RIESMAN: We're talking about how artists were influenced by him, but how were you influenced by him? You've written in the past that he's had a huge influence on your storytelling. How does that manifest itself?
CHABON: Well, I think partly in what I encountered just almost immediately when I first encountered him, which was this idea of reinventing mythology for our contemporary world. The idea that our oldest stories could also be our newest stories. I think that was something I just absorbed unconsciously. I think the idea that the contemporary world, including technology, including fabulous technology, could still be described and understood using these really ancient, archetypal characters and narratives. I think that was definitely something that certainly made the contemporary world more interesting to me, narratively, to think of it that way. I think that's one part of it. I think the thing that I still take inspiration from in him is just that seeming inexhaustibility of his imagination. You know, that is just an endless source of inspiration and encouragement to me, and something I guess I aspire to in some way. It makes me see. He was incapable of restraining himself to one idea, and that's been said by many people. It's not an original observation, but like in one issue of Thor from 1967 or '68, or Fantastic Four from that same period, he would pack like seven ideas — for characters, for plot strands — each of which would have contented one artist or one writer, that you could have spun an entire series of one idea out of seven from a single issue that he came up with, in the late '60s when he was really creatively just at his peak. That's inspiring to me, and that's something that ... It set a standard for a kind of richness and a generosity, a kind of overflowing generosity of ideas that was very inspiring to me.