellis' Transmetropolitan], and everyone thought that Warren Ellis was declaring that he was the future of comics, and it was just kind of a little joke that [artist] John Cassaday had thrown in. It's not meant to be, \"Ha, ha\u2014Casanova is better than James Bond.\" But the idea of a creation killing a creator\u2014I think it's [an expression of] whatever my parent issues are, whatever my dad issues are, whatever my generational issues are.\n\nAnd it's not even necessarily about biological parents\u2014I think it's really hero issues, maybe? Maybe that's a better way to put it. I think that's a theme in the work. What happens when the people you look up to invariably disappoint you [laughs], and how you choose to react to that. It's easy to frame that as a parental issue, it's easy to frame that as an extension of an Oedipal or Electra complex, or whatever the inverse is, which I can never remember, but it's not really that. It's much more about hero worship for me. This is very much a book about wanting a quote-unquote father, wanting a quote-unquote mother, wanting someone to guide and lead, but having to deal inevitably with the fallibility of everyone, the fact that everyone is fallible, especially the people you admire and look up to. That moment of realizing, when you're a kid, that you could knock your mom down if you wanted to. Or the minute you're behind the wheel of a car and you realize you could run your dad over, as kind of deranged as that sounds.\n\nI remember those moments in my life. And it wasn't that I was angry at my parents or I was thinking \"I want to kill you, Dad,\" or \"I want to push you, Mom.\" But it was just a weird thought that happened, that passed through my head. There's that angst that comes from realizing you're standing on a plateau with the people you looked up to. There are moments when any kind of role model that you have in your life, be it parental or educational\u2014teachers\u2014or even just, you know, professional mentors, can kind of invariably disappoint you. There's a specific kind of haunting from that, that resonates with me. I think that as the story of Casanova becomes about somebody living their own life on their own terms, and by their own definitions, which is ultimately the thrust of these stories, we're going to see this guy start to live for himself and be who he wants to be and not be who he thinks he should be or be what people want him to be.\n\nThat's kind of the ultimate story. It's ultimately a story about identity and the fact that we are what we do. That ultimately, we as people are defined by our actions and not by our intentions or by our expectations. When guiding lights kind of flicker or waver or dim, how you react to that, I think, is a prime moment in your development as an adult. How you handle the idea of being strong enough to shove your mother down a flight of stairs. It's maybe how we react to power, in a very rudimentary, very primordial way, a very ugly kind of way? That moment of realization\u2014because it's not \"Oh, you let me down, Mom,\" or \"Mom, you're not immortal,\" or \"Dad, you're a dick.\" It's \"I'm an adult.\" It's that realization that you've ascended to a certain level that was inconceivable.\n\nAnd there's a responsibility that comes with that, which can be really scary. If other people don't control you, you're responsible for what you do. \n\nIt's that first realization that it doesn't matter what we do, so in a way, that's all that matters. You can do anything, so only do what's right. That realization of\u2014I don't know if \"power\" is the right word, but whatever that is, that's something that resonates with me. And it comes up again and again in the work. Now, that initially began much simpler. I had a short story that had been bouncing around in my head that I could never make work. I wanted to do a story about a guy who believes he was Holden Caulfield going after J. D. Salinger. This guy who believes he's Holden Caulfield\u2014and in the story we wouldn't know if he was or wasn't\u2014goes after a recluse author who created him and they have a confrontation. That was really the most original root of that story was \"What if Holden Caulfield met J. D. Salinger?\" Which is pretty shallow, I admit. But that is where the kind of root was, and then I was kind of able to find all my themes in that. And then to kind of be able to add that second volume to double-back around and loop it together and dovetail it in with the other thing just kind of became gravy on the cake.\n\nRight.\n\nI'm worried that I just sounded like a crazy person.\n\nYou'll probably sound like a crazy person to people who have not read this book, but that's sort of unavoidable.\n\nUltimately, Casanova is a book about children becoming adults. One child becoming an adult. And that's really what that story was about.\n\nAnd it's interesting to play out that theme of power, and what you do with power, in a book about a superspy\u2014because a superspy can do anything.\n\nYeah, and, I mean, it's a book about a guy who changes identity, issue to issue to issue. Clearly, this is me dealing with the stuff that I think we all deal with when you're in your late 20s, your early 30s. What-the-fuck-am-I-doing-with-my-life kind of stuff. I was just lucky enough to be able to work all that angst out with tits and explosions. [laughs]\n\nWhich is the best way, if you have that option.\n\nY'know some guys make cakes. I do tits and explosions.\n\n4. CITY ON FIRE\n\nBut it does seem like you're consciously probing and interrogating genre in these stories, and trying to look at the cultural baggage that gets passed down as people keep telling stories based on these same genre fundamentals. Like the built-in sexism of the superspy genre. Or the Coldheart Island story in issue #5\u2014you explain in the backmatter essay for that issue that you made the islanders a race of super-geniuses as a way of calling out Peter Jackson for keeping the stereotypical bone-nosed booga-booga tribesmen when he remade King Kong.\n\nOf course, of course, yeah. But that was really of the time. I had clearly written that issue a couple of days after seeing King Kong. It wasn't until somebody brought that up, not long ago, to me that I even remembered there was a connection to King Kong when I wrote it. It's kind of the magic of comics. It's very automatic, it's very fast. I write in December, it's out in February. The turnaround is remarkable. So I mean clearly, there's just something immediate there. When I think back about it now, I'm like, \"Aw, fuck, who fucking cares?\" But at the time, it clearly was a bee in my bonnet. You go with whatever it takes to get you off your ass [and write], and at that point, it was that sort of disappointment in that movie.\n\nWhen I think about it now\u2014my son is animal-crazy now. And they were showing a clip from King Kong in Best Buy, and he was hypnotized. And now he wants to recreate it all the time. We'll run around the house. He's like, \"You're King Kong, and I'm that car,\" from the scene where King Kong is chasing Adrian Brody in the taxicab, and Henry will run around pretending he's a taxi and I have to run around pretending I'm King Kong. So when I think about King Kong by Peter Jackson now, I think about chasing my son around, which is a completely different reaction than I had from when I saw it\u2014which was, amongst other things, \"Really? Really? Ooga-booga? That's what we're doing?\" So, obviously, that stuff is there, but I think it's sort of the tinsel. That hides the real tinsel underneath.\n\nYou've said you're not going to do the backmatter essays in the new version of the book. \n\nIt'll be different as we go. The back matter will be back, but it will be in sort of a different format. It's not 100 percent locked in at this point, but there will be some sort of text-piece stuff. It's not going to be me just talking about comics anymore, or talking about my comic. It's not going to be me talking about me. I'm done with that.\n\nThe text stuff you wrote for those first 14 issues was really personal\u2014part director commentary, part blog. Did you start to feel weird about giving stuff away like that?\n\nYeah\u2014invariably it's hard not to feel like you're trying to explain to people why you're cool. For one thing, it's like, \"Does this make it less interesting, does this make it less special, does this make it less of anything? Doesn't a whore lay bare their metaphors like that?\" And two, when you put any part of yourself out there, if you expose any sort of soft underbelly, it becomes a target. Harlan Ellison has this great line\u2014\"I live in the 21st century, I just don't want to deal with shitheads on the Internet.\" And ultimately that's it. I just have a very low tolerance for shitheads, and a very low patience to suffer fools. And ultimately I'd much rather pull up a couple drawbridges and not have to have an afternoon ruined, or even just a moment of hot blood flashing through the ears. You make yourself a target, and it distracts\u2014it becomes subtractive rather than additive. So [the backmatter] will be something different. It'll still be a value-add, I hope, worth checking out and worth looking into and worth reading, but it's not going to be me talking about me anymore.\n\nWere you surprised when people reacted to it negatively? \n\nNo, no. I came from an art school culture. I don't know not how to talk about my work. I don't. It's part of the way I learned how to work. In an art-school culture, you have to be able to talk about what you're doing and what your intention is and what your thoughts are and be able to look at things. And comics hate that. There's this anti-intellectual streak and an anti-art streak in comics. Like, \"Who the fuck are you to think that you're entitled to speak about your work like this?\" We're not supposed to talk about our work like this. Grant Morrison isn't supposed to sit down and point out to you that in All Star Superman, Lois Lane bought a bag of oranges and not a bag of apples because she's in love with the guy who comes from the sun. We can talk about it, but if he sits down and does it, it becomes kind of like, \"Ugh, tacky. Who asked you, art boy?\" So, no\u2014it was obvious and I knew it was going to happen. I wasn't prepared for how [long pause] ugly it would make me feel, so I'd much rather just let the work speak for itself, and become evangelical rather than introspective. I think if I had to sum up what the new back matter is going to be, \"evangelical\" is the way I would do it.\n\nThere was a time when you were both writing comics and writing about comics on the Internet, sort of splitting the difference, in that Warren Ellis creator/pundit kind of way. Did you feel like it was going to be private, in some way, putting this stuff in the back of a comic that maybe nobody was going to read?\n\nNo. I don't think I really let myself think it through. I think if I knew then what I know now, if I could have told myself then what I know now, I don't know that I would have done it. But then again, I sort of have spent the first half of my career making up for the stuff I said online before my career started. Even if I didn't say it\u2014there's a hierarchy to who is entitled to say what. And that came back and bit me. I don't think I knew how to not talk. I used to do a kind of proto-blog comics commentary site [called Savant], and it maybe had eight to ten thousand hits per week, but everybody who worked in comics read it. This was in '98, '99, 2000, 2001, when it was impossible to talk about comics on the Internet and not be read by people who worked in comics. I just kind of came up talking about my stuff\u2014much to my regret now.\n\nDo you regret putting all that stuff out there?\n\nMatt: I don't think\u2014I think if I hadn't, I don't think the stuff that would have happened would have happened. I think ultimately it did what it was supposed to do, which was raise awareness. It was a tool. Let's just be completely ugly and utilitarian about it\u2014it was designed to raise attention and it did. But, whatever\u2014it is what it is.\n\nSo that's an art-school thing for you? Explaining your intentions, and sort of self-critiquing within the work? \n\nYeah\u2014you're supposed to be able to have an artist's statement that goes through what you were thinking and feeling\u2014not like, \"Here's what this is about,\" but to be able to talk about the process. I'm also a big process junkie. I will read any how-to there is. I'm just fascinated by that stuff. I love reading screenplays, I love reading other comic writers' scripts, even if I don't particularly like the comic. I like to read all that stuff.\n\nIs there going to be a process element to any of the supplemental material in the Icon version of the book?\n\nI think I'm much more interested in letting the work just talk for itself. When the back matter returns, it will be much more, like I said, evangelical in nature, and much less introspective.\n\nYou did a lot of influence-acknowledging in those early Casanova essays. Like, \"This came from here, this is a reference to that.\" It almost seemed like you were trying to address the question of pastiche head-on, like, \"Yes\u2014this book is full of references to other pop culture. Absolutely.\" \n\nI don't know if it was necessarily that. I mean no offense to Michael Moorcock or his not-inconsiderable body of work, but I named Casanova's dad Cornelius [after Jerry Cornelius, the Casanova-esque secret agent in Moorcock's series of '60s-'70s sci-fi novels] because I knew I was going to get hit. [laughs] There's no way you get to do this comic and not have people come at you with Jerry Cornelius. I'm not a fan of the Cornelius books, I'm sorry. But I knew if I didn't acknowledge it tacitly, I'd never hear the end of it. Clearly, there's an awareness of that. There was that sort of aspect to, like, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, where he was critiquing the book as he was writing the book as part of the book, and how clever that was. Oh sort of like \"Oh, look, you've made this kind of critique-proof, because you've critiqued it in the writing.\" But for me, it was less about \"Let's head it off\" but rather \"Let's just talk, let's share about it.\" Like, \"Hey, have you ever heard of The Ipcress File? Hey, have you ever heard of Department S? Have you ever heard Peter Wyngarde's completely insane solo record?\" You know what I mean? It was much more about \"Let's talk about the stuff that we're into,\" and less about \"I know, I know. I've seen Diabolik\" or whatever.\n\nReally, it was much more about\u2014y'know, I remember when James Robinson was writing Starman, he would write what he was into in the character. Like, James Robinson collected Bakelite radios, so [Starman's civilian alter ego] Jack Knight collected Bakelite radios. In the letter column, James Robinson used to write about Bakelite radios and his readers sent him Bakelite radios. I started to write about spy stuff, and people started to send me old spy toys. I've got this little radio that turns into a shotgun. I have a bike that shoots missiles. People would send me these old Agent X7 spy toys and stuff like that. But really, it's about, let's just celebrate this stuff that we're into. I was thinking, I'll talk about this, and someone will know what the Ipcress File is that I don't know about. Someone will be able to tell me what is the missing Department S from my super spy collection. What's out there that isn't Matt Helm? Cool stuff that I wouldn't have known about.\n\nAnd if nothing else, I imagine it was you trying to get some kind of a ping back from the audience, that signal that somebody is actually paying attention.\n\nYeah. And I remember loving the letter column in Starman, I loved the letter column in The Invisibles, and those were all people, likeminded weirdos, talking about stuff they'd like. I was like, \"Yeah\u2014let's do that.\" I'd much rather talk about old spy films and George Markstein novels than \"Well, that's a great question, if you look in issue three, we see that\u2026\" Y'know, trying to solve the riddle of No-Prizes or whatever.\n\nI don't know if I'm a typical reader, but that kind of direct-address stuff never takes away from a book, for me\u2014I always like seeing the seams and how the machinery works and how the author got from here to there. You mentioned the Eggers book\u2014I like the postscript to the paperback version of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, \"Mistakes We Knew We Were Making,\" this long essay where he addresses all the issues raised by the book. I liked how this award-winning book was sort of deconstructing itself before your eyes. \n\nI feel like, had Quentin Tarantino come out and said \"Fuck yeah Ringo Lam's, City on Fire, it's an amazing movie, have you ever seen it?\" instead of dodging, it would have maybe made it a different thing. I've said this before, but the [Led Zeppelin] da da, da na na guitar riff isn't \"The Ocean\" for me, it's \"She's Crafty.\" I grew up with sample culture. I knew that da da, da na na from Licensed to Ill, not Houses of the Holy. I came up with that. That's where I'm from, that's my wheelhouse, man. That's what makes me comfortable. Reference and homage and remix. If anything else, it's the buttons you wear on your jacket. Like, \"Hey is that a Watchmen pin? Let's talk about comics.\" That kind of stuff\u2014it's little signals, little signal flares, up in the night, little bottle rockets, little smoke signals looking for a response.\n\nAlso, I don't know how you feign ignorance anymore with the Internet. It's becoming harder and harder to have a shield of plausibility If someone wanted to pretend, like, \"I've never heard of City on Fire by Ringo Lam.\" The Internet is making that impossible, it's much easier to find this stuff these days than it would have been. I remember when, before the Internet, there was a bootleg company out of Chicago that had printed a Pixies bootleg and on the back of the CD, it was a live Pixies show, all of the songs listed were Prince songs. So there was a rumor that went around that the Pixies did a show of nothing but Prince covers and you had to find this bootleg to get it. And it was a thing where Pixies fans obsessively were looking for this Prince/Pixies bootleg. And it turned out that what had actually happened was this company that made bootlegs, somebody had printed the \"Pi dot doc\" with a \"PR dot doc,\" as Prince alphabetically follows the Pixies, and there was a fuckup at the manufacturing plant.\n\nAre you telling me that America's bootleg-CD manufacturers are not\u2014\n\nThere was a little QC issue. Yeah. But for awhile, I remember for a year or two, looking for this fucking\u2014like, obsessively trying to hunt down this Pixies show where they did nothing but Prince covers, which didn't actually exist, because in fact it was a Prince bootleg. That's the kind of thing where you could easily figure that out on the Internet in two minutes these days, but it took me a year and a half in 1990-whatever.\n\nSo you're saying you kind of at this point, you kind of have to cop to whatever your\u2014\n\nIt's not that I'm copping\u2014but it's much more interesting to open it up, to have a conversation. It's a celebration. Fuck yeah. Diabolik, absolutely. Have you seen that fucking movie? Department S\u2014there's no X-Files without Department S. George Markstein is psychotic, have you read his books? He's insane. No\u2014let's make each other smarter. [laughs] I'd much rather have an open-source genome than somehow try to pretend this has all sprung fully formed from the brow of Zeus or whatever.\n\nRight, but it's weird, because when you do acknowledge these things, or when it's obvious that the work is a product of sample culture, you're opening yourself up to that criticism where people say, \"Isn't this just a mixtape of all the shit that you like?\" I thought about this a lot, when I interviewed Quentin Tarantino. And I've kinda gotten to the point where I feel like the mixtape is the greater form\u2014or at least that there's nothing inherently nobler or higher-quality about the well-made, smooth-edged object that gives off the illusion of having sprung fully-formed from the creator's mind. \n\nI think that the thing is\u2014I couldn't stand Kill Bill I until I saw Kill Bill II. And Inglorious I liked actually a lot. Much to my surprise. I love Inglorious. It was that thing where you sort of set your framework with other things, these are the shoulders you're standing on, and then you launch off into your own direction. You even see it in Scorcese. I mean, look, in Raging Bull, the last time he fights Sugar Ray, the camera goes down, and suddenly it's a shot-for-shot re-creation of the shower scene in Psycho, played out in a boxing ring. But you get it; it hits you on this level. It's smart, and it's a reference, but it builds, and it goes. And it's still Raging Bull. Nobody thinks, 'Oh, yeah, Raging Bull. That movie with the Psycho rip-off.' Like nobody says that about Raging Bull, but it's there. And again, I think it's the way we speak to each other in code, and we speak in aggregate and we put together these kind of complex thoughts and it's sort of a way of speaking in another dimension, with extra meaning and wordplay and stuff like that. And yes, it maybe cannibalizes the work of other people, but hopefully rather than cannibalizing it, it's really more amalgamating and making something new and growing it in kind of a new direction. And look, if at the end of the day Casanova turns somebody onto Jerry Cornelius, Diabolik, and Department S\u2014fuck, that's great. That would have changed my life in high school.\n\nI think the second arc of Casanova is the Kill Bill II to the Kill Bill I of the first arc. There's more of an emotional payoff to the references, a sense that something's at stake.\n\nOh shit, I never thought about that. But that's not the worst thing in the world. That's interesting. That never occurred to me.\n\nIt really transforms the book. Because it's never been collected in trade-paperback form, whenever I push Casanova on somebody, which I do all the time, I always feel like I'm only giving them half of Kill Bill, in a way.\n\nIt's been murder because the second collection hasn't been out. And I think the second arc is better written than the first. I'm still, I think, learning so much in that first arc. But yeah, it's been brutal. And now, like, I own all the deadstock [of Casanova's original run] in the world. If it's not out on a shelf, it's in my basement, that's it. I've got everything I have\u2026I have the last copies of the hardcover in my basement; I have the last extant issues of the second volume in my basement. If it's not out on the shelf, and it's not in the wild, then there's no calling anybody and getting it reordered, because I have it all. The good news is it'll be out soon, finally. Fucking finally, it'll be out and available. But I think, yeah, it gives it a much different picture. And too, then volume three is hopefully as different from volume two as volume two is from volume one. I know in the writing it's much different.\n\nHow far along are you, at this point?\n\nMatt: I'm on the first issue. I know what happens, I've got the story broken. But in terms of the actual scripting, I'm almost done with the first issue. Gabriel's nowhere close to drawing it quite yet, so it's not been a priority, you know. But we'll get there. I would like to have the first issue [of the third arc] written before ComicCon [in July], but with the new baby I don't know if that's possible. With Henry, it was different, because he wasn't a sleeper. So it was very much, like, \"What, I have 22 minutes? Gimme a notebook.\" Shit, the other day, we drove to the [Oregon] Coast to go to the aquarium and I wrote an issue of Thor in the backseat of the car because it was the longest uninterrupted time I've had in like a week. I sat with my notebook and my laptop on my lap and just typed the whole time.\n\nWhich issue of Thor is that going to be?\n\nThat'll be #617. I had it all broken out in my notebook, but it was typed and turned into a script in the back seat of a car on the way to and from the Oregon coast.\n\nIs it hard to switch back to the Casanova brain from the Marvel brain?\n\nNo, no. There's this degree of pressure there only because I feel like it's kind of the book that made my bones in a lot of ways, it made some of my bones anyway. There's this degree of 'Don't fuck this up, please don't let this be my Waiting for the Sun. No, ultimately, I'm lucky\u2014each book I do is such a different muscle group. It's sort of the difference between doing cardio and core work and swimming. It really is like crosstraining. Each book\u2014Iron Man, Thor, and X-Men and Casanova\u2014are each wildly different than the other that it's refreshing to get to it because it ercises muscles that I don't use anywhere else.\n\nThere's pressure and nervousness, but it's much more pressure and nerves based on\u2014I've gone back and reread it and it's not as good as I remembered it being, y'know? And part of it is just a function of me and who I am and I'm never happy with anything that I do. But when I sat down and it was time to write volume 3, and it was time to get started, when Team Casanova was on the field and we were ready to start playing again. I immediately went a reread one through fourteen in one sitting and came out of it, like 'Hmm\u2014that's, like, a B-minus.' So there's that, I remembered it being a much stronger work than what I actually felt. [pause] Let's maybe not put \"Hey, it's a B-minus\" in there.\n\nThere's your pull-quote. \"Casanova: It's a B-minus!\"\n\nThe thing is, it's great when you're the ultimate boss and you get to decide what happens. But that also means you're the boss and you have to decide what happens, y'know?\n\nYou know that they won't let you fuck up X-Men that badly. \n\nExactly. You've got a safety.\n\nSomeone will step in and take that away from you if you're running it into the ground, whereas\u2026\n\n\u2026I am the only one who can fuck Casanova up."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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