I don't think I can, sorry. I don't know what's in print and what isn't.

Judging by what Amazon has available for "Prime" delivery, I'd hazard a guess that SUPERMAN: SECRET IDENTITY, SUPERMAN: CAMELOT FALLS (vols 1 & 2), SUPERMAN: BACK IN ACTION, SUPERMAN: THE THIRD KRYPTONIAN, SUPERMAN: SHADOWS LINGER and SUPERGIRL: BEYOND GOOD & EVIL (which has ACTION 850 in it) are all in print, but I don't know for sure whether that means DC has plenty warehoused or Amazon just has copies left. Conversely, I don't know if the stuff they don't list as available new is out of print, or if they simply don't happen to have stock at the moment.

But even other volumes -- including SUPERMAN: UP, UP AND AWAY, SUPERMAN: 3-2-1 ACTION, SUPERMAN: REDEMPTION -- seem to be available "new" for reasonable prices from third-party sellers.

What I'd do if you're interested is see if your local comics shop can order you any of the books you're interested in, and if they can't, go the online route. But there shouldn't be any of my Superman work that's made it to book form that's hard to get.

I thought it worked fine. I think they could have been more faithful to the comics (well, not the comics where he was a karate-choppin' buck-toothed stereotype, but some of the comics) and still had it work, but this way worked well, too, in a nicely modern context.

I read an unused script for the first one that featured the Mandarin as an Asian warlord/arms merchant. But this was more inventive.

Like I said a couple of posts back: Ultimately, I thought it was an interesting and powerful interpretation of Superman. Not perfect, but very good at what it set out to be. And it was fun to see a couple of nods to SECRET IDENTITY and even my SUPERMAN run.

I think his character is decent, and hasn't gotten much exploration, but there's stuff there to build on. But the costume is wonderful.

I'll see it tonight. I don't know what I'll think -- but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Thanks! Hope you like what's coming!

Same thing that happened to almost all projects in development. It stalled at one point or another. The road from optioned to on-screen is a long, winding and hazardous one.

But there's still interest out there and we're in the middle of another negotiation, so we'll see what comes.

To crush your bacon cheeseburger, see potatoes French-fried before you, and hear the lamentations of the triple-thick shake.

If there's a way I could own SUPERMAN: SECRET IDENTITY, that'd be great, but it's hard to figure how that'd work.

I'd probably pick the Power Company, since there's already a story I want to do that's a non-DCU version of Witchfire. Or maybe the characters I created for TRINITY -- the Dreambound, Warhound and such.

I pitched the idea of an ongoing series with the three of them, and it got developed and changed and mutated until it became the single big epic weekly story that it was.

And writing it was a lot of fun creatively (especially working with Bags, Fabian and our second-feature artists), but the pace of it was exhausting.

Not that hard, really. The origin part was just a matter of taking all the various flashbacks we'd seen of Kang's life and putting them in order, and between Roger Stern and me, we knew most of it and could find the rest. It was making it feel like a story, a progression that led somewhere rather than just a list of facts, that took the work.

UNTOLD TALES was plot-style. I find that a very useful approach to writing Spider-Man, because he's chatty, so plot-style writing lets the artist draw without feeling crowded, and then you can fill up the available space with banter.

But MARVELS, a couple years earlier, was full script. I try to write in whatever way will get the best results. Who the publisher is is irrelevant to the question -- who the artist is, what kind of story it is, that's what matters.

I'd say there's room for just about anything, if it's well done. Marvel Comics published THE 'NAM, after all, and some of Sam Glanzman's comics memoirs, among other things.

Within the fictional framework of the Marvel Universe, if historical accuracy aids a story, then good. If I was setting an Invaders story around the battle of Midway, I'd try to get the details right, other than whatever fiction I added.

I don't think anyone suggested they had to.

I introduced Mount Charteris with the idea that Humus Sapiens was trapped inside, and that's why he'd never joined the X-Men. But Fabian got to pay that particular plot thread off.

No, I don't think doing comics-style shows is a better route than doing comics-based shows. Nor do I think it's a worse route. No more than, say, original screenplays are better than adaptations of novels -- it's all one a case by case basis. If the result is good, that was a good route. If it wasn't, not so good. But you can do good and bad stuff either way.

The issue with Charcoal is that the creators of the character entered him in a contest which they knew meant that if he won he'd be property of Marvel, then after the fact tried to threaten a lawsuit in order to get Marvel to pay them lots of money. That seems pretty crass to me -- if you don't want Marvel to own the character if you win, don't enter the contest.

At the time they were making their fuss, Charcoal had been temporarily killed -- Fabian had done a story where he was seemingly dead, but would be coming back. But Tom Brevoort didn't like the way the creators were acting, so even though Marvel resolved the issue, Tom asked Fabian to simply leave Charcoal dead. If they were going to be a pain in the ass about it, don't reward them by having the character appear regularly.

As for whether I like working with this kind of character, I'm not sure what you mean by "this type of character." Contest winners? I don't know, this is the only one I ever wrote, as far as I know. Characters where the concept was come up with my someone else and I got to flesh the character out? That was fun, but not all that different from when I get to create the character from the ground up myself.

In the end, it was a fun way to involve fans in the book, but one that left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, so it's probably best that Charcoal wound up not sticking around.

I think the word "just" is the problem there.

The Mandarin was, classically, someone who wanted to go back to the old days, when people like him ran everything and the general populace was essentially property. That's a villainous motivation, but it's not a racial one. He wants to return to the days of the mandarins because that's his culture's past, much as those Tory wannabes in Kirby's CAP wanted to return to days like British monarchical control of the American colonies. Introducing a Russian villain who wanted to return to the days of the tsars would work fine, and yaddita yaddita yaddita.

That's why I wanted to draw a direct parallel between "noble" overlords and corporate overlords, to remove it from being strictly a cultural thing and make it social comment.

So no, I don't think the Mandarin was "just" a Yellow Peril stereotype (he wasn't even strictly the classic stereotype, like Fu Manchu and the Yellow Claw). But if you don't know anything about the culture he's drawing on, so you wind up with a karate-fighting buck-toothed guy, well, it's hard to refute charges of stereotype then...

Thundra struck us a fun and distinctive powerhouse character who's got some connection to the Avengers, in that she's married to Arkon. So including her felt like it was a change that happened over time, and there was probably an interesting backstory behind it. It implied history that felt both appropriate and interesting.

That's pretty much the thought process behind all of them. Carlos had ideas about the pregnant Jocasta, but mostly, it was putting together a team that felt like there was some real texture there, like it was something you could imagine developing appropriately over time.

Glad you liked it!

I would have had the Mandarin resurface as a businessman -- the new owner of Stark-Fujikawa -- to translate his ideas about feudalism into a modern environment and make a more direct comparison/contrast between him and Tony.