At The Daily Beast, Shannon Donnelly speaks with Stephen King about American Vampire, his collaboration with Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque that debuts this week from Vertigo, and offers a three-page preview of the first issue.

In the interview, King admits to the challenges of his comics-writing debut, and confesses his disappointment after learning that thought balloons have fallen out of vogue: “I got this kind of embarrassed call from the editors saying, ‘Ah, Steve, we don't do that anymore.’ ‘You don't do that anymore?’ I said. ‘No, when the characters speak, they speak. If they're thinking, you try to put that across in the narration, in the little narration boxes.’ ... I think it's a shame to lose that arrow out of your quiver. One of the nice things about the written word as opposed to the spoken word in a movie is that you can go into a character's thoughts. You do it in books all the time, right?”