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" Retro Girl! Wolfe! Calista! As comic book mega-fans tune into Brian Michael Bendis&amp;#039;s Powers television series (debuting today on Sony&amp;#039;s PlayStation Network), media critics wonder if the comic will translate to the small screen. For the most rabid aficionados, Bendis himself is a superhero who started indie, had success, made big deals and got rich. That it took 15 years from Hollywood option to series realization only adds heft to the Bendis mythos. But now he must prove his mettle with the TV show, the direction and characterization of which he cannot completely control. (Will it stay roots-true and indie enough? Will non-comics fans tune in?) Reached at his home in Portland, Oregon, Bendis talked Powers, Hollywood weirdness, and one particularly searing lie spewed by Damon Lindelof.  An alien comes down from outer space and knows nothing of these Powers. How do you describe Powers to him? It&amp;#039;s a homicide detective show set in a world where there are superheroes. I say it&amp;#039;s also about how media and celebrity culture treat superheroes. Some of them are glorified. Some are like one-hit wonders. We investigate all of this from the dead body on up. What&amp;#039;s interesting is one of our detectives used to be a superhero whose Powers were taken away, Christian Walker. This show took a long time to get going. Guillermo Del Toro says that &amp;quot;Hollywood is the land of the long no.&amp;quot; For me it was, the land of the long &amp;quot;Ehhhh...maybe.&amp;quot; Was it frustrating that it took 15 years? I say never pity anyone with an option deal. How bad can it be? But there was the normal amount of rejection, not knowing, emails not answered.  In your graphic novel, Fortune and Glory, someone promised you $50,000 for a script. You left the meeting happy. Moments later, your agent said they reneged. That person grew up and became known as Damon Lindelof. Isn&amp;#039;t that hilarious? I met him later at a Marvel retreat. He pulled me aside and asked, Do you remember me? I was the 21-year-old idiot who offered you money and took it back. If you reread that scene, he actually pitches me a version of Lost. About people stuck on an island running around. So, is he less of a bullshitter now? Yeah, yeah. If I had that job when I was 21, who knows what I would have done? The reason I wrote that book is, I always have a goal of writing a certain amount of words per day. (In Hollywood), you can spend a lot of time not getting anything done. People say, We&amp;#039;re going to do this. Then, you never see them again. That&amp;#039;s so spineless. I&amp;#039;ve had meetings go well, like for Powers. Still, I walked out and I asked, Can we find out if that was real? I need to know quickly. I just need to know. What&amp;#039;s the timeline for those 15 years of gestation? Sony&amp;#039;s had the option since between the first and second issues in 2000. It actually happened at the San Diego Comic Con, which is a comic book author&amp;#039;s dream. Mike (Avon Oeming) was literally drawing the book in a security booth in New Jersey at four in the morning where he was working. So this money got him out of that line of work. It was life changing. But then, serious sluggishness. Hot off the success of Spider-Man and X-Men (the movies), there were a lot of people grabbing up comics. I don&amp;#039;t think they realized they bought a detective movie, not a superhero movie. There were a couple of years where they tried to make Powers into Spider-Man. It&amp;#039;s more like Se7en than Spider-Man, and you can&amp;#039;t turn one into the other. But it struggled its way through. There was this 180-degree turn. Around 2006, they got together and said, You know it&amp;#039;s probably a better television show because there&amp;#039;s so many stories involved. The ongoing cliffhanger nature of comic books is more similar to television than movies most of the time. Walking Dead proved it. Then, it went to FX. But even FX didn&amp;#039;t work out. Making The Shield with superheroes sounded great to me. We developed there and actually shot a pilot. The pilot was not a disaster. It did have chemistry issues, I&amp;#039;d say. But the important stuff tested well enough that they put a writers room together to figure out how to do it. FX didn&amp;#039;t go with it but everyone on the Sony side loved it.  And here it is on PlayStation. What&amp;#039;s the difference between the comic book and the TV show?  First of all, the language of storytelling is different. And there are character differences like the little girl Calista (who wants desperately to be a Power) is now a teenage Calista. You&amp;#039;ll see a lot of elements from Powers that you see in the book\u2014just out of order. I hear there were some reshoots, though. Not reshoots in the traditional sense. I&amp;#039;ve seen movies where they re-shot 20 minutes. This is just about information. How much information do we need right away? How do we frame the female superhero? Very simple stuff. Walker (Sharlto Copley), the main character, still wishes he was a superhero superstar. This is the guy who had everything handed to him, the way he wanted it, and now he cannot get a sandwich the way he wants it. It&amp;#039;s so fucking disappointing (to him).  And in this world, the mere presence of superheroes screws people up. If you&amp;#039;re miserable and someone flies by looking like they have everything in the whole world and it&amp;#039;s never going to be you, that&amp;#039;s tough to deal with. Like a kid today is likely never going to be Beyonce or Taylor Swift, or even Justin Beiber or Selena Gomez. The rock star comparison is important. You look at the archetypes. Like, why is Beyonc\u00E9 always praised in the mainstream media which never says anything negative about her? And others, they just assassinate. Celebrity culture really gets you going. I mean, I got up this morning and checked the news and found that Vanilla Ice was stealing stuff out of his neighbor&amp;#039;s house. Powers will always write itself. I&amp;#039;ve never been without inspiration. Who&amp;#039;s the deepest character? Deena (Walker&amp;#039;s partner, played by Susan Heyward). She has the most layers. She took off in the book. She was everyone&amp;#039;s favorite, winning all sorts of fan awards. We&amp;#039;ve been able to go to very dark places with her character. I&amp;#039;ve seen three episodes. It seems like it&amp;#039;s getting darker and darker. People may be surprised as to how dark and mature we get. This isn&amp;#039;t Saturday morning cartoons. Then, there&amp;#039;s some really funny stuff. My favorite episode is Episode 6 which forces all of the characters into the same place. Walker and Retro Girl (former superhero lovers) interact with each other in a way that&amp;#039;s, dare I say, warm.  Was working in comics pretty was much all you thought about growing up? Yeh. George Perez (Avengers, New Teen Titans) was like Bruce Springsteen to me, a rockstar. I would lecture my friends about him and Walt Simonson (Thor). I would be frustrated that other people didn&amp;#039;t know how great they were. This was so pre-Internet that I was the only person in my peer group who was into it. At one point, you saw Gil Kane (Green Lantern) fume with jealousy over something Frank Miller (Sin City, 300) had done. What&amp;#039;s the most jealous you&amp;#039;ve gotten and why? (Laughs) I&amp;#039;m doing OK, so I&amp;#039;m not thinking that way. In my mind jealousy would come with seeing people do something that makes it all look extremely easy when it&amp;#039;s not, like artists who can draw better than I can. In college, I was different. I was so hungry that anyone else who was published\u2014I couldn&amp;#039;t deal with it. What made the comic so successful? This is in hindsight, but before we began, Watchmen and Dark Knight were likely the be all and end all of superhero experiences. There was nothing else to say.  Like kryptonite for creativity.  People stood clear of even approaching something like that. The idea of a detective story with superheroes from the point of view of cops had never been done before. I mean you had cops in Spider-Man and Batman but you never stayed with them for the whole story. And in Marvel or DC even when you kill a superhero, there&amp;#039;s still a way to undo killing them. But when you kill them in our world they stay dead.  Superheroes fly in and fly out. We don&amp;#039;t go with them. We stay on the ground. It&amp;#039;s like they brought comic book color with them and they took it away when they left. And me and Mike brought that cop gallows humor in the right places. But when we were making it, we were just hunkering down, hoping someone would give a shit. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a33575/brian-michael-bendis-powers-creator-premiere-interview/>