"Comics are short form. In their own way they're like writing a short story," Rucka said. "I can work with comics fairly easily and fairly fluidly. When I'm working on a novel, it requires as much concentration and discipline as I can muster."
In the twist for Rucka, his new spy novel is a further examination of the intelligence agency he created in Queen & Country. That series has at least 7,000 readers who buy it from issue to issue, Rucka said, and about four times that number who read it in trades, a thicker comic-book format that collects entire story lines. For the prose version of Queen & Country, A Gentleman's Game, Rucka had to strike a balance between giving fans something new and making it accessible to newcomers.
Readers could tell that Meltzer was a comics enthusiast right from the start. There are superhero references in many of his novels, including his latest, The Zero Game, which had its debut last month at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. Meltzer's first comic-book project was Archer's Quest, a six-part Green Arrow story. Meltzer inherited the comic book from the filmmaker Kevin Smith, whose tenure raised Green Arrow from second-string hero to one of DC's top sellers.
Writing comic books is "the ultimate 11-year-old fantasy," Meltzer said. "When they first offered me the job, I was going to say no, but my wife said to me, `Moron, you've been waiting your whole life for this.' As always, my wife was a lot smarter than me."
While Meltzer's stint on Green Arrow was well received, he still came close to turning down a second opportunity to write for DC. "I was going to say no and I had a breakthrough," Meltzer said. He had found a human -- rather than superhuman -- idea for the story and so Identity Crisis was born. For Meltzer, this is a chance to tell the kind of story that appealed to him as a comic-book fan, tales that weren't "about capes and utility belts, but were about the people behind the masks."
The Identity Crisis mystery involves the biggest DC heroes and will use all of Meltzer's skills as a thriller novelist.
"How do you hide from a man who can see through walls? How do you lie to a woman who has a magic lasso that can make you tell the truth?" Meltzer asked.
His answer: "I used everything I learned from one genre and applied it to another."
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