You know what I mean? It's something that's sort of become bigger than the individual people, in a sense. It's kind of like they throw their ideas into it, and the ideas kind of move along on this giant river. Just in terms of the way the creators relate to the process of contributing to the grand narrative and always having to cede control at some point. A lot of that gets passed on from generation to generation. There's a fictional character history, and there's the behind-the-scenes history, which is also a tradition of sorts. There is something that connects the experiences of Jack Kirby and Steve Gerber and Frank Miller, and so there's sort of a shadow history. I think that the more I learned about the creators, the more I realized that, in the same way the X-Men have a 50-year ongoing legacy of story, the stories of the creators themselves are sort of all tied into this one continuum. When you first started kicking around ideas for the book, was this 50-plus-year definitive history what you had planned? I think that mythos was what stood out for me about Marvel. To try to convey this to non-comics readers, I say, "Imagine if 'Lost' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'Mad Men' aired for seventy years, every week, and every character got their own spinoff show, and that aired every week for seventy years as well." You just become consumed by this vivid, mysterious, imaginary world.
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