“I love doing research. It’s like cheating, but with permission.”
― Greg Rucka
“When there’s a clear vision, and you’ve got the creative teams working toward that goal, each on their own, it can then come together quite elegantly at the endpoint.”
― Greg Rucka
“Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn’t mean you know how to write.”
― Greg Rucka
“I think that Batman loses his efficacy and mythology if he’s got too many people around him. That’s what the Justice League is for, you know what I mean?”
― Greg Rucka
“I’ve always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.”
― Greg Rucka
“The goal with ‘Alpha’ was to run towards the cliches and then to break through them, and that doesn’t change depending on the medium.”
― Greg Rucka
“I think if you look back at some of the stuff that we broadly label as the crime ‘ouvre,’ there are certainly elements of the supernatural at work.”
― Greg Rucka
“I love ‘The Omen,’ just as a piece of plotting.”
― Greg Rucka
“I’m not a huge Lovecraft fan as far as that goes; I think there are some stories of his that are really quite wonderful, but for the most part, I have great difficulties with his prose – and the more you know about the man, the harder it is to separate him from the work in many ways.”
― Greg Rucka
“What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we’re telling them about.”
― Greg Rucka
“I showed up pretty much at the exact right moment to end up with a lot of work on my plate very quickly, because I was young and foolish, and so I wrote very quickly.”
― Greg Rucka
“All the sudden, I was part of the ‘No Man’s Land’ thing, and there was a bundle of core writers for that, but somewhere along the line, I became the go-to guy after that initial arc.”
― Greg Rucka
“I think there are certain questions that get asked in comics over and over again, and people want definitive answers, but I feel like there shouldn’t be definitive answers.”
― Greg Rucka
“There are so many great characters because one of the things that makes Batman fantastic is that Batman is tragic. I’ve said this elsewhere; I’ve said it over and over again, but the beauty of the character is that he’s a Don Quixote.”
― Greg Rucka
“We wanted to talk about death in the DC Universe, and how some people go to get a pass and come back, and some people didn’t. That opened up a whole other topic about legacy. We wanted to talk about what was required to be a hero, what were the elements of true heroism?”
― Greg Rucka
“I think Batman has the Wolverine problem. I think he’s overexposed.”
― Greg Rucka
“You have to accept that Batman is a fact of life in Gotham City, and on top of that, you have to accept that somehow this city manages to function with a police force that’s 90% corrupt.”
― Greg Rucka
“I like the ‘Keystone Kops’ storyline. It didn’t actually go quite the way I wanted to, but it was another great way to show how different life was in these two different corners of the DCU, being on the ground in these different areas.”
― Greg Rucka
“There is a sequence in my ‘Detective Comics’ run where you can’t find consecutive issues by the same artist. That’s intentional. That was done on purpose.”
― Greg Rucka
“I am the product of Denny O’Neil in many ways, I carry forth a lot of what Denny instilled in me.”
― Greg Rucka
“You know how a nonlethal weapon is supposed to work? A nonlethal weapon works on the basis of three things: It needs to deter, and that’s normally done through pain, and that pain creates a byproduct, which is fear.”
― Greg Rucka
“Fear is one of the elements of nonlethal weaponry. You’re going to get hurt, and you don’t want to get hurt. Pepper spray hurts. You don’t want to be sprayed. That’s why it’s a useful deterrent as a nonlethal weapon – I’m not advocating spraying people randomly.”
― Greg Rucka
“There are a lot of people in the medium who came and got into the industry and work in the industry, and these are people who were raised on comics and loved comics. Comics are their religion. To such an extent, that they don’t know anything else.”
― Greg Rucka
“I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.”
― Greg Rucka
“The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.”
― Greg Rucka
“When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘The Mists of Avalon.’”
― Greg Rucka
“I write characters. Some of those characters are women.”
― Greg Rucka
“We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character’s journey.”
― Greg Rucka
“I tend to see – socially, I don’t tend to be myself in a male role. I don’t know any other way to put it.”
― Greg Rucka
“I’m a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.”
― Greg Rucka
“Character is made up of a variety of different things. One of those elements is gender.”
― Greg Rucka
“The worst thing that can happen for a writer is for a writer to start believing their own press. I think the industry, and the comics industry in particular, is littered with the bodies of writers who believed their own press. And you can see the moment they did, and then the work nosedives.”
― Greg Rucka
“The writer’s curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you’re doing, the more I think it shows.”
― Greg Rucka
“I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to ‘work,’ so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable – because if I feel – if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.”
― Greg Rucka
“’Alpha’ is a very fast-moving book. It doesn’t lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to.”
― Greg Rucka
“It’s funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.”
― Greg Rucka
“When I was in third grade, I would run home – literally run home from school – and if I could make it in time, I could get home and the put the TV on in time to catch the answering machine message at the start of ‘The Rockford Files.’”
― Greg Rucka
“When I started out as a novelist, I thought I was going to be a private-eye writer. That was my intent, and that’s what I studied, I mean, scholarly.”
― Greg Rucka
“My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.”
― Greg Rucka
“I love liminal characters. I love these characters that are outside and enter and consequently are perpetually outsiders, and who hold themselves to a higher standard.”
― Greg Rucka
“When we’re 16, we have lots of heavy thoughts. And these are the heavy thoughts, where, when we’re in our 30s, we look at 16-year olds and sort of scorn it.”
― Greg Rucka
“Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don’t know how to do it. You just do the best you can.”
― Greg Rucka
“Comics fans want new stuff that looks exactly like the old stuff. It is hard for the publishers, and even the audience, to change something.”
― Greg Rucka
“Heroes are defined by their villains – Batman is nothing if he doesn’t have Two-Face.”
― Greg Rucka
“Every character needs an adversary – one who is both challenging and a contrast for the hero. The best adversaries reveal something about the character they’re contrasting.”
― Greg Rucka
“Punisher is scary; he should be scary.”
― Greg Rucka
“To me, the joy you’re going to get in a ‘Punisher’ story is watching him punish incredibly wicked people. Now, if you can add to that an emotional content, wonderful.”
― Greg Rucka
“Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.”
― Greg Rucka
“We forget when we’re all grown up. 16 was a long time ago. It’s hard to remember how freakin’ difficult it is as 16! Life is not easy, and you’re trying to figure stuff out.”
― Greg Rucka
“The stories that are out and the things that have been published are a sample of my interests. There are genres and sub-genres that I haven’t waded into but have wanted to, or have waded into in other places but never actually written.”
― Greg Rucka
“There was a time in my career when my hackles would really get raised if someone came in and said, ‘We need you to do this or that.’ But the fact of the matter is, you’re working in a shared universe, and all elements of the universe are, ideally, going to mesh and work together. That’s my goal. I want to be on the team.”
― Greg Rucka
“For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.”
― Greg Rucka
“I think you can’t repeat beats. If you’re doing something in one book, you can’t do the exact same thing in another book.”
― Greg Rucka
“The goal of ‘Revelations’ is that once it’s all done and finished, and you’ve read all of it, it is its own story.”
― Greg Rucka
“Every writer has characters that they become attached to and that they feel very strongly about.”
― Greg Rucka
“There are still plenty of people who want to burn me at the stake for my Wonder Woman run. And I can’t really blame them, you know? That was my take on the character, and when people are invested in the characters, they see them very clearly and in the way they like.”
― Greg Rucka
“I’m sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.”
― Greg Rucka
“For every person who passes on the opportunity to write Spider-Man or Superman, I guarantee there are 5000 hungry writers who would give their eye-teeth to do it. But just because they want to do it, it doesn’t mean they are capable of doing it.”
― Greg Rucka
“DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like ‘The Avengers’ breaking six hundred million domestic.”
― Greg Rucka
“I think when you’re working with a character that another writer is acting as – for lack of a better word – custodian of, your obligation as a professional is to not do anything that violates that ‘primary’ take.”
― Greg Rucka
“I met one of my best resources because I cold-called the local FBI office one day early in my career with questions. The agent who took the call knew someone who knew someone who was ex-Army, trained in personal protection. The resulting introduction was one of the best, most enduring friendships I’ve ever enjoyed.”
― Greg Rucka
“Some of the best moments I’ve ever written have come about because someone, somewhere, blew my preconceptions out of the water and dropped a detail in passing that took the work in an entirely new, entirely unexpected, direction.”
― Greg Rucka
“Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don’t want to go.”
― Greg Rucka
“Emotional honesty transcends reality; it’s what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.”
― Greg Rucka
“Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best.”
― Greg Rucka
“I just know that if you make a Superman movie you can’t take kids to, you’ve done something wrong.”
― Greg Rucka
“If Portland can truly have a true comics show that doesn’t become a media show but retains its focus on comics, I think it’s going to serve the city well. If this becomes a big show, it’s going to bring in a lot of money for the city.”
― Greg Rucka
“Comics don’t work without the visuals, obviously.”
― Greg Rucka
“If someone arrives, fully functional yet a tabula rasa, how does their environment influence, educate, even mold them? And if that is a nurture question, then where does that character’s nature fit in? How does that manifest?”
― Greg Rucka
“A character wandering around asking, ‘Who am I?’ isn’t, in and of itself, a story I’m interested in telling.”
― Greg Rucka
“I’m a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we’re talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.”
― Greg Rucka
“Like nightclubs and sporting events, entry into an amusement park is a permission to become someone else. We come for the experience and to relish it.”
― Greg Rucka
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