Brad Meltzer claims comics "shaped his childhood"

Pen America did a fluff-coated interview with the overrated novelist Meltzer, who says just about what one could expect of such a pretentious author:

Mary Higgins Clark once said that writing four-minute radio scripts taught her to write cleanly and succinctly, because every chapter in a suspense novel had to advance the story. Your novels move with a similar sense of economy while still leaving room for rich character detail. How do you balance forward momentum with character development, and is that something you learned over time or something that came instinctively?

I honestly think it came from reading comic books growing up. Every comic is a short chapter and ends on a cliffhanger. That trained me to see a novel the same way: short chapter and cliffhanger, short chapter and cliffhanger. It’s what I prefer as a reader and a writer.

You grew up reading comics and later went on to write them. What did reading and writing comics teach you about shaping a narrative?

See above. It was my Mr. Miyagi. It had me sanding the floor and painting the fence, training me in ways I never understood until it was time to fight Johnny.

Gee, that's awfully easy, to say nothing of corny, stuff he's claiming it helped him shape. Whether he grew up reading comics, he didn't learn any moral lessons from them, as his penning Identity Crisis makes clear, and even his Justice League story from 1996 isn't much better. He certainly didn't understand nothing in terms of morality. So of course, we can't expect him to be much different with his upcoming work for Marvel, especially at this dismal point in history. Besides, look what kind of stories did shape his idea of what and how to write, along with an allusion to politics made here:

Were there any specific comic books or books in general that helped shape the kinds of stories you wanted to tell?

Watchmen by Alan Moore is still my favorite book of all time. Batman: Year One. There were so many. They were all part of what I still love today: you need to have adventure, but, at its core, it needs to add something to the character and say something about our time on this planet. [...]

Much of your work draws on history. How do you think about free expression at a time when access to history itself is increasingly debated or restricted?

Clearly, free expression is as vital as ever. But in my mind, history is like your old, wise grandmother. She never forgets. So yes, there are lots of things to worry about these days. Plenty. But history sees it. And she’s writing it all down.

It's always as fascinating as it's hypocritical how leftists like these make the case for "free expression" and allegedly caring about history when they've done nothing to improve the situation much of the world sunk down to over the past decade alone. Let's recall Meltzer made clear a decade ago he was against Donald Trump. And if he was against Trump then, it's a foregone conclusion he hasn't changed. That aside, history may be writing things down, but leftists like Meltzer are selective, and in Identity Crisis, his idea of history was a left-leaning metaphor for 9-11. And one of the most grating things about his MO is that in some cases, he holds his cards close to his chest in interviews like these, but in the end, his approach to writing says it all.

Also note how he takes the cliched approach of citing dark-leaning stories as inspirations. It clearly played a part in his script for Identity Crisis, and that he may have later penned at least one Superman story in the 1000th issue didn't change that, mainly because, if memory serves, he resorted to forms of wokeness there too. It's very sad how Meltzer continues to be welcomed by the establishment and the MSM without question, and they continue to ask him unchallenging queries in their interviews, leaning entirely in his favor.