Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.

When I was a kid, what captivated me about detective fiction were the puzzles more than the detectives or their enemies. And as I've gotten older, I see a lot of merit in setting your investigative sights higher than figuring out how someone stole Encyclopedia Brown's bicycle.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

I don't know if you'd do a Marvel story on Ferguson, because it trivializes what the real flesh-and-blood people on the ground are doing there. But you can make an allegory and deal with the bigger questions.

There's a reason Archie didn't go the way of Betty Boop or Davy Crockett or Woody Woodpecker, forgotten relics of a bygone era, and it's because when 'Archie' stories are at their best, anyone of any age can see a little bit of themselves in them.

The nice thing about working with BOOM! on 'Irredeemable' and 'Incorruptible,' man, was they let me have my head. No one said boo about anything.