Matt Fraction, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker

For the first anniversary of the Comic Book Club, a weekly interview show at the People's Improv Theater, co-hosts Pete LePage, Justin Tyler & Alex Zalben brought out the big guns: Not only Matt Fraction, Brian Michael Bendis, and Ed Brubaker—three of Marvel Comics's most popular writers—but Bill Hader and Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live were in the hot seat as well, which pretty much guaranteed that the evening was going to be a free-for-all. Geek humor abounded; one of the biggest laughs of the evening came when Hader and Myers recalled having Natalie Portman as a guest on the show and discovering the Star Wars actress didn't know the correct way to pronounce Dagobah.

The three writers were in town for one of Marvel's regular creative summits, where scripters for all the company's comics get together and coordinate plot points far into the future, particularly where major "crossover events" are concerned. "It's sixty smart people having the dumbest conversations you can imagine about how 'Spider-Man would never do that,'" Bendis quipped. "Sometimes you have to go in a really big circle to get to 'Oh, the Hulk should hit them,'" Fraction added. "I wish we were joking."

At least, I'm pretty sure that was Fraction; things were bouncing around pretty quickly up there. It was definitely Fraction who said of his work on Punisher War Journal, one of the best mainstream superhero comics I know of right now, "I wanted to make the most metal comic in the whole world. This is a comic you'd paint on the side of your van." (And it's true; if I had a van I would totally paint Fraction's Punisher on the side...unless I'd already covered it with his independent comic, Casanova.)

(NYT comics expert George Gene Gustines did a write-up on the Club the morning of the show, and Keith Huang has way better pictures of the evening. And thanks to Marvel associate editor Jen Grünwald for taking pictures when I got invited onstage for the trivia portion of the show, during which Hader kept helpfully shouting "Stan Lee!")