Even with all this success, Busiek could top it when he becomes the writer of the new Avengers and Iron Man titles, as part of Marvel's Heroes Return project.

Please talk about your work on Avengers.
I'm a big fan of the Avengers -- I've always seen the book as the flagship book of the Marvel line, since so many of the core heroes are involved in the team (and anyone who thinks I'm spouting promo crap can read my letter way back in Avengers #183, in which I said the same thing). And the book's had so many good runs -- the Roy Thomas/John Buscema run, the Steve Englehart run, the Shooter/Michelinie/Byrne/Perez stuff, Roger Stern's run -- there's an awful lot to live up to there.

But I'm lucky -- I get to work with George Perez, and he makes any writer look good. What I'm hoping we can do is restore the Avengers as the senior varsity of the Marvel Universe -- the biggest, boldest, brightest, most dramatic team of heroes, Earth's first line of defense against any and all threats. The X-Men have had a good long run as Marvel's preeminent team, and I think it's the Avengers turn again. So George and I are planning a fairly traditional approach to the team, with big epic adventures against powerful dangerous villains as the context against which we'll be playing out character drama between the various members. I always thought the book was at its best when there was a whole lot of intrigue and romance going on in between the big battles, so I'm hoping to do a lot of that kind of thing.

We're not actually saying who's going to be on the team yet -- we start off with an emergency that brings together a few dozen Avengers, and we'll whittle that down to a workable team in #4 -- but based on the letters I've gotten, the various online polls and convention comments as to who the readers' favorite Avengers are, I think people will be pretty happy with the line-up. We'll have some big names, some classic longtime Avengers, and some new faces, which should give us a nice range of characters to play with.

And so far, the book has been an absolute blast. Whenever I get a package of art, I'm overwhelmed by the work George is doing -- it's my plot, but he's pumped it full of so much grandeur and majesty that I'm just stunned -- I had no idea my stories could be that... big. I don't know how to describe it, but I send off a plot, and what comes back just radiates Avengers! I think readers are going to enjoy it.

Could you describe what Iron Man will be like as written by you?
If I do it right, it'll be full of intrigue, hi-tech adventure, romance, suspense, all that kinda cool stuff. I see Iron Man as very different from your average superhero book, because it's so driven by the secret identity -- Tony Stark is a billionaire playboy, a businessman, an inventor ... and oh yeah, he's a superhero, too. So it's very much about Tony Stark, who's Iron Man when he has the suit on, as opposed to say, Superman, who's basically Superman, but is Clark when he takes the suit off. I'd like to get a lot of character interaction into the book -- Tony is, after all, the most charming man in the Marvel Universe, and he should get involved with the world's most beautiful and intriguing women. At the same time, I'd like to play the action stuff like a big-budget special effects movie -- a techno-thriller more than a traditional superhero adventure.

I'm aided in this by Sean Chen, who I think is going to become a star while he's on Iron Man. His work is detailed, precise, utterly believably and highly dramatic -- he has as much fun drawing a Tony Stark scene in some exotic locale as he does drawing a high-velocity Iron Man battle. And he gets better with every page -- his first issue was terrific, but his second leaves it in the dust. I really think Sean is the secret weapon of the Heroes Return books -- the readers out there know George, and Alan Davis and Ron Garney, but unless they've been reading X-O, they haven't had that many chances to see Sean's work. And Iron Man's going to correct that.

Iron Man, more than any other book, is the Marvel series I'd most like to write. I only hope I can get what excites me about the character out onto the page, where everyone else can see it.

How did you first come up with the concept for Astro City?
I've been interested in the question of what else happens in a superhero world, aside from the slugfests and adventures, ever since I started reading comics regularly. I had so much fun exploring the idea here and there -- in a couple of backup stories and most notably in Marvels -- that I thought an entire series dealing with nothing but that would be a dream to do. Naturally, the series turned out differently than I thought -- it's not just about what else happens in a superhero world, but about superheroes as metaphor for real-world ideas and emotions and such. But one thing that turned out just as I expected: It's a dream to write the book, and I'm having a blast.

You enjoy writing stories in which an ordinary person lives in a world with super-heroes and observes them. In the "New Kid in Town" storyline, which starts in Astro City Vol. 2 #4, that line is crossed when you tell the story of an ordinary teen who tries to enter the super-hero world. Why did you try to explore this story this way?
I'm not sure what you're asking. I'm interested in exploring the whole genre in Astro City, and how it can be used to tell stories that resonate with human experience. Astro City hasn't been limited to ordinary-person perspectives; we've had heroic perspectives, villainous perspectives, and so on. Doing a story about someone crossing the line seemed to be a natural choice, and instead of making the kid get super powers and suddenly WHAM, he's a superhero, I figured there'd be more opportunity for exploration if he eased his way in, making the transition slowly. Hope that answers the question.

How do you decide what characters will be featured in Astro City stories? Do you try to think up stories for specific characters? Or do you think up stories and decide that they would be best told using certain characters?
Mostly, the stories come first, and the characters are chosen (or invented) to serve the central ideas. I try not to do "what happens next" stories in Astro City, even though that's what the readers seem to want to know most; I'd rather find an idea that a story can be built around, and see who fits into that structure.

The Astro City storyline of Astra leaving home without telling her parents. This showed perfectly, in an entertaining way, why a child who is not abused, would chose to basically run away. Comic book writers normally don't try to explore what children are thinking and what motivates them. Why did you write this story?

I wrote it because I wanted to explore the idea of super-team-as-family through the eyes of a third-generation superhero, who has grown up surrounded by expectations that she'll be a celebrity and a hero (sort of the superhero equivalent of Bridget Fonda). I wanted to see what life would be like for her and how we could use that to explore her situation and the superhero genre.

Astro City is your own universe, your own super-hero playground. Would you be interested if some company wanted to make it into an animated series or a film? Or would you be afraid to let this happen, in case they made a mess of something that is so important to you?
I'd be more interested in animation, because a live-action film would take too large a budget even to do a halfway decent job. That said, I'm not eager to do an animated series either, since the book is so personal to me, and I don't want a crappy adaptation of it out there. But a good adaptation is another story; it all depends, I suppose, on whether I ever end up talking to the right people. If there never is an Astro City cartoon, it wouldn't bother me a whole lot, so I'm not going to make a bad deal just to get the characters on TV...

In Astro City you can write any type of story you want about any super-hero or villain in any type of situation you wish. Does this remove some of your interest in writing company owned super-hero titles, when you can tell some of these same stories in Astro City, with more freedom?
Yes and no. The one thing I don't do in Astro City is straightforward roller-coaster adventure, because Astro City is exploring what else the superhero genre can accomplish. So I still like to write the other superhero characters, if for no other reason than to do the adventure stuff I like writing.

The Wizard's Tale graphic novel. Where did this concept come from?
Two different tracks of inspiration, actually. On my side, I've long been a fan of James Thurber's gently satirical fairy tales, notable "The Thirteen Clocks," and when I was in college I started to write something like that on my own. I worked out a story but never finished writing it; I'm not the wordsmith Thurber was and never will be. So I put it aside.

Around the same time, Dave Wenzel was spending some time in traffic court, and to while away the hours, he doodled up some characters that he found he liked and wanted to do something with. He worked up more characters, then contacted a writer friend about turning it into a children's book. What the friend came up with, though, didn't center on the characters Dave most wanted to paint, so that project got put aside, too.

Jump forward a bunch of years. Dave has just finished up The Hobbit for Eclipse Comics, and they'd like to keep him busy on a new project, since they're negotiating for comics rights to Lord of the Rings and they want him available. He mentions his children' book project, and suggests it might be turned into a comic book with a new writer. Cat Yronwode looks at Dave's paintings for the project and suggests me. And when I see the character designs, I realize that what Dave wants is a story focusing on the characters he cares most about, but that his writer friend shoved into the background -- and as luck would have it, those characters would perfectly suit the story set-up I'd put aside in college. Dave and I braid our two inspiration-tracks together, and the result is The Wizard's Tale.

Of course, Eclipse then goes bankrupt the month the book was due to come out, and it takes a few more years to untangle the rights and the return of the originals, but hey, that's how this business works sometimes...

Why did you decide to write the Sea Devils one-shot? Is there any chance you might be writing them again?
I wrote Sea Devils mostly because Dan Jurgens asked me to. I had way too many other assignments at the time, but Dan's a persuasive guy, and he made Tangent seem like an interesting, fun concept with a lot of possibility to it. He was so convincing that even after I told him I really didn't have the time and I'd have to think it over, I couldn't get right back to my other work. I took my dog for a walk, and by the time I got back to the house, I knew the rough outline of the story I'd want to do. So I called Dan back and said I'd do it. I'd just have to make the time.

And it did turn out to be as much fun as Dan made it sound -- I got to help build a whole new universe, to play with some DC historical names, and to work with a couple of guys I've long wanted to collaborate with -- Vince Giarrano and Tom Palmer. It was also fun to work out connections with the other guys, like the Joker's appearance in Sea Devils, or the appearance of some Sea Devils in Secret Six.

Alas, if they decide to do more, I probably can't participate. I'm so busy, now that Avengers and Iron Man are up and going, that I can't spare the time to work on anything else. Keeping those books on time, plus handling the annuals and specials that pop up in the schedule like land mines, is more than enough to keep me from ever getting enough sleep. But I hope DC does more Tangent; I'd like to seesomeone else's take on the Devils.

What attracted you to writing Thunderbolts? It certain started with a different concept than other super-team books.
It sure did. It started out as an idea for the Avengers, if ever I wrote that series -- I'd come up with the idea of having the Masters of Evil slowly infiltrate the team under new guises, until after about a year the Avengers were all Masters of Evil plus Captain America (and maybe Hawkeye). At that point, they'd strike, destroying the Avengersfrom the inside.

I didn't get a chance to use the idea, but when Onslaught happened, I realized there was a better opportunity there -- what if a group of villains stepped into the roles of the fallen heroes, winning the public trust and gulling the world into a false sense of security? What would that mean to the world? To the "heroes"? I thought it would make a distinctive and different set-up, and a fun character crucible, so I pitched it, and Marvel bought it.

What is upcoming for Thunderbolts?
Not much I can talk about. Thunderbolts is a series that works around secrets and surprises, and stuff turning out to be something other than what it appeared to be. So I can't talk too much about upcoming events without giving away some of the surprises. I will say that Zemo's plan is ramping up, and there will be a showdown -- one that involves the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, in addition to making the T-Bolts choose between their heroic roles and their villainous intent. After that, the series will go in a different direction for a while, but you'll see appearances by Shield, the Great Lakes Avengers, the new Masters of Evil, Hercules and more, including some characters who've barely been seen in the Marvel Universe and possibly the most obscure guest-star of all. I hope that sounds intriguing, because if I say anything else, I'll have said too much...

We will also be building up to a special event of sorts, for November of 1998. That'll be Avengers/Thunderbolts month, and it'll feature the Avengers meeting the T-Bolts for the second time, under very different circumstances. Also, I'm writing a Citizen V/Captain America special that'll be out that month, and there'll be a trade paperback of the Masters of Evil's assault on Avengers Mansion, an Avengers/Thunderbolts novel from Byron Press, and stuff like that. Marvel's pretty happy with the reaction to the T-Bolts and the anticipation for Avengers so hopefully we'll get to have a lot of fun bringing them together and watching the sparks fly.