My name's Ed Brubaker, and I am a comic book writer and a
screenwriter.
I write for Marvel Comics.
I write "Captain America" for the last seven or eight years.
I wrote the famous death "Death of Captain America"
story line a few years back, and I do a series called
"Criminal," which Will actually guest appeared in the
recent story line of.
And I wrote Sony's first web series that they did, "Angel
of Death."
I knew from the time I was a little kid that you could make
a living writing stories because my uncle was a famous
screenwriter.
He wrote the "Wild One" and "On the Beach" and "Murder, My
Sweet." So I never had any other thought of something to
do that wasn't creative.
I used to draw comics that I wrote, and I've always just
written stories my whole life.
When I was working at DC Comics on "Batman," I actually
created a "Batman" villain.
I wrote the first two chapters of a longer story, and the
artist got taken off of the book after the first issue and
put onto something else, and we never finished it.
But I created what I thought would have been a classic
"Batman" villain.
And it was a guy--
I think his name was the Maestro, and he was basically
an evil orchestra conductor.
I am a gamer.
I have been a bigger gamer at different times in my life.
I like story games, like I was a huge D&D player when D&D
first came out.
And probably not when it first came out, but when I first
discovered it, I was in junior high school.
With the advent of the console gaming system, me and a lot of
my friends, who also are writers, would do things like
sit around and play "Call of Duty" until late at night and
talk to each other on our headsets and make fun of each
other and plot out stories together.
I was never a huge tabletop game player until one of my
best friends, he turned me on to games other than
"Monopoly," which I always found "Monopoly" to be the
most frustrating game because it would seem like you were on
the top of everything.
And then you just roll one wrong roll of the dice, and
everybody has all your money, and you've
lost all your property.
It just seemed like too many highs and lows.
If you can't shoot someone in the face, I feel like there's
something missing about the game sometimes.
But there's a whole world of tabletop games that they're
like these adventure stories, like the
one we played tonight.
It was like you could imagine the story of
it at the same time.
One time, I actually did try to create my own game, and I
wrote an entire rule book for a game called "Bloodthirsty
Immortal Headhunters." I still have that entire
rule book at home.
I designed all the artifacts, and it was a lot of fun.
I spent days and days doing this when I probably should
have been doing something more productive, but it
was a lot of fun.
And it's just really interesting to see that
because my favorite games are the ones where there is some
story element to it, and that was really my
whole goal in designing.
It was how do I make this game last as long as possible?
How many sword fights can we get in?
In any fantasy-related game that I'm playing, if there's
an option to be a halfling thief, I will always play a
halfling thief.
I think the moment I discovered the "Hobbit" as a
kid just imprinted on my mind that any time there is a
fantasy option, there must be like a Bilbo Baggins
character to play.
Gaming is a kind of complicated and interactive
fun that I think a lot of America and probably the rest
of the world at this point in our high-speed culture is a
little too ADD and a little too lazy to realize how much
fun they're actually missing out on.
