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Greg Rucka [0-0] American

Rank: 102
Writer, Comic Book Writer

Gregory "Greg" Rucka is an American comic book writer and novelist, known for his work on such comics as Action Comics, Batwoman, Detective Comics, and the miniseries Superman: World of New Krypton for DC Comics, and for novels such as his Atticus Kodiak series.

Christmas

Quote	Tags	Rank
Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.		101
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.		102
I love 'The Omen,' just as a piece of plotting.		103
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.		104
What we want to see is stories that are going to be honest stories about the characters that we're telling them about.		105
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.		106
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.		107
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.		108
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.		109
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?		110
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?		111
I think Batman has the Wolverine problem. I think he's overexposed.		112
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.		113
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.		114
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.		115
I am the product of Denny O'Neil in many ways, I carry forth a lot of what Denny instilled in me.		116
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.		117
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.		118
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.		119
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.		120
I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.		121
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.	Christmas	122
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.'		123
I write characters. Some of those characters are women.		124
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.		125
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.		126
I'm a Caucasian American Jew. These are all things that make up who I am.		201
Character is made up of a variety of different things. One of those elements is gender.		202
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.		203
The writer's curse is that the more you fall in love with the work you're doing, the more I think it shows.		204
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.		205
'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.		206
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.		207
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.		208
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.'		209
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.		210
My college senior thesis was going to be on the American private investigator.		211
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.		212
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.		213
Speaking as a father, there is no rulebook, and you don't know how to do it. You just do the best you can.		214
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.		215
Heroes are defined by their villains - Batman is nothing if he doesn't have Two-Face.		216
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.		217
Punisher is scary; he should be scary.		218
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.		219
Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.		220
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.		221
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.		222
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.		223
For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.		224
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.		225
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.		226
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.		301
Every writer has characters that they become attached to and that they feel very strongly about.		302
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.		303
I'm sick to death of the way the Big Two treat people.		304
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.		305
DC are playing catch up with Marvel because of things like 'The Avengers' breaking six hundred million domestic.		306
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.		307
I love doing research. It's like cheating, but with permission.		308
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.		309
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.		310
Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.		311
Superman is precisely what we should be teaching our children. Superman inspires us to our best.		312
I just know that if you make a Superman movie you can't take kids to, you've done something wrong.		313
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.		314
Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.		315
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?		316
A character wandering around asking, 'Who am I?' isn't, in and of itself, a story I'm interested in telling.		317
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.		318
I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk.		319
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.		320

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