Smallville writer Bryan Q. Miller (“Committed” 8.05, “Bulletproof” 8.12, “Hex” 8.17, “Echo” 9.04 & new writer of DC’s Batgirl series) spoke with “MTV News” about his take on how to integrate magically-gifted characters into a live-action comic book world. Here’s a snippet of the interview below:

“Magic is always hard on our show,” Miller said. “On the page, not just from a budget standpoint like on TV, you can do anything with magic. When you have real people walking around on TV—fictional characters—you have to somehow ground what’s happening. Magic can just be limitless, and if it’s limitless, where does the conflict come from? How do you stop Zatanna when something goes wrong?”

“When we saw [Zatanna] in ‘Hex,’ she was just getting a handle on her magic — that was kind of our approach to [solving] that,” the writer added. “She wasn’t totally, totally awesome [at magic] yet, which made it a lot easier to wrangle what she could and couldn’t do. It’s a matter of skewing it and handicapping it a little bit so that you can wrap a story around it.”

In terms of “Smallville,” then, both grounded and fantasy-filled comic characters can coexist in a live-action platform. But perhaps the comparison isn’t fair, since “Smallville” focuses on the eventual Superman, who is almost as far from a reality-based character as it gets.

Read the full article at MTV here.