>>111083336I dug this up for you
BW: Bizarro is probably my favorite character in the book, and one of my favorite characters period being published at DC right now. You’ve taken him in a different direction than most anticipated, and I think that was a great move. Can you talk about inspirations for your version? Where’s this guy coming from?
SL: I think it is right there in his name. So many times in the past he has been written as dumb. “Me am cold,” when he is in the sun, and “me am hot” when he is in the Arctic. When I looked at him at the beginning of the series, I thought, “his name is Bizarro. He should think bizarre.” His name is not Stupido.
And then I thought about how maybe my entire life I’ve been either written off or admired or loved or hated over the reality that I don’t think about things the same way other people do. I just don’t. I’ll give you an example:
When I was growing up, I had two best friends, Buddy and Mickey, who had Muscular Dystrophy. They were both supposed to have died before they were thirteen years-old. We spent every day together—and as they were my neighbors, that was very easy. Well, they both lived until the age of twenty-four. So for about ten years of my life, every single day was a gift from God.
Every. Single. Day.
Every day, I would go to bed, and they were alive and happy; and every morning that I would wake up and they were there, I would thank God and the universe for it. We all hear the phrase “live every day like it is your last”—but we don’t. We get wrapped up in bills and relationships and jobs that suck, and instead of appreciating what we have, we grouse about what we don’t have or don’t have yet or may never have.
