Kansas City, present day, morning: Jason Aaron, the man who writes “Thor” comic-books, wakes up wearing the Thor-print pajama-pants he sleeps in. He gets up out of bed, in the home he shares with his wife and sons, fixes coffee and ambles upstairs to his finished-attic office, still wearing the Thor pants, and sits at the large desk where he writes stories for iconic comic-book titles as well as gritty independent books.

His heavy-metal saga “Thor” run has been heralded as right up there with the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby cosmic golden-era. Aaron, a Jasper native, has also written for Marvel Comics’ “Wolverine,” “X-Men,” “Ghost Rider,” “Doctor Strange,” “Black Panther,” “The Incredible Hulk” and “Captain America.” And the mega-selling “Star Wars” comic reboot, intriguingly set between the “A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back” movies. Aaron’s edgier material has involved Vertigo’s Vietnam War-themed “The Other Side,” the Indian reservation-set crime series “Scalped” and Image Comics’ “Southern Bastards,” which takes place in his home state, in fictional Craw County.

The shelves and desk in Aaron’s home office are decorated with various action figures, including those depicting a certain God of Thunder. But up here you’ll also find a University of Alabama football helmet and vintage Bear Bryant commemorative Coca-Cola bottle, as Aaron is a longtime Crimson Tide fan. “It’s sort of the space I dreamed of since I was a kid,” he says, soft-spoken, a subtle Southern accent sweetening the edges. “And I don’t ever forget that or take that for granted.”

His home office also contains a vintage spinner-rack, the type of display Aaron began selecting comics from at the local drugstore around age 6. The rack’s filled with heroes from his Alabama youth, including “Teen Titans,” “Superman,” “Blue Devil” and “Amazing Spider-Man.”

On a recent afternoon, Aaron, now 44, checked in for an extensive phone interview. Excerpts are below.

By Matt Wake | mwake@al.com

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Jason, football is involved in your “Southern Bastards” comic-book’s storyline and you’re a big Alabama fan. Would (legendary quarterback) Kenny Stabler be the best ever Alabama player to base a comic book character on?

[Laughs] If we were just saying players, yeah, Stabler would be a good one, maybe Derrick Thomas. Just for more recent, Julio Jones already looks a superhero so that wouldn't take much of a stretch.

Was your decision to have long-running “Thor” character Jane Foster (who was cancer stricken) pick up Thor’s hammer, assume his powers and actually become Thor, making the character female (in the “The Mighty Thor” variant title) met with any push-back from Marvel? Or was Marvel totally into changing things up like that?

Marvel was definitely into changing it up. There was never any push-back at all from anybody at Marvel, it was always full speed ahead. "This is cool, interesting direction to go in." I had already been writing "Thor" for a few years at that point and it was a natural direction for my story to go so it wasn’t completely out of the blue or didn’t make sense.

And it became a huge story. So of course, there was a lot of uproar. Even when it was first announced before anybody knew what the story was but that never bothered me never changed the story I was telling. If anything, the complaining about Thor being a woman I was all washed out by the flip side of that, which was all the new readers that were picking up the book.

And the response to that character in particular has really been different than the response of anything else I’ve ever done, which has been incredibly gratifying, from meeting people at signings who are either struggling with cancer in their own lives or the lives of somebody close to them or lost somebody. Or people who just respond to the seeing such a long running female supporting character like Jane Foster, who’s been around in the pages of “Thor” almost as long as Thor has, to see her step up in such a huge way ... The response has really been overwhelming.

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Courtesy of Marvel Comics

Why did you connect so strongly with comic books as a kid? What drew you to this as a career, instead of say writing for another type of media?

I found comics really young. I think the first comics I’ve got are from before I could even read. I always had comics in my hands and in front of my face and I pretty quickly became obsessed and wanted to buy whatever was on the spinner rack and would track down issues I missed of specific titles, so I immediately became a collector and fan. It was always a part of the way my brain worked.

As a kid, I loved to draw and that segued into writing and drawing my own stories, so I think I was always attracted to telling stories in some capacity. I decided when I was pretty young that I wanted to write comics but it took until I was almost 30 before I was able to get my foot in the door. But I was always writing stories in some capacity, whether it was short stories or aborted attempts at novels. But comics were always the backbone. I never stopped reading comics.

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Courtesy of Marvel Comics

It took you until you were 30 to get your comic-books career going. What were you doing to earn a living before that?

I went to the University of Alabama and majored in journalism and realized that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go so I dropped out of there. I was there when they won the championship in ’92 so that was a good thing. But then as soon as I left school we got put on probation.

So, I was always writing all that time and took a few years out of school and went back to UAB and got an English degree so I took a lot of fiction writing classes there, which I think was really important and helpful. I went to a really small high school in Shelby County in Columbiana, so it’s always important I think for anybody who wants to write when you break out of your little circle of friends who are telling you you’re really good at something and start getting opinions and feedback from people who aren’t your friends. And being pushed to read and to write outside your comfort zone. So that was a really important experience for me.

After that I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do with this English degree. Or how I wanted to write. I moved to Kansas City and had a couple of short stories published and was working day-jobs where I could goof off at work and work on stories and in 2000 I submitted to a Marvel Comics talent search contest, which is something Marvel had never done before and really haven’t done since.

So it was kind of this weird one-time opportunity and sent in a one-page synopsis for a “Wolverine” story which was in large part influenced by Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” It was just this weird character story. Wolverine finding this woman on this deserted road in the middle of the woods and she has a flat tire and he’s trying to change her tire and get her out of there and they’re having a conversation about questions of identity and ideas of faith. So, I turn that in. And I think mine was one of the only ideas that didn’t involve Wolverine fighting ninjas or sitting in a bar. So, I won. And that was kind of my big break, my first published comic story but it was another five years I think of me working and writing and pitching ideas to people before I got my next gig.

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And that was “The Other Side” for Vertigo?

Right, which was something I worked on for a long time. Probably the hardest I’ve ever on any script was that one, which was the first full comic script I’d ever written and it was influenced in large part by my cousin Gus Hasford, another Alabama native, who was a Vietnam vet and a novelist who wrote the book “The Short-Timers” which was what Stanley Kubrick’s (movie) “Full Metal Jacket” is based on.

What were some of the jobs you worked as an adult before comic-books became a full-time career?

I worked at Johnny Ray’s BBQ when I was going to UAB. And then once I moved to Kansas City I worked in a video store and in a warehouse, so different jobs where I could turn my brain of and be thinking about stories even while I was working. And I wasn’t making a whole lot of money so by the time I got home I didn’t have a whole lot else to do other than read or write. So again, I always tell people who are trying to break in as a writer you have to treat it was a job even if it’s not paying you like a job. So it feels like you’re working two jobs for a while but that’s the only way to ever to get to the point where writing actually is your job.

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Courtesy of Marvel Comics

Was there a unique pressure to writing the “Star Wars” comic book reboot in 2015? You’d already worked on many legendary superhero titles, which have decades of intense fans, but anything “Star Wars” involves a whole other level of fandom.

To me, I never look at it as pressure, if anything that’s exciting. When Marvel called and asked if I wanted to write “Star Wars” I jumped at it. I didn’t even know what the book was or what it was but I said Yes, absolutely. My job is a very solitary job. I sit in my office here by myself, there’s nobody else to tell me how I should write or what I should write and whatever I’m doing I’m doing for me ultimately I’m making comics that I would want to read. That’s the only way I know how to do it. I don’t know how to write a book for anybody else, I just know the stuff that I want to see on the page.

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Courtesy of Marvel Comics

And so with “Star Wars” that was literally a job I’d been training for since I was a kid in the backyard in Alabama playing with my “Star Wars” action figures. I was making up stories back then and decades later I’m making up stories as my job, so to me it’s kind of the same thing. I was excited. I knew this was a big deal. This was Marvel’s first “Star Wars” comic in decades, it was the first of this new Lucasfilm canon, it was the first big Star Wars thing coming out that year as everything was building towards the new film, “The Force Awakens.”

So it was a big deal. When I sat down to write that first moment I realized that I’ll probably only get to write “Star Wars” number one once so I put on the John Williams (original film) score and I tried to do it up right. I think the only time I ever felt any sense of pressure was Marvel emailed me at one point and told me the preorders on the book were close to a million copies which was … No book in 20 years had sold a million copies. That made me go back and reread it a few more times, make sure I’ve dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s because I’m going to be seeing this book for the rest of my life.

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What’s the most valuable comic book in your personal collection?

I don’t know. I’ve got a pretty huge collection. My basement’s full of long boxes. I don’t have a lot of really old books – I’ve got “Hulk” 181, the first appearance of Wolverine which is a good book. So I’ve got stuff like that. I mean I am a collector but I’ve never really been that big on buying stuff for its value. I don’t buy any graded books. I don’t want any book that’s slabbed in plastic that I can’t flip through. The good thing is these days I can say that’s legitimately work related, that’s my work-related research library.

Do you listen to music while you’re writing? In a cool way, “Southern Bastards” feels like some lost, super-dark Drive-By Truckers album come to the page.

Yeah, I mean certainly I think you could make that connection but I don’t actually listen to anything while I’m working. I have to work just in silence, no music, no TV on. Usually when my kid’s at school and the house is quiet, that’s why I can’t work in a coffeeshop or any place like that. I tend to work best at home sitting at my desk in quiet. But yeah, I listen to a lot of music and I think a lot of music still goes into the thought process of what I’m working on. I think you can see a lot of Drive-By Truckers and Jason Isbell and old-school outlaw country, all that kind of stuff in the pages of “Southern Bastards.”

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Courtesy of Vertigo Comics/Jason Aaron

I read that your comic-book “Scalped” was being made into a TV show. As part of the deal of you getting to do the book, Warner Brothers had the option to make it into a show. Any updates on “Scalped” coming to TV?

They shot a pilot but things have changed at WGN so it’s not going forward from that. I think they’ve changed their original programming focus since they commissioned it. But I got to hang out on the set of the pilot and see the finished version of that, which was really cool, and the cast especially was really impressive, so I was disappointed for them that it didn’t happen, but for me that kind of stuff is always fun and exciting and interesting but I’ve never been looking to jump out of comics to move to Hollywood.

I love what I do and I love the freedom of what I do. Basically, anything I’m working on there’s a very small group of us that make the decisions of what that is. And with “Scalped” that was my first big ongoing series and I was completely unknown when that book started so I’m so grateful we were able to tell that story the way we wanted to tell it and I got write 60 plus issues of that book. So if anything happens in any other media that would be great but regardless that book is still the story I wanted to tell.

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Photo of actor Gil Birmingham, left, and comic-book writer Jason Aaron (Courtesy of Jason Aaron)

Who were some of the actors involved in the “Scalped” pilot?

Gil Birmingham was the lead, he played Chief Red Crow. He was in “Hell or High Water,” which was one of my favorite movies over the last few years.

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What’s coming up next for you, project-wise, that you can talk about?

I’m still doing “Thor,” the big one’s called “The Death of The Mighty Thor,” it’s a big story that things have been building towards for quite a while and that will dramatically change the landscape of “Thor” going forward. And I’ll still be doing that, working on Thor next year.

I’ve got another big new book that will be starting next year as well I just can’t talk about what it is yet. But if you read the recent “Marvel Legacy” number one which was the big 50-page book that kicked off Marvel’s Legacy initiative and set up a lot of different stories. The beginning of my next big thing was in the pages of that book, so it will spin out of that. So yeah, come next year I’ll be doing the biggest stuff I’ve ever done at Marvel.

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Your lifelong love of comic-books, of course, and your time in Alabama have influenced your work. And we talked about music’s role. Is there anything else outside of those things that inspirse you as a comic-book writer?

I don’t think there’s one thing. For me it’s a little bit of everything. Growing up I was never just a fan of one thing, like I loved comics, but I loved superhero comics, I loved independent comics. When I was coming of age in the '80s it was a really good time for comics, there was an explosion of companies and a lot of good comic books coming out.

I read fantasy. I love sci-fi. I love Godzilla movies, I love Bruce Lee films. Football, wrestling. I think even now I consume a lot of different stuff as a reader, as a fan, and I think that’s what I try to do as a creator, I don’t want every book I do to have the same voice. I like to do a lot of different kinds of things. Even in the pages of one series, I think in the six or seven years that I worked on “Wolverine” I did a lot of different kinds of Wolverine stories. I just like to mix it up. I get bored.

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Courtesy of Marvel Comics

The best movie or TV project ever based on a comic-book is …

Huh. I think just of the Marvel films, I really loved the first “Avengers” movie and “Captain America: Winter Soldier” is probably one of my favorites. For something that’s non-superhero, “Road to Perdition” was a great film, based on a very old graphic-novel.

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Courtesy of Image Comics/Jason Aaron

Besides the local drugstore, where else did you go to feed your love of comic-books growing up?

There was no comic book shop but there was a used bookstore in downtown Jasper, I think it’s still there, my mom would take me to it and they would always have sort of a little stash of comics on the shelf, old stuff.

So I’d always read through those and there was one time I found some issues of DC’s “Vigilante” series, which as a direct market book that only went to comic book stores so I’d never seen it before I’d been to comic book shops. So I bought those. And that was the first time I ever subscribed to a comic. I got a subscription to “Vigilante.”

The first comic book store I ever went to was in Birmingham, it was called The Wuxtry. I was probably 14 or 15 I think before I found that place. And that became my local comic book hangout until it close and then I found another one and that closed and then I found another one in a string from moving from one comic book store to another. Also, when I was pretty young my mom took me to Dragoncon, that was the first convention I ever went to, in Atlanta. I guess I was about 13. I used to go to that most every year.

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What brought you to Kansas City?

I moved there the summer of 2000. I moved literally the day after the first “X-Men” movie came out because I saw “X-Men” on a Friday and I drove to Kansas City on a Saturday. I just wanted to go somewhere. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in Kansas City, I thought I wanted to try and move on to Chicago, but my sister had met a guy from Kansas City, married him and moved here so there were two people I knew here. But when I moved here I actually stumbled into the middle of a good local comic-book scene.

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I’ve always had a pull-list (system by which customers reserve regularly read titles with a retailer) at one place or another. I had pull-lists at probably at least different shops around Birmingham over the years so when I moved to Kansas City the first week I was here, that very first Wednesday I found a local comic book shop and through that shop met a lot of local creators, which is really great and helpful when you’re trying to break into comics is to be able to sit down with people who are in the same boat as you. It helped me a lot over the course of my career, having a good local community and then met my wife here and put down roots.

My sister’s still here, and we have a small but loyal Kansas City chapter of Crimson Tide fans. I like Kansas City. I like being in what my friends from New York and L.A. call flyover country because I’m right in the middle of the states and it’s a three-hour flight in any direction, which I like. And not too far from Alabama either. It’s not too bad of a drive. Arkansas is not the most scenic state to drive through and neither is Missouri, but by the time I get to Memphis it starts to feel like home.

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