I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.
I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.