AV Club geeks out

Art by Cameron Stewart, Paul Grist, and Steve Bissette

Check out interviews with writer Grant Morrison, outgoing Dr. Who show runner Russell T. Davies and legendary Swamp Thing artist, Steve Bissette.

My favorite bit from Morrison's interview:

AVC: Speaking of British comics, if a British writer reaches a certain level of critical success, is he automatically inducted into a magic circle?

GM: Induction isn’t automatic, and involves a rigorous series of Harry Potter-style challenges involving hippogriff-wrangling, mer-wolf races, and all the usual folderol of an openly occult lifestyle. Marshall Law writer Pat Mills is also a magician of some infamy.

Davies on the Dr. Who format:

What I wanted to do was repeated patterns within the show, like every year we would go to the year five billion. Every year you’d go back in history and meet a famous figure, whether Queen Victoria or William Shakespeare or Dickens. Every year we’d come back to Earth and spend some time with the companion’s modern-day family. Not absolutely fixed within that, not a rigid path. But I think it’s important in an ever-changing show to have sort of little rocks or anchors that you can cling to and sort of say “Don’t worry, we’re still on the same show, I’m going to still always come back to what you like.”

Bissette on the creation of John Constantine:

And [John Totleben and I] wrote Alan [Moore], and said “We’re going to put Sting in the comic, and Alan, you better make it a character, because he’s not going to go away. We’re going to make him more and more visible, whether you like it or not.” So Alan made him John Constantine.