Top 15 Dave Gibbons Quotes

I think with something like ‘Watchmen’ you can genuinely call that a graphic novel because it has the weight and the intent of a proper novel and it also is the complete story.

I think the problem with the term graphic novel is it sounds pompous, it sounds pretentious, whereas on the continent, they call it an album, which to me sounds, it’s got more much of a connotation of a kind of a music single and an album collection.

With the ‘Watchmen’ comic, we attempted to tell it in an accessible way. I deliberately made the artwork very clear, deceptively so. You think you’re sucking on a sweetie, but it turns out to be a sugar-coated chili.

If you want to draw comics, you really have to love to draw, as you will be spending many hours sitting down with a pencil or pen in your hand.

I don’t think schooling of any sort really prepares you for real life. I don’t know if art school would have prepared me to draw comics. Half of the people I know in comics went to art school, half of them didn’t. Some of them went and dropped out.

There are people who specialise in lettering, and I’ve had my hand lettering made into a digital font. I picked up a copy of the ‘Dandy’ the other week, and I was amazed to see that it was completely lettered in my hand-lettering font. It was quite a thrill, really, having been a ‘Dandy’ reader years and years ago.

There’s a thing with genre movies and science fiction movies that number two is the charmed; two seems to be the best. I loved ‘Terminator 2.’

I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English.

Comics are a particularly esoteric field where you really learn how to do it, by doing it or by learning from other practitioners.

One of the things you have to be able to do, as a comic strip artist, is to draw things repeatedly from a variety of angles, so you need references, and you find the best picture you can.

To my mind, the most successful and the best comic book illustrators are those who translate the real world into a consistent code. If you look at Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko, their drawings look nothing like the real world, but they are internally consistent. In terms of a comic book it can work just fine.

I’ve always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.

When I first came to New York City, what I was thrilled about was not the Empire State Building, or the Statue of Liberty; it was the fireplugs in the street. These things that Jack Kirby had drawn. Or these cylindrical water towers on top of buildings that Steve Ditko’s ‘Spider-Man’ fights used to happen in and around.

People unacquainted with graphic novels, including journalists, tend to think of ‘Watchmen’ as a book by Alan Moore that happens to have some illustrations. And that does a disservice to the entire form.

Comics is all about making it believable and helping people to get completely lost in a fictional world.