Greg responds...

It's really a combination of both. As I work on Spider-Man now, I have an on-going fight budgetarily as to how many characters I can put in any given episode... or rather how many actors I can hire. (It helps some when actors double up. For example, if I've got Brooklyn in an episode, I can get Owen for free. But if I also need the Magus, then Jeff Bennett get's a small additional payment. But if I ALSO need Bruno, then Jeff gets a FULL SECOND payment, as if I had hired a second actor to play Bruno. If I also want Matrix, I can get him for free with Bruno. If I also want young Macbeth, though, I need to make a second small additional payment. But if I ALSO need Vinnie, then I'm paying Jeff the same as three full other actors. And so on, heck with folks like Jeff or, say, Kath Soucie, this thing could go on ad infinitum.)

So, yeah, there is a certain liberation that comes with all the voices being in our heads and not behind actual microphones.

Beyond that, there's the scope thing. Look at Joss Whedon's new "Hey, no limits on my special effects or cast of thousands" Buffy comic. Same thing to some extent. I want the scope of the comic to be larger, because that's one of the strengths of that particular medium.

And still, part of it is VERY organic to the universe that we so carefully built through 65 television episodes. Nothing is wasted, and even the smallest character often inspired story ideas for me. (And I've had a decade to muse on all their stories, so frankly things are way MORE planned out now than they were back in the day, when we did plan ahead, but when our deadline pressure on the writing side was so incredibly crushing that often we were lucky as much as we were smart.) So it's natural that more and more of them will begin to have larger and larger roles. Some will whisp away for many issues and reappear when you least expect them. Others will be a constant presense. Others may not survive. Such is life...