Why did you become a writer?
I first decided to be a writer when I was about twelve because of comic books. I was in grade seven. I’d been collecting comics for two years already—primarily Bill Mantlo’s Micronauts . Then I found Frank Miller’s Daredevil . He was one of the first celebrated auteurs of modern (post-Eisner, post-Ditko) comics, probably because he was in the “big two” of Marvel/DC. I’d never before seen the intensity possible in a work drawn by the same person who wrote it. Narration in comics had generally been awful. Now I was reading DD #179 (I think), and finding a narrative shift from (I think) omniscient to first-person (reporter Ben Urich, who for some reason reminds me now of Seymour Hirsh). That stunned me. A narrative switch? Twenty years later I’d employ that same approach to the tune of eleven narrators in my first published novel, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad . So I’d already known, because of Michael Golden’s and Pat Broderick’s work on *Micronauts*, that I wanted to b...