… and I think it’s possible to discern a high level of attention to detail as the series progresses – I’ve noticed things like characters’ hairstyles growing and changing, or the way Superman’s appearance deteriorates as he weakens over the twelve issues. Is there any kind of line you stop yourself at when it comes to the level of detail?

At the risk of having things thrown at me, the line is the deadline! On the one hand, if I didn’t have to consider deadlines – which, it’s fairly well-known, I do miss quite a few of – and if I didn’t have to generate a certain amount of money just to pay for things, then I’d spend longer on everything than I do. So in that sense it’s practical things that stop me from spending longer – but equally, if I had unlimited time, I’d spend that time bringing the pages to a finish that I was absolutely happy with, rather than just adding detail for detail’s sake. I mean, I’m sure all of us could come up with the names of artists whose work we feel is distractingly over-detailed. There’s a balancing act. So I tend to put in the detail that I feel is relevant either to the storytelling of a particular scene, or to fill in the background information. But if I had much more time to spend on it I don’t think it would be much more detailed.

One of the things that really jumps out about We3 in particular is how interested you seem to be in the way comics convey the progression of time and narrative – and there was that description at the time of a “Western Manga” style that you were pioneering with the book. Is that an ongoing development in your style, or more of a one-off experiment?

To an extent it was a kind of natural progression of the way I’d been going since I started. But when I started off in comics, because I wasn’t much of a comics reader beforehand – I read Mad magazine and Weird Science and Sinister Tales and things, but I didn’t follow any superhero titles regularly at all – what I was concerned with was the quality of the drawings, without any real knowledge of the rules and conventions of storytelling. So over the years I’ve just naturally learned more about visual storytelling, and it’s become more and more important to me – to some extent, even to the detriment of the drawings themselves!

With We3, that was a project that Grant had approached me about because of the way I go about my storytelling anyway – he had some ideas about storytelling that he felt was relatively new, he knew that I was already borderline-obsessed with storytelling, and together we sat down to see how we could do things differently, and what boundaries we could push at slightly. So on my learning curve, which has been going since I started in comics, that project was one of a number of steep inclines. But with All-Star Superman, because of the nature of the stories – the stories in some ways are very condensed; there’s actually an awful lot going on in what appears to be, visually and in terms of the dialogue, quite simple and easy to follow – there’s a lot of information to convey, and a lot of that is that natural progression from We3. And so although the storytelling is a very different flavour, in a much more subtle way all the same rules apply. And time moving across the panel and across the page is something that I utilise as often as is necessary.