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Years in the making, writer Grant Morrison and artist Yanick Paquette’s Wonder Woman: Earth One graphic novel will finally hit shelves — at a still-unspecified date. But at least Morrison is offering up some details about the book. We grabbed a few quotes from his interview with the LA Times’ Hero Complex blog, as well as the one piece of preview art for the book so far. You can see it all after the jump.

On Wonder Woman as a character:

There’s something about the character that really annoyed me, to be honest, because I couldn’t quite get a hook on her. I felt like there were a lot of really strange contradictions in there…. And because it was a challenge to most people. If you read about filmmakers talking about Wonder Woman, it’s always, “Oh, we can’t make a Wonder Woman film because people wouldn’t buy into this, this, this or this.” So it seemed that it was a challenging character.

 On the themes of the book:

It’s not a comic about superheroes punching each other. It’s about the sexes and how we feel about one another, and what a society of women cut off from the rest of the world for 3,000 years might look like, and what kind of sexuality, what kind of philosophy, what kind of science would that have developed, and how would that impact our world if it actually suddenly became apparent that these women existed.

On Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston:

Wonder Woman was a very high-selling comic back in the 1940s. It was really successful. But the sales diminished as soon as Marston died. So obviously whatever weirdness he brought to it was actually part of the DNA of Wonder Woman. We’re trying to bring some of that back.

On influences:

The only influences I really wanted to have was the original Marston stories with Harry Peter, and also the Lynda Carter TV show, which I thought was a really good and workable translation of the Wonder Woman concept for a mass audience.

The multi-platform Unity 3D game engine will provide support for Xbox One, Xbox 360, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, according to an announcement from Microsoft and Unity at the Build 2013 developer conference.

Unity will develop new tools to support Xbox One, including features like multiplayer matchmaking, SmartGlass, Kinect gesture recognition and Microsoft's Azure cloud technology. Game developers having their work published by Microsoft Studios will get access to Xbox One and Xbox 360 tools from Unity free of charge, Microsoft says.

"I'm also happy to say that the Windows Store Pro publishing add-on will be free when released," writes Unity CEO and founder David Helgason on the company's official blog. "You'll be able to port your games, ads, training and educational apps-any kind of Unity-authored content-to both the Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 platforms with a Unity Pro 4 license."

Thanks to Unity's multi-platform support for Windows and Xbox, "Microsoft's gaming ecosystem will benefit from the wealth of ideas and imagination flowing from the Unity games development community," said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism group in a release.

At Build 2013, Guggenheimer announced more than $100,000 in prizes available to developers building Windows and Xbox apps in the Unity 3D engine.

In March, Unity Technologies announced a partnership with Sony Computer Entertainment to support the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Vita, PlayStation Mobile and "future cloud services."

On April 1st, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posed a question on a company blog: "What is Jelly?" The answer, he said, is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. Unmentioned in the post is that Jelly is the second jellyfish-themed product with which Stone has been associated. Before Jelly, Stone advised a lesser-known Q&A startup named Fluther. A fluther — it rhymes with "brother" — refers to a group of jellyfish. If you want to know where Jelly is heading, Fluther is the place to start.

Jelly plans to take core ideas from Fluther and remake them in an app purpose-built for mobile devices, according to a person familiar with the company's plans. Fluther, whose team was acquired by Twitter in 2010 but remains operational, is part of a crop of web-based knowledge platforms that sprung up toward the end of the last decade. Quora, ChaCha, and Aardvark are among the companies who raised millions of dollars on the premise that high-quality, real-time answers represent the logical evolution of search engines. (Google bought Aardvark for $50 million and promptly shut it down.)

Routing personalized questions to users based on their expertise

Fluther's take on Q&A involves using algorithms to route personalized questions to users based on their expertise. It is designed to be used in real time, so that "each question feels like its own chat room." In a Twitter-like touch, users follow a "fluther" of interesting people to help personalize the questions and answers they receive. Meanwhile, a team of volunteer moderators tries to prevent the site from devolving into a Yahoo Answers-style wasteland; providing high-quality answers helps you increase your "lurve" score.

It remains unclear how Jelly will work, or whether it will have any connection to the existing Fluther service. The person familiar with Jelly's plans said it was strongly related to Fluther but did not see the product itself, which is still early in its development. The Jelly team is trying out a range of different approaches, the person said.

If Jelly has more mystique than most Silicon Valley startups in stealth mode, Stone is the major reason why. After getting his first job designing book covers for Little, Brown and Co., he became creative director at Xanga Inc., the early social network and reviews community. From there he had prominent roles at Google, which he joined after it acquired Blogger, and at Twitter, which he co-founded with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams.

In 2011 he and Williams co-founded the Obvious Corporation, with a goal to "develop systems and mechanisms that help people work together to improve the world." Williams turned his attention to Medium, the publishing platform; in April, Stone announced Jelly. In his LinkedIn bio, Stone notes that "the main thrust of his work over the past decade plus has been developing collaborative systems freely accessed by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

In 2009, Stone became an adviser to Fluther, which was founded by Ben Finkel and Andrew McClain in the summer of 2007. By the time Stone joined, it was attracting more than half a million monthly visitors and raised $600,000 from prominent Silicon Valley investors including Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Dave McClure. In a screencast to accompany the news, co-founder McClain said that 98 percent of questions on Fluther get answered, with an average of 14 answers apiece.

Barely more than a year later, in December of 2010, Twitter acquired the team behind Fluther for an undisclosed sum. Four engineers and a designer came on board, Finkel and McClain included. At that point, active development on the website stopped, and it was handed over to community manager Lisa Noll, who continues working on Fluther. Finkel and McClain have continued to oversee the site.

Stone had stepped away from day-to-day duties at Twitter, so he didn't work with the Fluther team once they arrived. Finkel was put in charge of new user experience on the growth team; while he was there, Stone notes, Twitter grew from 50 million active users to 200 million active users. Finkel quit in March; on his last day, co-workers carried him out of the office. A few weeks later, Stone revealed Finkel would be Jelly's chief technical officer.

Connections between Finkel's old company and his new one

Even a cursory glance at Fluther's website reveals connections between Finkel's old company and his new one: Each employs the jellyfish as a logo. Each emphasizes the power of groups, connections, and the ability to do good. Then there's the name Fluther gives its users: "jellies." "Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product," Stone has said of Jelly — something that is also true of Fluther, and fits with the notion of a crowdsourced information platform.

There is no shortage of question-and-answer services online, but most of them were built first for the web. Quora, the most highly valued service of the current crop, launched in beta in January 2010 but didn't release a mobile app until September 2011. The mobile app has lagged behind the website in features; Quora only added a search function to the app last month.

ChaCha has put more emphasis on mobile search, letting users send in questions via text message as well as mobile apps, but the quality of its answers varies widely. The most profitable and widely used Q&A platform in the world remains Google, which has begun placing more emphasis on letting users ask questions in natural language and receive immediate, high-quality answers.

Since announcing Finkel's hiring, Stone has been building out his team. In recent weeks he has scooped up Kevin Thau, who formerly ran mobile efforts at Twitter and had most recently built the #Music app, and added Tweetie and Letterpress creator Loren Brichter as an adviser.

In April, Stone said of Jelly: "it won't be ready for a while." In an email to The Verge, he declined to comment on the company's plans. But for all the mystery surrounding Jelly's development, its basic direction may have been hiding in plain sight. The company, Stone has said of he and Finkel's brainchild, is "the idea that we couldn't get out of our heads."

Ford gathered journalists in its hometown of Dearborn, Michigan earlier this week for its Further with Ford conference, holding a variety of panels to discuss the past, present, and future of technology across a variety of industries (Warby Parker and Coca-Cola were both in attendance, for instance). One of those panelists happened to be the gregarious and always entertaining Steve Wozniak — better known to most of us as "Woz" — and I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with him after his final panel appearance on Tuesday. The Apple co-founder, entrepreneur, and technologist was eager to chat.

First of all, I have to say that I saw your Nixie tube watch while you were on stage, and I was extremely jealous of it.

Yes.

Did you build it?

I wish. I wish I'd thought of it. You can't build it unless you think of it. There's an astronomer in Tuscon, Arizona that builds them, so I bought it online. It's $400, and I think he's out of parts now.

Yeah, I can imagine. Not easy to come by [Nixie tubes]. Is it accelerometer driven? I saw it come on…

Yeah.

Nice.

When you turn your wrist. And I love to tell people that the Nixie tubes are run on 140 volts, and it's waterproof, so you can take it in the bathtub… once.

So correct me if I'm wrong: you're a Model S owner, is that right?

I'm an S-Class owner.

You don't have a Model S?

"I'm no longer just buying anything I feel like at any time."

I ordered a Model S, and decided at the last minute because of my wife. See, I'm one person, I'm a Model S person. But she was an S-Class person — Mercedes. It's a lot less money, a lot more technology for driving, and a lot less batteries to worry about. That was right for her. Now, she might surprise me and get me a Model S for my birthday in August, we'll see. She knows… Every day, I sent her articles about the Model S consistently. I have for a couple of years. That's why one day she said, "Hey, we should go down and look at one," and decided, okay, we'll buy it, but we backed out. Elon Musk wrote me, he sent me some emails, he was pissed that I was getting a gas guzzler and that I wasn't a Silicon Valley boy. But you know, there are some times that you have to make tradeoffs. Because my wife's from Kansas, I'm no longer just buying anything I feel like at any time. And so, you know, how many luxury cars can you buy per year? We've got another one in the garage that we never drive, so…

So give me thoughts on the Model S. I drove one from LA to San Francisco on a review…

It's easy to give you my views.

Specifically, I'm wondering about your thoughts on the center console.

Yes. To me, you know, it's not horrible. If you take it into account, you can use it. I'm good for it. But for most people, I have so much trouble in a car, driving with touchscreens, that I worry about people trying to access the screen while they're driving. I worry about that a lot, and I don't think it's that attractive. It's not unattractive — not totally ugly at least — but the controls in the Mercedes are so ergonomic, they fit your hand, you never have to look at them, you can feel where your hand is. So I do have a reservation about that, but not enough to turn me off. I think it's a great car, I think it's the first electric car that was worth anything. I look at it as, all the electric cars so far have been very tiny so they get better mileage on smaller batteries, you know, they can go 30 miles… or they were sports cars. Well, this is the first one, it's a luxury car, a big sedan that fits five people comfortably. Well, my gosh, those are the people that are going out and buying $100,000 Mercedes already, so a $100,000 car… money doesn't matter. The fact that $40,000 is batteries, they don't see it as much.

So I think they found the right market niche that might be permanent, might be enough to keep a company sustained. And the next step is to bring it to a lower-priced market. And the idea of the replaceable batteries means you buy your battery per mile. You lease the battery, you don't own it. You only buy the car. That's a step that'll appease the other crowd. Luxury guys, I think, really want to own their own battery and don't even want to swap it with somebody else's — they want to know what they got.

But it is a problem because you do have to pay now for the battery, and you have to pay for the electricity. As opposed to, you know, just gasoline. So it's going to probably be more expensive per mile that way, and the economic factor might come into play. But that makes me think, you know, just driving into this building, we passed Ford's fuel cell research division and I thought, oh my gosh! The words we heard last night from [Ford CEO Alan Mulally] … he mentioned fuel cells, he mentioned electric vehicles. Well, those two go together perfectly. You have to lose energy if you know physics, but it transfers so efficiently to the wheels, that's why it can still make sense economically. And then you don't have to carry this huge weight of batteries and the huge cost of the batteries. There are different problems with that one, though.

You know, we keep trying to find the way to clean energy … I'm not smarter than all the people who work on it and research it and the scientists and the people and the laboratories, so it's not like one person can have this beautiful vision nobody else has. It's been a struggle my entire life to make better batteries, and all we ever really came up with was lithium ion. That was about it.

The technology for batteries does seem to move really slowly, right?

Yeah.

So to completely switch gears, if I'm not mistaken, you're an advisor on the Sorkin film, right?

Correct. Yes, I'm going to see him again very soon, and I look forward to that. I like to answer questions, and I like to answer them honestly. And I really admire the way he's going to make that film. I think it's going to bring out Jobs' personality and characteristics and thinking and vision very well at three key, important times. Introducing the Macintosh, Steve was still young, trying to move too fast, and not regulated enough to really create a good product, a successful product. He had basically, in Apple times, when he ran things... he had three failures. We had 10 years of revenues from the Apple II running the company, and that was just from one person. When Steve Jobs was at NeXT, he was really getting his head together and taking control and becoming the person that, when he came back to Apple, you know, he was ready to really run the company and keep control of things and watch what was being done and develop new products secretly that were really incredibly great. He was finally ready to wait them out until their time, which he didn't do with the Lisa and the Macintosh.

"Introducing the Macintosh, Steve was still young, trying to move too fast, and not regulated enough to really create a good product, a successful product."

The Macintosh should've been a whole different product, not a mouse-driven GUI machine like it was, and the Lisa he should've just waited five years, and then it would've been ready. When he introduced the iPod, that was the next Apple II. That was what shot Apple… that's what makes people really love Steve Jobs to this day, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and how much they meant to our lives.

Why do you think the Macintosh shouldn't have been a UI-driven product?

It was a different project. I was on the team, Jef Raskin was on the team; he brought ease of computing and intuitive computing into Apple, and he had very strange, different, kind of disruptive ideas. Steve really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there. He took over the project, and it was really my own opinion — only my opinion — that he wanted to compete with the Lisa group that had kicked him out. He liked to call them idiots for making it too expensive. Well, one megabyte of RAM back then cost 10,000 of today's dollars. He made a cheap one — but what he did was he made a really weak, lousy computer, to tell you truth, in the Macintosh, and still at a fairly high price. He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there. It was a lousy product. Every time we improved the Macintosh, year by year by year, it got closer to what the Lisa had been.

"Who built the Macintosh into a success later on? It wasn't Steve, he was gone."

We didn't get the Lisa back until we got OS X from NeXT. Once we had OS X, that was the Lisa! But we had it so early … If we had just worked on it and developed it until it was at a personal computer price, we would've had the most incredible technology ever for GUI computers and we would've really owned it and had the rights to it. So Macintosh… the Macintosh failed, really hard, and who built the Macintosh into a success later on? It wasn't Steve, he was gone. It was other people like John Sculley who worked and worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away.

I'm a huge Newton fan to this day.

You know, I loved the Newton. That thing changed my life. John Sculley got demeaned by Steve a lot, but he did the Knowledge Navigator, the Newton, HyperCard — unbelievable things. The first day I had the Newton, I hand-wrote a message… I got a phone call in the San Francisco airport on the way to Disneyworld with my kids. And I hand-wrote a message to myself on a notepad paper: Sarah — that's my daughter — dentist, Tuesday, 2PM. And I saw a button called "Assist," and I thought, this must be a menu. And I tapped the Assist button — it opened up the calendar, Tuesday at 2PM, it put in the word "dentist" and it grabbed Sarah out of my contact list. And that was the first time in my life I had seen a computer understand… I had written something for a human, and the computer understood it. I didn't have to learn its language and it changed my life forever. From then on, I wanted computers to understand me. Just talking, as I'm talking to you. From then on, I used my Newton, if I wanted to call my friend Jim, I'd handwrite C-A-L-L J-I-M, and I'd click "Assist" and it'd dial him so I didn't have to dial the phone and I felt so free!

That one, and then the [G4] Cube. And oddly enough, the 20th Anniversary Macintosh was a really slick little machine.

"Who hired Ive? Gil Amelio."

That was one of Ive's first designs, right?

Yes. And then he did those glass speakers, and remember — who hired Ive? Gil Amelio. You'd be really surprised to get a lot more and different opinions about things and people.

But you think that Sorkin will do a good job conveying that?

Oh, I think what he's going to do is just have three real-time half-hour scenes. He's going to have Steve Jobs interacting with all these key people — very quick dialog that brings out Steve's thinking, and his wisdom and his guidance and his vision, and other people that were in the way and what some of the conflicts were and how Steve… I'm sure he's going to treat some people nasty, you know? And how he might just really grab onto others and love them and take their ideas. So I think it's going to be a great, great movie.

Do you have a sense of the timeline for [the movie]?

Actually, I don't. They're on their own. It's when he gets time, when Sorkin gets time more than anything else. It's gotta be on his schedule.