Top 30 Christopher Priest Quotes

Deathstroke is a villain. Don’t come to the book with any expectations that he will, in any way or sense or form, act heroically. He’s a bad guy, and that’s the fun of it.

If you could access 90 percent of your brain, you’d be Charles Xavier.

What makes a good villain is someone who doesn’t just challenge the hero but comes organically out of that character’s history and circumstances.

I think every writer is in search of the truth. We are trying to psychoanalyze ourselves.

In my opinion, I feel like all versions of ‘Deathstroke’ are valid. Just like with ‘Black Panther,’ I felt like it wasn’t good for a writer to say another writer’s work was invalid or never happened.

In comics, my experience has been mostly artists whose visual storytelling chops are either weak or they’re more invested in rushing to a paycheck than in doing work they can be proud of.

I’m old enough to remember seeing James Brown live.

My ‘Black Panther’ run really wasn’t about Black Panther. It was about Ross. It was about exploding myths about black superheroes, black characters, and black people, targeted specifically at a white, male-dominated retailer base.

Writing ‘Deathstroke’ presents a number of challenges to me. As a Christian, as a minister, it’s difficult for me to write a comic book that all but glorifies violence. So my take on ‘Deathstroke’ has been to not so much celebrate violence but to deal with the consequences of violence.

The ‘Black Panther’ series was never really about the Black Panther at all. The State Department guy, Everett K. Ross, was the series protagonist, so politics was simply a logical part of the character’s tool set.

In ‘Black Panther,’ I tried to preserve virtually all versions and interpretations of ‘Black Panther’ – including the Jack Kirby one, which was really tough to do – and make it work within current continuity.

If we can provide even a fictional roadmap to what a successful, prosperous African nation might look like, then let’s do that.

I was trained in storytelling by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, and Larry Hama. Doesn’t make me a genius, and there really isn’t anything fancy about the stage direction in my scripts.

When I read comics, they were dense stories. When you put them down, there was a sense of having gotten a great deal from them.

If I could make Panther tough, mysterious, wily, and often at odds with his ‘Avengers’ comrades, that was a character I’d find interesting.

I’m abrasive. I am so sure that I’m right about virtually everything. I can sing you an aria of reasons to not like me.

You go back to look over the body of my work, and there are no archetypal villains in my books.

The problem with most liberals – myself included – is we tend to think we’re post-racial: that we’ve got a handle on things because we’re not racists.

Escapism has its place. I used to write ‘Conan the Barbarian’ for Marvel, which takes place in an environment completely removed from the real world.

I didn’t want to write a ‘black’ book because black characters are a tough sell.

I think everybody wants to feel validated in some way, and when you’re looking for leisure activities or if you’re looking for escapism or things like that, you want to read about characters you can identify with.

If the League were real, today, they’d most likely be sued by every person they ever saved. They’d be subpoenaed by every authority in every jurisdiction imaginable; hearings upon hearings. There’d be waves of accolades followed by tsunamis of boos from social media.

I’m really not used to people paying attention to my writing.

All people – white, black, whatever – are tribal in the sense that we relate to that which is familiar to us.

It made absolutely no sense to me why Panther would ever join a super-hero team; he’s not a super-hero, and the record shows he did a whole lot of nothing most of the time.

Deathstroke,’ in my view, is a family drama. It’s like the ‘Sopranos’ with super villains.

Hollywood is, of course, loaded with egos, but it’s amazing to see how, despite the egos, those collaborators pull together and focus on telling a story rather than butt heads and sabotage what is extremely hard work and investment just because their ego apparently demands it.

You don’t want to have a character say what’s bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

I saw ‘Get On Up’ about a dozen times. I went every day. Every single day, I was standing outside when the movie theatre opened and bought my ticket. The theatre was usually empty. I live in a town that wasn’t eager or very interested in a James Brown biopic, but I couldn’t stop watching Boseman.

I don’t think there is really much from my career that I want to go back to. I think that, with most of the characters that I’ve been lucky enough to work with, I’ve said all I have to say about the Black Panther, Green Lantern, and on and on.