The Le: You're quite the comic fan. What are your two favorite characters from the Marvel Universe, DC Universe, any Indy Universe?

Seth: Wow. Do I really have to limit myself to two? There are so many great characters, each with different reasons to love them--so characters I love for one reason might be bested by another when considered from a different angle.

For DC, regardless of what name or costume he might be using, Dick Grayson has always been one of my favorites. I had a Robin costume as a kid, and felt like I was growing up with him when he set aside the Robin name in the Judas Contract to become Nightwing. He's got the same self-made hero thing going that Batman does, but I always liked the sense of humor he brought to the gig. It'll be interesting to see how his Batman is different.

DC Favorite #2 is a little more obscure. When I was a kid, I paid ten dollars to a mail-order comic company called Westfield Comics that advertised in comics (oddly, years later I ended up shopping at their store in Madison every Wednesday), and in return I got a box stuffed with a hundred old DC comics. That was in the mid-80s, so those old comics they sent me to clear out their warehouse had a few superhero books (Action and Adventure Comics, mostly), but also a ton of horror, western, and war comics. Of course I read them all, and my favorite character I discovered was J.A.K.E., the G.I. Robot. A robot fighting dinosaurs during World War II! How cool is that?

I'm going to cheat for my first Marvel pick. One of the first comics I ever subscribed to as a kid was the Fantastic Four (back during John Byrne's great run on the book), and I still have a hard time thinking of them as anything but a single character. Not that you can't tell a good Thing story, or a good Invisible Woman story, but those characters just don't sing to me until you put them together. A family that goes out together to adventure on the edge of the unknown, then comes back to live in a cool Doc Savage-like tower in the middle of the city--I love that idea even more than I love the individual characters.

I've always been a fan of gadget heroes (note the previous three choices on this list: utility belt, robot, super-science family), so another of my Marvel favorites is Iron Man. Another self-made hero--but this time he ends up with a super-cool battlesuit. And not just one battlesuit, but dozens of them! I also love how important Tony Stark is to the Iron Man character, and how just as many stories spring from the inventor/billionaire businessman side of his life as the Armored Avenger side.

Indy picks are even harder and even more prone to change over the years. There are days where I might say Tintin, Scrooge McDuck, Concrete, Milk and/or Cheese, Grendel, Hellboy, Vanth Dreadstar, Grimjack, Scud, the Goon, or Hellboy. For starters. So it's even harder to pick just two.

Or one, really. Because one of my two favorite indy favorites is pretty solid: Alec Swan, star of James Robinson's all-too-short Malibu series Firearm. Another common characteristic of characters I love is that they sit on the borders of genres, and Swan brings together superhero stories, spy thrillers, and hard-boiled detective mysteries into one super-cool character. I'd pay good money for another year (or seven) of Firearm stories.

My other indy pick for the day is probably no suprise after the rest of this list: Tom Strong. Doc Savage remolded for the retrofuture, and his sidekicks are a robot and a monkey. Also: helicopter backpack, zeppelins, superscience pulp adventure... an awesome character that's the perfect seed for a million stories.

See Part III of the interview!