Obviously, you're familiar with Kurt Busiek's bibliographical characters: the Avengers. Superman. Batman. Aquaman, Astro City. Wonder Woman. Autumnlands. Conan. Thunderbolts. (And if you're not? Please, pick up his runs on these books ASAP) He's influential, his stories range through a large scope of genres, and by golly, Astro City is a work of art.

Over the last couple months I have been absolutely blessed to be able to have an email correspondence with Mr. Busiek, who is arguably one of the greatest comic writers and creators of this generation.

First off, thank you SO much for taking the time to e-chat with us. To start things off, I wanted to send over a couple questions about Autumnlands, just because it's such a hauntingly terrific book that the story just sticks in my mind like an earworm.

Comparing Autumnlands to your past work, it seems like such a stark departure: You've excelled in superhero books for a long time, and have won numerous awards because of them. What drove you to try such a diverse, ambitious story?

Well, AUTUMNLANDS isn’t my first non-superhero book by any means. I’ve done CONAN, SHOCKROCKETS, ARROWSMITH, THE WIZARD’S TALE and more.

I like variety, and I’ve been drawn more and more to fantasy over the years, so I wanted to do more in that vein. AUTUMNLANDS was a story and a setting that had been in the back of my mind for a long time, and it felt like it was finally time to get going and do it. And to do it as comics, because really, if you’re going to tell a story about animal people, isn’t in better to be able to see them?

And with your past works on Avengers and Astro City so prominent, when did the Autumnlands story start to percolate? Was it a progressive thought that expanded into a story?

Yeah, it’s something that slowly developed over the years. It starts, more or less, with me wishing I could write KAMANDI, but every time I talk to DC about it, they’re holding it for someone else (usually Grant Morrison), so I’m not able to do it. So I stewed over that, and eventually two things happened. First, I realized that doing KAMANDI would probably be a bad idea — it’s one of those projects that’s so solidly identified with one creator that if you do it like Kirby, you’re not going to do it as well as he did, and if you don’t do it like Kirby you’re doing it wrong. And either way, it probably isn’t going to sell, so it won’t last.

So that was the first bit, and it made me realize that I’d be better off doing a series that had what i like about KAMANDI in it, without actually being KAMANDI or duplicating KAMANDI. And the second bit was that I read Jack Vance’s TALES OF THE DYING EARTH, and realized that instead of a post-apocalytpic world of SF, if my “future world” of ascended animals was a richly-textured world of magic and fantasy, then I could have a blast with that, and immediately be off in a new, non-Kirby direction.

So I started playing with that, and the floating wicker cities, the gods, the young terrier, the legendary warrior from the past…they all fell into place, and I started building the world around that.

Did you immediately consider Image as the right publisher for this, or did any other house come to mind? And was your recruiting process really as easy as that first issue recollection makes it out to be?

I thought it would be a nice fit at Image, since Image was doing a lot of strongly-individual creator-owned work, combining eccentric approaches to genre with strong, engaging visual material, and I thought AUTUMNLANDS would fit well in that kind of line. I’d talked with other publishers about it over the years, and no one had leapt up and said, “Yeah, yeah, you gotta do that!” But Eric Stephenson liked it a lot, when I ran it by him, and we were off to the races. I thought it would fit at Image well and he thought it’d be a strong book. Plus, they’ve got a great deal, so what more did we need?

Right, the rest of the team.

We talked about a bunch of different artists, so it’s not like we put together the team overnight. But once I saw Ben Dewey’s work, online, in the Emerald City Comicon book, in a PLANET OF THE APES annual…I was more and more convinced that he was the right guy. And when I called him to see if he was interested, it did go about like I described. A little slower, maybe, in that there were more words spoken. But he honestly didn’t need to hear much more than “big sprawling fantasy adventure in a world of animal people” before he said, “Sure, I’d love to do that.”

Jordie Bellaire joined us because she and Declan Shalvey visited Portland, and she saw Ben’s art for the first issue and said, “Can I color this? I want to color this, let me color this.” And we did seal the deal over pizza.

And John Roshell’s been designing and lettering books of mine since MARVELS, along with Comicraft honcho Richard Starkings. So I already knew he was up for it, and sure enough, he was.

Those various conversations were spread out over more than a year, so it didn’t happen overnight. But each of them happened fast, once they happened.

When crafting the characters in Tooth & Claw, did you start with the animal species, or did you assign them based on character attributes?

Could be either, or other things. In Goodfoot’s case, I started out with the name, and her personality and species both came from that. But usually, it starts with character. We want a character who’s snooty, or menacing, or whatever, and we decide on an animal to fit. We’re a bunch of typecasters, rotten pigeonholers!