Jeffrey Renaud of Comic Book Resources recently spoke to ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian about Ian's first foray into comics this week with the release of "Lobo: Highway to Hell" #1 by DC Comics. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Comic Book Resources: I read that your early passion for comics came from an uncle that gave you his entire comic collection when you were just eight years old. So what were you reading in the early 1970s? And were there any gems in that collection that you still have today or wish you still had?

Scott Ian: My uncle Mitch was only 10 years older than me, so when I used to go visit my grandparents house when I was a kid, I used to hang out in his room and look at his comics and his records and everything else. He had a pretty cool collection of Silver Age, mostly of "Thor" and "Conan", if I remember correctly, and just random other Marvel and DC stuff. But he was really into "Thor" and "Conan". At some point, I guess when he was of the age where comics were no longer cool, for him, I was lucky and he gave me all of his comics. I guess I started off at a pretty early age with a really cool collection of early Marvel stuff.

Comic Book Resources: So was that a trigger for your collecting, or did you already collect comics?

Scott Ian: Well, yeah. I was already collecting myself, and that just filled in a lot of stuff that obviously, as a seven-year old, I couldn't go out and buy. I was already buying comics off the rack by 1970, or something like that, so I was already way into it.

Comic Book Resources: What were your favorite titles?

Scott Ian: I liked all the major titles. My favorite Marvel titles were probably "Hulk", "Fantastic Four", "Thor", "Spider-Man" and "The Avengers". And for DC, it was "Batman" and "Superman". But that was also the time when basically anything Kirby was doing, I was buying. I got way into his "Forever People" stuff that he did for DC. I was pretty much into everything at the time. But I could only afford to buy X amount of comics, so I would tend to stick to just the biggest titles.

Comic Book Resources: Were you familiar with Lobo before landing this assignment?

Scott Ian: Lobo came out in the early Eighties — I wasn't a kid anymore. But, I was pretty familiar with Lobo from really early on. I can't tell you when, specifically, the first time I ever saw Lobo was. Probably, the first Lobo stuff I was really familiar with was when Simon Bisley was doing him, because I was a fan of Simon's from his "Judge Dredd" stuff. That probably would have been my first experience with Lobo.

Comic Book Resources: How did you get into writing comics? Did you reach out to DC or did they contact you?

Scott Ian: DC reached out to me a couple of years ago. They actually got a hold of my manager and asked him if I was interested in coming for a meeting and I said, "Yes, of course." I had no idea what they wanted to meet with me about. When they said to me, "Do you know why you're here?" I was like, "No. What? Am I in trouble or something?" And they were like, "We'd love to work on a book with you." And I was like, "You know that I've never written a comic before, right?" So we just started talking, basically. A couple of the people up there were big fans, and they'd been reading stuff that I'd been writing. I had a pretty regular food column on a couple of sites. And they would read my blogs, and they just thought I had an interesting point of view. So they wanted to see if I was interested in trying my hand at it. And I was like, "Yeah. I've wanted to do this my whole life. I've answered the question a thousand times, 'If I wasn't in the band, what else would I be doing?' And my answer to that is always, 'I would have hoped that I would have got into writing comics.'" So I said, "Look, of course, I'll give it a shot, and if I fail, well, at least I gave it a try." And so they basically said, "Go take a month and just think about it. Think about ideas. Think about characters. And see what you come back with." So a month went by, and I asked them if I could have another month. And they said, "Yeah." I just jumped at the chance and, in my head, I got on a one-track mind that I had to write a Batman story. But it was just proving really difficult, because I'm a fan when it comes down to it, and my attitude towards writing Batman was, unless I could do something that deserves to be on the shelves with the best Batman stories that have ever been written, what's the point of even doing it? I don't need to just write some OK story, know what I mean? So I had some ideas, and I was in New York and I went back in and I started to ask them, "Could I do this?" and "Could I do that?" And there were just a lot of "dos" and "don'ts" when it came to Batman. And they basically explained to me [that] with certain characters in the DC Universe, there is going to be a lot of things that you can and can't do, and you're going to have to stick with continuity and so I basically just asked them straight up, "Well, what characters wouldn't I have that problem with?" And the first one they said was Lobo. And it just clicked in my brain, because I hadn't thought about Lobo. And they said, "We've been thinking about doing another Lobo book. It's been a couple of years." And I just said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, hold on. I know it. I know the character. I think I could do some crazy shit with Lobo. Let me think about it for a couple of weeks." Literally, over the next two weeks, I put together my outline. I emailed them the outline and they said, "We love where you're going with it. Flesh it out. Write the whole story." So I wrote the whole story, basically, and got the green light to go ahead and do it. It just clicked right away.

Read the entire interview from Comic Book Resources.