NateCosBOOM

Kurt Busiek is the writer of the MAXIMUM SECURITY, a Marvel crossover event celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year. To celebrate, I’ll be sending Kurt a copy of Maximum Security #1, signed by me.

I asked him four goddamn questions.

NATE: Favorite super hero created after 1990?

KURT: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

NATE: Best Harrison Ford movie other than any of the Indiana Jones or Star Wars?

KURT: I’m a sucker for SABRINA. But probably WITNESS. Still, hard to argue with kick-ass get-off-my-plane US President in AIR FORCE ONE…

Nah. WITNESS.

NATE: For or against sports fantasy leagues?

KURT: They are strange and alien to me, and I’ve never participated in one. I like my sports real, and featuring the Boston Red Sox.

But I see no reason to be against them. I’m neutral, like sports fantasy Switzerland.

NATE: When you write characters in Astro City that have noticeable similarities to well-known DC/Marvel icons, are you thinking “What would Superman/Spider-Man/Wonder Woman do in this situation?” as you write, or do your characters take on unique lives of their own as soon as you create them?

KURT: They’re specific and distinct characters to me the minute they’re created. I don’t actually create them as stand-ins for Marvel or DC characters, I create them based on archetypal underpinnings, and the similarities are just surface things.  Samaritan wasn’t created to be Superman, for instance, he was created to be a very fast flying busy hero, because that’s the story I came up with that created him — a plan for a 24-Hour Comic I never did, but which I came up with while thinking about flying, and doing a comic exploring what it would feel like.

Everything that Samaritan is comes from that root, so when I think about what he’d do, I think about his need to be on the go all the time and his wish to just relax. And that’s not Superman, so what Superman would do doesn’t enter into it.