I hear your first introduction to comics was the X-Men.
I must have been 10 or 11 at the time. It wasn’t even a real issue of X-Men. It was one of those public service things that they do, an anti-smoking issue where some kid is on the track team, starts smoking, slows down, and the X-Men set him on the right path. But that’s all it took.

You would think that would turn off a lot of kids.
I wasn’t really interested in the smoking message. I was a kid, I was in school, and it was kind of cool to think of somebody having their own personal squadron of spandex-clad mutants to come in and rescue you. I started watching an animated cartoon on Fox every Saturday with the X-Men also, so it was kind of a gateway drug. My first crush was on Wolverine, who I thought was the most amazing tragic hero ever — not knowing of any others at the time. It really stuck with me, and right away I started thinking about if I were going to write a comic book about the X-Men, what kind of stories would I tell?

You've been to different places and done different things. Do you just go where the fates take you?
Not exactly. I just have trouble seeing contradictions. People hold up two things and they’re like, “Wow, you’re a comic book writer and a Muslim. Isn’t that a contradiction?” I don’t know, is it? Maybe I do have diverse interests, but I’m also very affected by where I am at a particular time. In Boston, it was all about the last gasp of electronica and the rave scene. In Cairo, there was so much history and so many political decisions are made there and there’s so much tension. In my mind, all of that stuff feeds into one greater human narrative because it’s all stuff that affects real people.

Comics are a huge part of our culture. How do they play in Egypt?
When most Egyptians think of comic books, they think of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck because those are the things that are most common there. And even my in-laws over there, I think most of them think I write children’s books. They really cannot imagine why an adult would pick up a book with pictures in it.

When did you come up with the concept for Air?
The philosophical underpinning of the book is something that was percolating in my mind for a long time. Symbols and their importance and what they are, really, have become very very important in the discussion of religion in the modern era. But the idea for the story itself happened when I was in Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, which is where Blythe the main character works in the story. I was interrogated briefly by a little blonde stewardess in what became the inspiration for issue one of the book where Blythe interrogates Zayn. As I was standing there and she was asking me about Visas and what I did and looking at me very suspiciously because I was white but I was in the Middle East — which seemed to her a contradiction — I was just thinking, “Man, this would be a great comic book if only she was a little bit cooler and I was a lot cooler!”

What I like is Amelia Earhart comes out of nowhere and there’s a country that doesn’t exist but kinda does. It seems like a 9/11 story but then it becomes this much bigger thing. You embrace every different way to go.
Oh yeah, this is a kitchen sink series. To me, and maybe this is because I have to live with some of the implications of that event played out, the term "post 9/11" has a much much bigger scope than just terrorism. It’s something that permeates our culture and how we see ourselves and how we see history before 9/11. To me, all of these little threads kind of play into each other: the way we look at history; of what significance is a map; if you say a country doesn’t exist, does it exist and what happens to it. And of course all of the cool, weird factors that are just native to aviation — Amelia Earhart disappeared off the face of the planet, and 80 years later we still don’t know what happened. It’s interesting that in the modern world, with all of our technology and all of our confidence about the way we face the world with that technology, there are still weird things that nobody can quite explain and you still have to theorize about. I wanted to take this one big super-narrative to tie all that stuff together, and obviously the threads that are going to do that are going to be a little bit insane. But I’m not afraid of the insanity.

Are you bringing back any more mysteriously disappeared historical figures in upcoming issues?
Wait and see. I haven’t ruled it out.

You recently did a Vixen miniseries. Do you like writing superhero comics, too?
I love writing superheroes. It’s sort of like the carbohydrates of the comics world. All fun, all immediate reward, all stuff blowing up. It’s really cathartic.

How excited would you be to do a Wolverine series?
I would be so psyched. You have no idea. The other one I’d really love to do is Aquaman. There is untapped comic genius in that character. He’s always played like a straightman, which I’ve never understood. He's very serious, very "lord of the ocean." But why not Aquaman in a sewer, Aquaman in a swimming pool? He could be really fun to do as a funny character instead of a serious, dramatic character.