Words matter. These are the best Comic Quotes from famous people such as Andy Dick, Pat Paulsen, Ryan North, Ang Lee, Cedric the Entertainer, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Before I was known, I would go on stage and pretend I was other people. Once I pretended I was mentally handicapped. It was really wrong. One time I was a bad magician. And one time I pretended I was a Christian comic.
Having a comic in the White House will assure stability in foreign relations. The world will continue to respond to foreign initiatives by saying, ‘You must be joking.’
There are so many ways to make a book or comic, but most involve doing something online.
I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you’re reading comic books to the big screen.
We as comics do want an immediate response from the audience. It’s really quiet on the set, and there are only the producers, and the director, so a comic is looking for someone to give a reaction, even if it is the camera guy.
Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri. Kids did not read comic books back then.
I remember my father, who was ‘somebody’ in the synagogue, bringing home with him one of the poor men who waited outside to be chosen to share the Passover meal. These patriarchal manners I remember well, although there was about them an air of bourgeois benevolence which was somewhat comic.
I never read too many comic books when I was growing up, but I think everyone loved Wolverine, you know what I’m saying?
The difference between ‘Watchmen’ and a normal comic book is this: With ‘Batman’s Gotham City,’ you are transported to another world where that superhero makes sense; ‘Watchmen’ comes at it in a different way, it almost superimposes its heroes on your world, which then changes how you view your world through its prism.
I used to go to the Cleveland Comedy Club all the time. If there was a comic I liked, I’d go see him two or three times that week. Bob Saget was one of those guys.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Data was the comic relief on the show.
My brother had boxes of comic books. He was really the collector.
I love other movies that have been made since, but I think more than any comic book movie, ‘Superman’ just totally seemed to capture superheroes in ways that others have not.
I’m a total nerd. I love comic books and video games and most of all zombies!
My show is constantly evolving… new tricks are added, old ones are dropped… so it stays fresh. But it’s the randomly selected participants from the audience that make it fresh and provide some of the best comic relief.
I’ve read comics all my life and have wanted to write a comic for as long as I can remember. Alex Barnaby and Sam Hooker seemed like the perfect team to make the move into the graphic medium.
I’m a big veteran of being able to, in one comic, explain to you everything that you need to know to get forward in the story without you having to refer back to years of continuity and a universe in these superhero comics.
At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You’re trying to make them laugh. They can’t laugh at someone they’re looking up to.
There is a scene in one comic from the ’60s-’70s where Batman finds a film, a newsreel film, of his father. This newsreel film is from the ’50s, and his father has come to this costume ball in a Zorro costume, which strangely enough looks a lot like a Batman suit in the footage.
For me personally, I get to be a cartoonist, because my comic would never survive in print. Maybe one in 100 people would like it, but online, I can gather that one percent all in one place.
Maybe every other American movie shouldn’t be based on a comic book. Other countries will think Americans live in an infantile fantasy land where reality is whatever we say it is and every problem can be solved with violence.
Because of the audience I get and the fact that these people aren’t traditional comics buyers I don’t think the comic industry looks at that and thinks that is a very respectable thing. I’m very used to it. I’m not the guy who wins awards and gets mentioned in magazines.
Outside of my work as a comic book creator and co-publisher, I’m an avid gamer.
I’m the biggest geek of all. Adventure, fantasy, comic books – I can’t get enough.
I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.
I came to comic books when I was about 15.
‘RoboCop,’ when that came out, was like the best comic book movie ever, and it’s not based on a comic book.
I brought samples in, because I didn’t have any comic book samples, and I brought all these illustrations that I had influenced by Norman Rockwell and a couple of the other big boys. That’s all I had, that’s all I brought.
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.
Dante didn’t work out, and then we found Ryan. He worked at a comic, record and toy store in Fremont.
You don’t usually have to wait a month for a new episode of a TV show. We ask comic readers to wait a month for a new issue, and honestly, given the time that it takes to put them together, a month is really too fast.
I wouldn’t say design has become strictly functional. A lot of cars these days look downright comic book to me, and the info-gadgets with which late industrial people spend the most time – phones, music players, etc. – are blobjects.
I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I’m likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.
It’s tempting to just write a comic called ‘Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks’ – maybe it would work, and I could just close down the ‘xkcd’ store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.
I mean, of course, I love sci-fi and stuff like that, but I’m not, like, a comic book crazy guy.
I didn’t want to be a comedian. I wanted to be an actor – maybe a comic actor, but a real actor – by real, I mean not a comedian. I wanted to be an actor.
Comic books and radio were my escape. I even remember 3-D comic books where you put on the red-and-green glasses and Mighty Mouse would punch you in the face. It was the literature of the day for kids my age who were too bored with listening to ‘Peter and the Wolf’ on the record player.
I grew up a big comic book reader, as a kid, and I love the whole fanboy crowd.
Whether I’m doing music or I’m walking down the street or I’m in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I’m buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it’s the same me.
Some things that work in a comic don’t work in a film, and vice versa.
The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.
Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It’s sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn’t the star.
Look at comic books. It used to be something that only geeks were into. And now it’s everywhere.
It’s not until you develop your own voice, your own persona onstage that you become your own comic, who you really are.
Back then, I was doing more of my impression of what a comic is supposed to do.
I think that if you are looking at a comic that’s made by one person, that there’s just a level of intimacy that I don’t really see anywhere else.
Comic art is just different. It’s art on its own terms.
Show me a novel that’s not comic, and I’ll show you a novel that’s not doing its job.
Such is the nature of comic strips. Once established, their half-life is usually more than nuclear waste. Typically, the end result is lazy, rich cartoonists.
My problems with ‘Bonanza’ were problems of communication. What we discussed would be, never was. I thought it would be a sophisticated show. Instead it never went beyond the comic strip level.
Is it my end-all and be-all to become a standup comic? No.
If you’re a guy who’s always been the fun-to-be-around teddy bear, then all of a sudden people are viewing you as sexy, it’s nice. It’s great not having to be the plucky best friend or the comic relief anymore – I love that.
My roles in comedies from ‘Austin Powers’ to ‘Tommy Boy’ to ‘Wayne’s World,’ were sort of comedic ‘straight man’ parts. My character on ‘Parks & Recreation’ is the comic relief in a comedy. To play a character that appears strictly for laughs is sort of new for me and really fun.
A lot of people who saw ‘The Avengers’ didn’t read comic books, don’t like comic book movies, and enjoyed it. That was huge for me.
Being a female comic and getting a Comedy Central special is an honor because not a lot of women get that.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be serious, like Daniel Day-Lewis. No one really dreams of being a comic actor, do they? Now I realise how stupid that is – and it’s because comic acting isn’t taken seriously enough. It’s a discipline. You know instantly – either you’re funny and getting the laughs, or you’re not.
I draw a weekly comic strip called Life in Hell, which is syndicated in about 250 newspapers. That’s what I did before The Simpsons, and what I plan to do for the rest of my life.
I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That’s a good problem to have.
When I met my wife, I was a working comic, so the first week we went out, she saw me perform, and it was very clear what I do.
Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.
I’ve always had a soft spot for comic books. I learned to read from them. The words in them were so interesting.
Sleep is important for a comic – like it is for a lot of people.
I did plays in high school, and I usually got cast in the comic role, which I really enjoyed.
I’ve always wanted to play more comic parts.
Half of me is this wacked-out comedienne who will do anything for a buck and a laugh. Well, at least for a laugh. But the other half is a lot darker, sadder and more pensive. It’s the dark side that feeds the outrageousness and allows it to surface. I think that’s true for anyone with comic flair.
At any comic book convention in America, you’ll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
I do screen work, adult books, kids books and comic stuff, which gives me a pretty full plate. The problem is usually choosing which one I want to work on next.
I find the comic book audience a lot more intense than the fantasy one, definitely.
Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that’s what I know and what I’m comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that.
The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.
Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.
To my ear, the term ‘comic novelist’ is as redundant and off-putting as the term ‘literary novelist’.
When I was a kid, there were these great comic books called ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and ‘The Vault of Horror.’ They were gruesome. I discovered them in the barbershop and thought they were fabulous.
I’ve been writing for a long time, and I’ve loved comic books for a long time – forever – but I had to learn how to write in a different way to write sequential art for a graphic novel. It’s been an interesting transition.
As a female comic, if you talk about sex in any capacity, you will be branded a ‘sex comic,’ so I might as well go full force on it.
Seth Meyers and I wrote a ‘Spider-Man’ comic.
I can say pretty confidently that I am not the right guy to do a superhero movie, just because I was not a comic book kid. I don’t know that mythology, and I don’t have it ingrained in me in the way that a lot of these other directors do.
In comedy, it’s not the glamorous, beautiful people that are great at comedy. They’re either every man or every woman, they’re either quite tall and lanky or shorter and fatter or have a big nose. They have something physically about them that makes them into a comic stereotype.
I used to collect comic books. I had a substantial collection. I collect records also, but those have gone the way of the world.
‘Modesty Blaise’ is not well known in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, she’s an institution – especially for a comic book reader of a certain age. She’s a wonderful creation, and her strip ran in newspapers for a long time. So whenever female spies come to mind for us, they think of ‘Modesty Blaise’.
I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.
My failed corporate career became the fodder for the ‘Dilbert’ comic. Once it became clear I would not be climbing any higher on the corporate ladder, it freed me to mock managers without worrying that it would stall my career. Most failures create some sort of unplanned freedom. I took full advantage of mine.
Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.
It was said Daredevil grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, an amazing name for a neighbourhood. But that opened a Pandora’s box of all the crime stuff I wanted to do. I borrowed liberally from Will Eisner’s ‘The Spirit’ and turned ‘Daredevil’ into a crime comic.
Superman was my first comic back in the ’50s; that was me under the bedspread with the flashlight reading comic books.
When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad’s old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.
All comic books take place in built environments, and I was very good at drawing people and animals, and stuff like that, but I hadn’t spent much energy drawing buildings. So I thought, maybe I could, and then I became an architect.
I’ve always been a big fan of utopian, future, new-world stories – ‘V For Vendetta,’ comic books, graphic novels.
Co-writing the ‘True Blood’ comic is a dream come true both as a performer on the show and as longtime comic fan. It’s a real privilege to build on the rapidly growing ‘True Blood’ mythology.
There’s a difference between being a comic and a comedian. A comic is a guy who says funny things, and a comedian is a guy who says things funny, and he has a style and point of view that will last much longer.
For me, the reason to make the movie is that if people like the comic, then people would like the movie if it was well made. There are good movies for them, but very few. And I mean that in a true sense. If they love your story for freaking 30 years, then they can do a movie about it.
Writing a comic book series, you’re so reliant on whoever the artist is. It truly is collaboration.
Television and comic books are, and continue to be, probably the biggest influence in my life. It’s the biggest influence on everybody’s life.
When you’re a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you’re always kind of seeing how far you can push things.
In the beginning, when I was doing my shows, I was incorporating a lot of Spanish, just trying to be a Latino comic instead of just a comic. Now I try to make the show as broad as possible… I don’t want to alienate people. I want to make it so everybody can follow along and everybody can relate.
I’ve always loved science fiction, fantasy, manga, comic books; so I guess, to some degree, those things influence my personal idea of what looks nice, which definitely isn’t everyone else’s.
As a brunette, I had previously been this serious actress. Then I became a blonde and got to play a completely different, comic role.
I was never really a nerd. I’m not really into comic books or Dungeons and Dragons or any of that kind of stuff. I was in drama class, and I’m a big movie and music buff. And I’m into sports.
I read the ‘Deadpool’ series back in the ’90s. I’m not, like, a huge comic book reader, per say, though. I’ll check out ‘Archie’ when I’m in the grocery line, but that’s about it.
A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I don’t know what they think.
To drive a car in rural America is freedom. Before I had a car, I’d never seen a rock and roll show, I’d never seen a comic or a show.
When I get some budding young comic who’ll come up to me and say, ‘What was it like to do it in those days?’ I try to be as gracious to him as Stan Laurel was to me.
A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you’d say, ‘That’s what a child would do.’
Two things I really wanted to be: a stand-up comic or a New York Yankee – or a really funny New York Yankee.
I’m not a comic. I’m a humorist.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I’ve written a graphic novel.
I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I’m a storyteller. I’m not like any other comic. I tell detailed stories – not made-up stuff, but true stories.
My dad taught me to read by reading comic strips in the Saturday paper and Archie comics.
I grew up as a fan of comic books, and I’ve been reading them for so long that I’ve never felt an affinity toward just one.
The comic book world is so dangerous, you know what I mean? You say one thing and people – they’re ravenous – they are very opinionated fans. But they’re great fans.
If a comic laughs at their own jokes, I don’t like it. They shouldn’t find it funny; they should seriously believe in this stupid thing they’re saying.
I think the reason I choose the comic approach so often is because it’s harder, therefore affording me the opportunity to show off.
If you’d rather go to the football game than read a comic, that’s fine. I’d rather do both.
I once read that in vaudeville, it was often the straight guy who got paid more than the comic because that’s the tougher job. He has to set up the jokes in just the right way.
What we’re trying to do is take these words and soften them. I’m an African-American comic. I use the b-word in my act.
A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they’re striving for some kind of realism, like ‘Iron Man’ or ‘The Dark Knight,’ or they’re very stylised and gritty, like ‘Sin City’ and ‘300.’
Comic Con has become a very relevant venue for all films.
I didn’t expect ‘Scott Pilgrim’ to be successful. I just made this weird comic to entertain my friends.
I was an enormous fan of Dan Slott’s run, and John Byrne’s run was a big deal for me. I found Slott’s version of ‘She-Hulk’ first, and then I went back and looked up some of the older stuff because I liked it so much. And it was so good. It was perfect. It was my perfect comic book at the time that I found it.
I wanted to make an explicitly educational comic that taught readers the concepts I covered in my introductory programming class. That’s what ‘Secret Coders’ is. It’s both a fun story about a group of tweens who discover a secret coding school, and an explanation of some foundational ideas in computer science.
I remember, when I was an up-and-coming comic, how annoyed I would be when the famous guys would show up and just take everyone’s spots.
People used to think I was just a shouty comic but I was doing stuff about Sartre.
When I write a screenplay – and I think it’s one of the reasons why it was frustrating for me just to be a screenwriter – I’m not thinking of it in terms of words on a page; I’m thinking in terms of visual images – basically, a comic book. I’m thinking of it in a series of shots.
If you record the world honestly, there’s no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn’t get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.
Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn’t interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don’t think in terms of comic dialogue.
You look for comic relief in difficult times.
If I love a comic but they have an off night, who am I to say they should have taken out this or added that? It doesn’t work that way… I have no interest in hurting people’s feelings.
Metal guys are huge nerds. A good percentage of them are either horror or sci-fi or comic book or fantasy nerds.
It always amazes me that Japanese comics have, like, 200 pages. How do they do that? They’re fat books; it’s a whole different kind of comic that’s very close to their films. So I’m drawing from that history and bringing it here – bringing it to Katana.
I had no desire to be a stand-up comic until I decided to do it.
I’ve conducted an experiment on my kids. Instead of denying them access to media, I’ve encouraged it. They read comic books, play Nintendo and watch way too much TV.
Kids don’t even read comic books anymore. They’ve got more important things to do – like video games.
What interested me in doing ‘Dragonball’ was that it’s a huge comic book series that has built a great fan base, and it’s a great action movie!
I believe that a good comic script can succeed despite being drawn badly, but that a bad script can’t be saved by good art. Of course, great writing and great illustration makes for a great comic 100 percent of the time.
I’m sort of killing two birds with one stone here, getting to write for ‘True Blood’ and being able to put myself in a comic at the same time.
I never was a big comic book fan. Obviously I’d heard them growing up from my friends who did read them, but I never was a big comic book reader.
Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can’t get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it’s a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.
I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.
I thought I had more of a European sense of humour than the average American comic.
I think the people who would be the least interested in my work would be people who read lots of comic books.
I always loved comic books when I was growing up, and Spider-Man was definitely a character I gravitated towards because I loved the story of an average teenager having super powers.
Anyway, in the mid 80’s I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30’s and 40’s and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection.
I’m a stand-up comic. I’m always doing dates; it’s just that, if I’m working on a project or I’m busy, I can’t get out on the road or book any shows. Since the beginning of my career, I’m usually out for at least 10-15 dates throughout the year. If I have time, then I try to get at least 30-40 dates.
Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there’s usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least. So, I do look for the comedy in those things.
If you’re a comic, you don’t have a rehearsal room; you rehearse on stage. My main concern is remembering everything. I’ve written lots of material, but how do you memorise 90 minutes? That’s one hell of a long speech. I’ve always had problems with that.
The nice thing with Shakespeare from a modern point of view is that a lot of stuff that was tragic for him can read as comic for us.
I find it hard to get enthusiastic about hotels because, as a touring comic, I spend a lot of time in them.
I’m taking a lot of my favorite artists, different people, my favorite music and marrying that with what I do as a comic. It’s very collaborative, arty, fun and cool.
You know, I think whatever a comic talks about onstage is all they talk about offstage.
I sent in tons of submissions and proposals, and I collected my share of form rejection letters. Eventually, I found myself working at a comic book shop, where I met my future collaborator Brian Hurtt.
There have been times when I played more than others, but I’ve been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I’ve always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.
My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘Captain America,’ Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.
I love comic book movies, and Marvel Comics obviously are the best.
NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.
I don’t really find things funny unless they’re deeply tragic at the same time. I think if you’re funny just for the sake of being funny, it’s just frivolous nonsense. To me, all the best comic plays have been written about really serious and rather bleak things.
There aren’t any concrete steps to becoming a comic.
It seems so absurd to get really mad with a cartoonist over a comic strip. It’s sort of like getting in a fight with a circus clown outside your house. It’s not going to end well.
Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded!
I’ve always had a soft spot for comic books.
As it turned out, if you look at the history, everything in superhero comic books pretty much lies between Superman and Batman: Superman being the greatest superhero there is, and Batman being the one of the few superheroes who has no superpowers and is, in fact, not a superhero.
I’ve never really been a big sci-fi guy or a big comic book guy.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I’m rewriting. If I’m working with a co-writer, they’ll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
I see myself as a comic but the acting helps sell tickets for gigs.
Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.
And what’s interesting about him as a comic character is that the custard pie hardly ever ends up on his face.
At the same time, as you know, unless you are a comic book reader, Daredevil is not a known thing.
My reason for getting into the film business was a Spider-Man comic called ‘The Night Gwen Stacy Died’ when I was a kid; it changed my life.
The comic edge of ‘Ghostbusters’ will always be the same. It’s still treating the supernatural with a totally mundane sensibility.
Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers.
To get syndicated as a comic strip artist is as likely as winning the lottery.
I am a big fan of the web comic ‘Strong Female Protagonist,’ illustrated by Molly Ostertag.
At this very moment I’m behind on a compilation that Slave Labor is doing for Free Comic Book Day.
I think if you do something effectively whether you’re the lover or the comic or the action guy or the villain like I play; movies are very expensive to make. Chances are you’ll get asked to play that part again.
I’m a quite serious actor who doesn’t mind being ridiculously comic.
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.
My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.
I’ve never been to Comic-Con, but I’m certainly aware from this side of the Atlantic that it’s a very important part of film marketing now, even when the films are not directly linked to a comic.
It took forever for me to get work because I was a political comic, and now it’s become good business, and God knows how long that’ll last. You have to do it night after night after night to kind of make it. I still find myself on ‘Piers Morgan’ or on some show and I think, ‘I hope this is funny.’
I was never a big comic book fan. I was always more into the baseball cards.
As a kid, I was a big comic fan and I liked foreign comics as well.
Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen’s wonderful – this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.
When someone says ‘comic book movies’, what they inevitably mean is a summer superhero blockbuster, with heavily-muscled and tightly-gluted men (plus the occasional token woman) in tight-fitting costumes punching the living daylights out of one another for two hours.
I love comic books and always did as a kid.
The comic novels I did when I was in my 20s had a harder edge – less sympathy for people. Or a sympathy that was harder to detect: Characters’ foibles and obsessive bents were unrelenting, like caricatures.
I love comic books. I just do.
I know so many women, comic geniuses. Where are the parts?
You know, I’m a big comic book fan. As a kid I used to collect them until there was a horrible mudslide in Hollywood and I lost my collection, but I was also at an early age the voice of ‘Jonny Quest;’ it was a cartoon; so I am kind of a latent fan boy.
You can give some kind of spark of life to a comic that a photograph doesn’t really have. A photograph, even if it’s connecting with you, it seems very dead on the page sometimes.
It took a generation of filmmakers who loved and were raised on comic books to make movies that you actually cared about and felt something for. I think that’s absolutely the same with what’s going on with videogame movies.
My work looks like a comic book in form, but it’s not a typical comic book in content. I write autobiographical stuff.
All of us who grew up reading comics love the memory of sitting under an apple tree with a comic book in one hand and a peanut butter sandwich in the other; the tactile sensation of the paper on the skin and so forth is part of the experience.
A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.
I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.
Deadpool’s’ probably pretty proud of his comic book hero physique.
My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They’re meant to be novels.
If you haven’t truly died a million times as a comic you haven’t gigged enough!
Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I certainly would never read anything written by Kevin Smith.
If I had never ventured beyond being a stand-up comic, then I would be sitting in my house today working on my Leonardo DiCaprio impression.
I’m not a comic person at all. It never reached me in the north of Ireland, in the ’60s and ’70s growing up. We used to get stupid comics like ‘The Topper’ and ‘The Beezer,’ things like that.
Superman has evolved continually in the comic books over the course of 75 years. He couldn’t even fly for years in the original comic books. Kryptonite wasn’t added until the ’60s. All sorts of things like this. If a character is going to remain vital, he does have to change with the times.
It’s my insecurity that makes me want to be a comic, that makes me need the audience.
I didn’t want to be known as a gay comic, but as a comic who happens to be gay.
I didn’t really grow up a comic book fanatic.
You know, comics and movies, even if you take a comic and turn it into a movie, we can’t all be Joss Whedon.
I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.
Wouldn’t want to write the X-Men, and I suppose the X-Men is the ultimate Marvel comic, and I really wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it at all, although on the other had I wouldn’t mind having a crack at something like the Punisher.
When I started out, I really struggled as a comic because no one knew who I was, and sometimes I was telling stories, so it would take a while for people to get on board for things.
A comic strip has a rhythm and a pattern, and you got to get in and out quick. So you set up a joke, tell the joke, and done.
When I was at Marvel, they were in bankruptcy, which is hard to believe now with ‘Avengers 2’ out, but it was during the 1990s. It was a troubled place. Comic book sales were dropping. Work was scattered.
The first novel I wrote, ‘The White House Mess,’ was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
I’ve been getting in trouble my whole life and I really don’t care what anybody thinks of what I do on stage as a comic.
As a fan, I want all of the Marvel TV projects to be successful. I am a comic book fan.
I grew up with my uncle’s comic books at my grandma’s house, so I’ve always loved my comic book reading.
One of the things I think we’re learning to do as the twelfth insight emerges is to be discerning without being judgmental, because condemning someone certainly feels like a comic event that brings other things back on you.
I’m consciously aware, specifically with the comic book world, where there’s a built-in fanbase. But, there’s a little bit of leniency because there are a couple different universes.
If I truly had the courage of my convictions, I would be a full-blown comic novelist.
My theater nerd world and my comic friend world are colliding… That’s the thing that I was nerdy about, was theatre. I wasn’t as much into the comic book stuff. So it’s fun to see there are people that are into that that are also theatre nerds like me.
As you get older you’re told to be sensible, but it’s important for writing if you’re a comic that you’re able to still access that childlike thing.
I didn’t read comic books, growing up. I was more of a science fiction/fantasy novel guy. I loved reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ‘Tarzan’ and that kind of stuff.
I used to be an engineer, and I was the worst engineer in the United States of America. That’s why I became a comic.
That’s the great test: if you’re going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you’ve got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?
People love their comic books.
I don’t say that I’m going to be like every other comic that’s blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don’t do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.
My mother had all these maxims – like, classy girls never chew gum, never read comic books, never get their ears pierced, never get their hair dyed.
I was a stage actor for 20 years or so; I was leading men in classical things. ‘Shakespeare,’ you know. And now, I never play leading men. I’m that kamikaze comic that comes from the left, turns the table over, and leaves, or the hyper-intelligent yuppie scumbag if it’s a drama.
You can imagine sitting in a room for three days talking about comic books, eight hours a day. It gets wacky and very nerdy. It also gets contentious at times.
Years have passed since I have set foot in a comedy club. If the comic is doing badly it’s painful, and if the comic is doing brilliantly, it’s extremely painful.
I think it’s good that we’re not embarrassed that we’re comic book creators anymore. It’s good that people are able to make a good living at doing it, and not doing the traditional sort of mainstream fare.
Even when I was an engineer, I was a comic on my job. At birthday and holiday parties, I was the one scheduling and emceeing. If you work on your gift, and you’re good, it will shine through.
Comedy is free therapy. And if it’s done well, the audience and the comic take turns being the doctor as well as the patient.
Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
I inhaled books. I loved Classics Illustrated comic books. These were books that I could afford to buy after I turned in pop bottles for change. ‘The Prince and the Pauper,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘A Journey to the Center of the Earth.’ Male narratives filled with adventure and self-discovery.
I grew up on comic books. ‘X-Men’ was my favorite team; Wolverine was my guy. At 8 years old, I dressed up as Wolverine with Adamantium claws that I made out of aluminum!
I think musical theater fans – obsessive fans – are very much like Comic Con fans in our personalities. We’re very possessive, and we’re very obsessive, and we’re very critical. So don’t screw with our stuff.
‘The Cape’ is a really good comic! They invented the whole character, and now they’ve built a book of ‘The Cape’ for the show. When I was a kid, I used to love Batman, and I loved Spider-Man. My favorite was this guy called Judge Dredd. I know they made a movie of that in the ’90s.
It’s embarrassing to be involved in the same business as the mainstream comic thing. It’s still very embarrassing to tell other adults that I draw comic books – their instant, preconceived notions of what that means.
As a comic and as a nurse, it’s important to look calm on the surface when you’re absolutely crapping yourself inside. So, if someone is waving a machete at you, which has happened to me when I was a nurse, it’s important to make that person feel that you’re in control.
I’ve keep every comic I’ve bought in my life. I used to be obsessive about boarding and bagging them all.
I love that he’s both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. … I love that within the world of Shakespeare’s plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.
Whatever I write, no matter how gray or dark the subject matter, it’s still going to be a comic novel.
I’ve skewered whites, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, Muslims, gays, straights, rednecks, addicts, the elderly, and my wife. As a standup comic, it is my job to make sure the majority of people laugh, and I believe that comedy is the last true form of free speech.
I grew up on monthly comics. My closet is full of monthly comics. I’ve always wanted to do a monthly comic, and while I’ve had a couple of offers, the timing has never worked out. Most superhero comics come into the world as monthly series, so we wanted the same for ‘The Shadow Hero.’
Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer.
Every comic went through their Mitch Hedberg phase – the glasses, the hair in the face – and you knew immediately when they were doing it.
I’m shy. I am. I mean, if I get around, you know, in a room of a bunch of people especially I – you know, I don’t know or – it takes me a while to warm up. I’m – and the real me, I’m not as witty as, you know, as the comic Wanda. The comic, she’s had time to work on some things.
The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don’t think there’s any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC’s. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.
That’s the great thing about Comic Con – people are so accepting of one another.
When you’re a stand-up comic, you live and die by what you say on stage. There’s no director or writer or producer who can tell you what to say and not to say. Once in a while, a club owner will ask a comic to work clean, or not say something, but that’s few and far between.
A good comic explores the imagination, but it’s always got to have those notes of truth running through it.
When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning.
I’ve been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don’t tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I’ve got a stack of the ‘Walking Dead’ comic books next to my bed here.
Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.
I want to point out to adults that there is a world of good material available to you now in comic form – in this medium – and learn to give it your support because the more you support it, the better the material will be as it comes out.
I’m a fan of characters wherever they come from. Truth be told, I wasn’t a big comic book fan growing up. Maybe that helps me bring a fresh perspective to things because I’m not trying to match anything that’s been done in the past.
I used to describe myself as a comic novelist, but my concerns seem to have darkened over the past few years.
My family put a lot of emphasis on homework, so there weren’t too many comic books or video games for me, when I was growing up.
During the day, I was a doctor. At night, you know, I was a comic. And it was really just to let off some steam. It just became my golf, you know, in many ways. Most doctors have golf as a hobby. Mine was doing comedy.
When I was very young, I didn’t really write my own material. I just memorized other peoples’ jokes. Established comics, like Stanley Myron Handelman and people like that. And then, for every comic, you develop your own style after a while.
Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it’s a work of genius. It’s very simply drawn, but it has some really deep emotions that you don’t expect in a silly-looking comic strip.
There are too many good comic book writers out there. I’d rather remain a fanboy.
Back in the day, I used to read ‘Archie,’ but I haven’t been a comic book aficionado.
I think on ‘Third Watch’ that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn’t having a fun time.
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg’s great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
I met Harrison Ford at Barney’s Beanery. And I met Steve Martin at the bar at the Troubador. He said he wanted to be a stand-up comic. I thought that was the worst idea because he was so square, so Orange County.
I like the idea of making big budget films with a heart. I like graphic novels more than comic books.
Woody Allen’s movies are so much a part of me. I grew up watching them over and over and would read all his comic pieces for the New Yorker. In some ways, his influence is so much there that I can’t even locate it any more.
Plus, I love comic writing. Nothing satisfies me more than finding a funny way to phrase something.
I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they’ll be in a totally different category. People won’t take them seriously. They’ll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.
I was a huge comic book fan. It’s weird because the era of ‘Marvel’ I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it’s not the one that anybody romanticizes.
I like – there’s a better word for it, but I like the danger that a comic brings to a role. It has a feeling, even though everything’s scripted and everything’s planned what you’re going to do. When I see Will Ferrell or Sacha Baron Cohen, there’s a feeling that anything could happen.
The first comic I ever read was an ‘X-Men’ themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.
I wrote the original Mike Hammer as a comic, Mike Danger.
I never wanted to be road comic.
I’m a big believer that if you buy a comic, you ought to own it.
In high school, I had to hide my comic book side, my nerd side from the civilian world so they wouldn’t categorize me. They would try to marginalize me for what I like. I tried to give it up, believe me. I tried to kick the habit. But there’s too much I liked about it to give it up completely.
Neither my mom nor my dad ever bought me any comic books. Certainly not for Christmas. I suspect that doing so would have violated the Parents’ Code.
The thing about ‘Batman Begins’ is that he’s a character that people thought they knew a lot about, and yet you’re able to identify the spirit in his life where even in the comic books it’s not explored that much.
We’re sort of putting a slightly different spin on Steve Rogers. He’s a guy that wants to serve his country, but he’s not a flag-waver. We’re reinterpreting, sort of, what the comic book version of Steve Rogers was.
My wife, Caroline Spector, and I pitched some comic ideas to various publishers back in the ’80s, but nothing ever came of it.
Imagine my surprise when, after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself, Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.
George Carlin is kind of my template now because George Carlin before was straight laced regular comic and he had short hair, a tie, suit, nightclub guy. Then he said screw it, let his hair grow, just started telling what he thought was the truth. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.
Imagine my surprise when, after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself, Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.
Ultimately, there’s always been a link between comic books and video games, and comic books and movies, and then basically all three steadily becoming this sort of transmedia.
I think of myself as more of a comic person. I don’t know about a comic actor.
I like good stories above all else… and kickin’ art really goes the final stretch to ensure a comic is good.
Hollywood loves pre-validation. Even if someone has a property that was first published as a comic book that sold only 5,000 copies, for Hollywood, that is a stamp of approval. ‘Oh, it was already published in another medium? Must be good!’ They get assurance from knowing that someone else already took the risk.
In this day and age, where you have a lot of comic book movies made every day, and most of them are really good boys, it’s important to have a couple bad boys out there, too.
George W Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if you’ll pardon the expression.
One of the attractions for me of having ‘Watchmen’ made into the first Motion Comic was just that – it was breaking new ground.
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.
I love the comics so much, and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character – probably, I think honestly, the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on.
We never respect those who amuse us, however we may smile at their comic powers.
During my theatre days, I was more comfortable doing comedy. It’s such an irony. I have always played a buffoon on stage, and yet I don’t have any comic role to my credit.
I did a movie called ‘American Splendor’, based on the comic book writer Harvey Pekar.
I’m not the guy with the enormous comedy nose or the big feet or the bad posture or the whatever; a physical comic has certain things.
The audience has reacted well to my comic timing. But, I also have other aspects to my acting talent.
Comic books and graphic novels are a great medium. It’s incredibly underused.
When I was coming up, I kept a ton of comic books, almost 300 comic books. Back in the day, they didn’t used to cost that much, so I used to keep ’em, collect ’em, trade ’em.
An ‘insult comic’ is the title I was given. What I do is exaggeration. I make fun of people, at life, of myself and my surroundings.
People who are readers of fiction aren’t particularly interested in comic books.
I didn’t really grow up a comic book fanatic. I was a big baseball player, and my passion in life, in third grade, was collecting baseball cards. That was my childhood thing.
All of the stuff I can’t afford to do on a TV budget, I just put into the comic book because you’re really only limited in a comic by your artist’s imagination.
I actually feel like comic book movies need to be better than your average movie.
The best place to find material is in real life. I’ve always maintained that it’s not until the mid-20s that you have enough of a life to draw from. There’s nothing better for a comic than to go through some bad stuff – and some good stuff, like getting married.
Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called ‘Cement Shooz.’
I knew going in that being a single parent would be one of the toughest jobs I’d ever have. I’d been a talk-show host, actor, comic, and on and on, but this gig was going to be my defining moment.
When I started formulating the first Frank comic, I knew I wanted it to be something that was beyond time and specific place. I felt that having the characters speak would tie it to 20th-century America, because that would be the idiom of the language they would use, the language I use.
I actually don’t read comic books. I did when I was a kid – I used to read a lot of ‘X-Men’ comic books. I read a couple ‘Scott Pilgrim’ this past year, and those are really good, but I don’t read in general, unfortunately.
Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.
One time, I came off stage and a guy named Roman Decare, God rest his soul, he was a comic. ‘Louie, if you do that family stuff, and you’re a clean comic on stage, you’ll become famous.’ And, for some reason, a switch clicked, and I started doing the family stuff, and it became a giant part of my life.
There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.
On the whole, and this comment can get me in a lot of trouble, I find that retailers in the comic book business are not business people. They’re fans who’ve gotten themselves shops.
I think our Batman had to be fun, light-hearted, funny, tongue-in-cheek… and I think that made kind of an homage to those earlier comic books, where Batman always had a quip or something.
Any comic is a very good actor. Look at Don Rickles. He is saying the same joke every night for 20 years and making it look like he just thought of it.
Horror used to be one thing, and I think that’s starting to broaden – there can have subgenres, and other things can be going on in a horror story. In comics, you’ll never get the ‘Boo’ effect in a comic; you can go for mood, atmosphere and personal tragedy to build the horror elements and sense of dread.
Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don’t write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can’t do, and vice versa.
Listen, people like Brian Bendis did great things for comic readers, great things for comic readers.
A young comic, if he’s any good, can easily get on ‘Carson’ or ‘Griffin’ or ‘Dinah Shore,’ because they want to say the same thing, that they discovered the new talent.
You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book.
I would love to break away from my comic image.
I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.
Everything I’ve done is an old Marvel comic in its’ own way.
Today, I am a touring standup comic who cannot stand up. Within three minutes, I begin to wilt, lose my balance, and topple over. I can tap dance and run in heels, but I need to use a wheelchair to navigate airports.
For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories… But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.
‘Blade Runner’ was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
I’m more influenced by characters than standups. I love strong, comic women because it’s so hard, and I have so much respect for anyone who can do it. I’m a big fan of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and people like that.
Before I went off to Rutgers, I worked in a comic book shop in my hometown. At night, I would work on some comic stories, and after a while, I developed an idea for a weird little superhero spoof comic called ‘Cement Shooz.’
I wasn’t a comic book aficionado at all when I was a kid, but my cousin Weed was. Every time we went to visit him on the farm, he had two really fun things: comedy albums and comic books.
I’m a comic book artist. So I think to myself, what do I like to draw? I like to draw hot chicks, fast cars and cool guys in trench coats. So that’s what I write about.
Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.
There’s no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They’re going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.
For a long time I wanted to be a comic strip artist but when I started doing them in my teens they were getting really elaborate with tons of poses and a lot of information.
Every comic can report a few ‘gift from the gods’ moments.
My own personal geek culture years were when I was much younger. I collected comic books up until a certain age. I wanted to be a comic book artist when I was younger.
It was very natural that people just think of me as a comic actor.
I think there’s a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they’re no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, ‘The kids love this!’
I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain.
What I had noticed is that there weren’t a lot of women lining up to see a comic book movie, but they were going to line up to see ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ which may have been something I wanted to address.
I’m a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I’m also a coder.
As psychotic as it gets outside, the comic can be more psychotic.
Once upon a time, they thought I was a sweet, wide-eyed boy that was just trying to figure out how to kiss the girl. Lots of comic relief and adolescent yearnings.
I didn’t see a lot of comic books growing up.
Texas is still resistant to Howard Johnsons, interstate highways and some forms of phoniness. It is the place least likely to become a replica of everyplace else. It’s authentically awful, comic, and weirdly charming, all at the same time.
So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.
It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise.
Making comic adaptations means making a lot of choices – you need to adjust the pacing, the dialogue, and in this case, a lot of the cultural references.
I think in daily newspapers, the way comic strips are treated, it’s as if newspaper publishers are going out of their way to kill the medium.
I think that there’s got to be a comic gene in some way, but it’s so much about it is how you grow up.
I really want to do a ‘True Blood-Six Feet Under’ comic book crossover.
You can write a little and can draw a little, but there’s necessarily a limitation on both in a comic strip, since it appears in such a tiny space.
No, I’m not a comic book guy. I’m pretty fascinated with the subculture though and I do think that the world of comic books is such a natural transition into film.
I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.
I’m totally open to it being a movie or a television series or whatever, but truthfully, if no one wants to do it right, I’m also happy for ‘Ex Machina’ to only ever exist as a comic book.
If I wasn’t a comic or TV star, I really wanted to be a photojournalist. That was my other dream job.
When I was a small child, I partially learned to read with comics, in particular with ‘Scamp,’ about the Lady and the Tramp’s male child. That was the prime comic that made me fall in love with comics as a kid.
When I was a comic in the 1980s, I was on the road somewhere every day, and I’d get back to the hotel, and it was Carson and Letterman, and I looked forward to that all day.
But I couldn’t draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy.
A great comic-book cover occurs when it gets a potential reader to pick the book up and start thumbing through it. That’s a comic cover’s job: Attract someone’s attention, and persuade them to try the issue out.
I’m not really all that familiar with comic book culture.
I’m not a comic book guy at all.
We had a teacher in school who would organize dramatic shows. And she decided to put on a show about – I don’t know whether you remember – ‘Ferdinand the Bull’, the comic script. However, she decided, you’re going to sing Ferdinand, me, as a role.
When I first started making comics, I was living with a bunch of guys, old college friends. We had this deal. At the end of each day, they would ask me how far I’d gotten on my comic. And if I hadn’t made my goals, they were supposed to make me feel really bad about myself. They happily obliged.
People are so afraid to say the word ‘comic’. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to ‘graphic novel’ and that disappears.
I think readers are always patient. Look at the ‘Harry Potter’ series. Some have given up on this generation of kids as game and TV addicts, but lots of people spend lots of time patiently reading through hundreds of pages of dense prose. I think reading a comic by comparison is a lot more immediate.
I used to publish these stories in 32-page comics, and I would either do short stories or break the long ones up into chunks so there would be some variety inside the comic. But since then, people have been doing more and more long, standalone works, and the term ‘graphic novel’ has sort of become the codified term now.
In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that’s why you end up 100 years later asking, ‘Is that moment tragic or comic?’
‘Scalped’ No. 1 was only the third comic script I’d ever written. I really learned a lot about writing on the fly with that series.
Well, I’m always working on my comic strip and trying to, you know, keep cranking that out.
Reading the Martin Luther King story, that little comic book, set me on the path that I’m on today.
When you see people getting involved in Comic Relief, especially in tough times or times of recession, that’s very positive.
For me, who loves to draw and who loves to write and cannot choose between one or the other, the comic is the best form.
It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.
I was a huge comic book fan as a kid. The only problem I had with comic books is how expensive they got. I didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to be very specific about what I wanted to collect. I think they’re all somewhere in the basement of my folks’ house.
I’m not a child star, but you could say that I’ve grown up on TV. I went from being an unknown, down-and-out comic from Brooklyn and the Bronx to being a regular character on a major network comedy called ‘Martin.’ From there I went on to become the most notable black comic on ‘Saturday Night Live’ since Eddie Murphy.
The director Sofia Coppola’s new comic melodrama, ‘Lost in Translation,’ thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter,’ Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ and Wong Kar-wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love.’
I’m a schoolteacher. That’s even worse than being an intellectual. Schoolteachers are not only comic, they’re often cold and hungry in this richest land on earth.
I always say, ‘If you can’t give a reason for the banana peel being in the alley, then don’t have the comic slide over it.’ Do you understand what I mean? First explain how the banana peel got there quickly. And then there’s a reason for all the comedy.
When you say ‘comic book’ in America, people think of Mickey Mouse, and Archie. It has a connotation of juvenile.
I will say that comic books are not the easiest things to translate to film, number one. Even the most well meaning of filmmakers find what’s acceptable on the printed page is very difficult to bring to film.
I just love comic books. I’ve always loved comic book art, and I just think it’s amazing.
You look for comic relief in difficult times.
Sometimes people try to read into my strip and find out what my state of mind is. And I can say if I’m in a good mood, generally the comic strip starts out in a good mood, but the punchline is very negative and sour.
Tick is a cartoon character, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. This is the third step in his evolution. Comic book to cartoon to, now, live-action.
I used to love comic books, and I love American comedy, and neither are afraid to tackle big themes.
A good comedy’s very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.
I never envisioned when I was reading that comic as a 17-year-old that I would have the opportunity to actually play the character.
A comic, you have to be looking down at him. My favorite rooms, the audience is above the stage, stadium-style.
In America, there’s a very long tradition of a comic strip that comes in newspapers, which is not true all over the world. To sell papers, they put color comics in.
Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.
Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it’s about real life. I feel like I’m using a part of my brain that’s been dormant until now.
You know, I’ve never been a comic book person, just because that’s not my gig and I don’t have a television.
I’m a huge Howard the Duck fan. For people who don’t know, I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, but Howard the Duck was maybe my favorite character as a kid. I went back, and I collected all of those comics. I had every comic he was ever in.
If my mother hadn’t laughed at the funny things I did, I probably wouldn’t be a comic actor. After she had her first heart attack, the doctor said, ‘Try to make her laugh.’ And that was the first time I tried to make anyone laugh.
Since it’s based on my parents, it’s more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.
Comic book heroes are an important part of our culture, so I think we’re actually utilizing comic book heroes in a much more in-depth way than before. They have such potential, and I think we’re maximizing the potential.
Even though I was trained in play writing and screenwriting, when I sat down to write a comic book for the first time, Alan Moore was first and foremost in my mind.
The irony is that the more we fight age, the more it shows. Paint on a 50-year-old face brings to mind a Gilbert and Sullivan comic figure. Smooth the cheeks, and suddenly the ear lobes and hands look out of place. Do we run around in October, painting the gold leaves green?
I get bored with the constant probing for the cliched tears of the clown, the dark side of the comic.
I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I’m a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It’s the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
Even a pretty traditional comic book writer can make valuable contributions to the Internet.
I was always being called upon to be an honorary boy alongside my brothers. I don’t think I’d be a comic now if it hadn’t been for that.
I love ‘The X-Men;’ that was the first comic series that I was dedicated to, because I feel like you can pick your player. ‘I’m the most like Gambit… or I’m totally a Storm.’
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn’t write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
And my father was a comic. He could play any musical instrument. He loved to perform. He was a wonderfully comedic character. He had the ability to dance and sing and charm and analyze poetry.
I am one of the lucky ones, to work with comic giants.
Looking back Little Lulu was an early feminist, but at the time I just thought she was a really feisty developed comic strip character.
I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, ‘Life in Hell,’ for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing ‘The Tracey Ullman Show’ for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show.
I wasn’t intending to create a comic strip to begin with. So I think I wasn’t aware that when the strip started, there had never been a woman’s voice quite like this in the newspaper.
We all know showbiz isn’t easy, but being a comic – especially being a female comic – can be quite punishing.
Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it’s one place you can process them.
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
Comic books are a big passion of mine.
A comic book and a straight drama all have the same elements. If you’re playing tragedy, you have to be aware of the comedy; if you’re playing comedy, you have to be aware of the tragedy. If you’re playing comic book, you have to be aware of the reality.
I came in with a very specific idea about what a Doctor Strange movie should be, which was rooted in the comics, and I thought it should be as weird and as visually ambitious compared to modern comic book movies as the comic was when it showed up in the ’60s compared to other comic books at the time.
I came to one of the first Comic Cons in 1985, when it was just people trading back issues of comic books.
I want to read a lot of comic books. I want to watch movies. I want to rest.
I love the comic opportunities that come up in the context of a father-son relationship.
There is nothing that is so serious that you can’t also see its comic side. Comedy is a way of talking about the most serious things.
I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
If you have a smartphone – and you have a smartphone – then you have a comic book store in your pocket. So you don’t have to get over any social anxiety you have about entering that space.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that comic books appeal so strongly to children. Not that it negates any of their power for adults, but there is something about comics that makes them a perfect storytelling system for children.
I’m not a joke guy; I’m not a stand-up comic.
Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book ‘Jane Eyre’ by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.
He sort of gets comic moments. Not a lot of directors do.
I never storyboard. I hate it. I don’t understand why so many directors want to make comic strips of their films.
I used to watch ‘Last Comic Standing’ with my mom before she passed. So when I got that red envelope, I was extremely emotional.
Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games. I love this kind of world, so to be able to work in it is a dream. I enjoy it. It’s all good.
I definitely was a big comic collector as a kid.
I always loved Batman, the Michael Keaton ‘Batman.’ I loved those films, and Superman, but I was never a real comic book geek.
I’d love to see a good script of one of my books, in these years of animations and comic book sequels, and had so many written over the years, but none quite clicked.
I’ve always felt that there’s a Catskills comic who lives in my head and is constantly trying to get out. There’s all these jokes that have been passed down from Jewish generation to Jewish generation, which I love but which I’ve always made fun of.
What I really want to do is create great roles for women. And I’m not talking Nicholas Sparks romance. I think women’s roles have gotten ghettoized in these sort of places… I’m thinking women in action, comic books, or like the Tony Soprano of women. We need some complex roles.
When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.
I vividly remember my first ‘Superman’ comic, which my granddad bought me when I was about 7. From that point on, all I wanted to do is draw comics. And specifically, superhero and science fiction comics. Basically I used to copy comic books, and draw my own comics on scrap paper.
Once I started down the path of co-founding Image Comics, and even co-publisher, it just seems a lot more like a career path that isn’t that atypical for someone with a college degree. Whereas, someone who draws comic books as a freelancer and lives from job to job is a more unusual story.
It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
I’m constantly trying to mine the DNA of John Constantine and stay true to that character in the comic books.
I had a great time making the last movie, ‘Eclipse.’ We shot my back-story stuff from the 1930’s. But I was waiting for ‘Breaking Dawn’ because I love the relationship Rosalie has with Jacob and the rest of her family and Bella. She also provides comic relief.
One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it’s all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal – all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly personal – like Charlie Sheen. I do a mix of observations and updates.
A lot of comic conventions go way beyond comic books and include other parts of pop culture, like celebrities and science fiction and movies and books. So I go to them either as a celebrity, or as a fan, because I’m a big sci-fi geek.
I think the premise of somebody trying to recreate a night from their teenage years stuck with me as something potentially very tragically comic.
For reasons probably related to the popular vision of Albert Einstein and, also, the threat posed by black holes in comic books and science fiction, our gravitational wave discoveries have had an amazing public impact.
It seems like they make every comic book into a film. ‘Watchmen’ is my favorite of all time.
It’s just a great, legendary comic book hero and it’s one that has never been kind of been brought back to life after Lynda Carter. I mean, it’s a reinvention. When Tim Burton reinvented Batman after Adam West, and when Donner reinvented Superman after George Reeves, it’s time to do that with Wonder Woman.
I’m in a comic book now. That was cool. That’s something that I’m still sorta reeling about, ’cause I read comics as a kid. Someone drew me, and actually did a pretty good job!
I can say that even in the midst of my most cynical comic stripping: Opus shone through with a bit of heart, anchoring the ugly proceedings with a comforting pull of emotion.
Most people haven’t seen my dramatic work, but I did 10 years of theater before I ever became a comic. I’m just better known for comedy.
My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.
I don’t consider myself a comic but a performer. A comic tells bad jokes.
You see people who are disenfranchised elsewhere coming to Comic Con and making lifetime friends. I love seeing the outcasts of society all bonding together.
The majority of comic book villains are pure evil, but Curt Connors is an exception. Curt Connors is a good man who initially wants to save the world, but he gets hungry and greedy and reckless, and he pays the price for that.
I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I’m a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.
I’m sort of the comic relief after a hard day at work. My message is that it’s OK to relax.
It’s hard for a comic to be joking when your lines can’t be funny.
I guess that compared to other comic strips, I’m edgy. But put me along something like ‘South Park,’ and I’m ‘Captain Kangaroo.’
My favorite comic book growing up was ‘Thor.’ It was one of my three, favorite comic books. Obviously, Marvel is such a huge name, but for me, to book a role in a Marvel movie, and for it to be ‘Thor.’ When my manager told me I booked ‘Thor,’ I literally didn’t know what to say.
When I started acting, doing theater stuff at a young age, I was always the comic relief-type roles, so I knew I had a funny bone and could make groups of people laugh, but I didn’t really take it seriously until I started getting paid on a weekly basis; then I was like, ‘Oh, well, this could be a lifestyle.’
Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public’s desire for him to be funny simply because he’s so good at it.
‘XIII’ is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to ‘The Bourne Identity.’ I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn’t be published in English.
The nature of an ensemble means when you’re a supporting character and not the lead character, you get little tidbits here and there, but you’re usually there to provide bits of comic relief and little bits of action or something.
There’s no getting around it – I am a politically incorrect, racially insensitive, culturally controversial comic, but at least I’m self-aware.
When my brother and me got into performing in the late ’40s and early ’50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.
I was born a comic.
It’s a cliche, but it’s true that all the fun lies in baddies, grotesques and comic roles.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
That became a big time in comic books because it’s when people were starting to break out into independent stuff, the market was getting choked with speculators and everybody was trying to do their own trick covers.
It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don’t they do something about it? They’ve done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don’t we just re-release this thing?
I’m a huge Groucho fan. There were some great comic minds that would transfer into any generation, and Groucho is certainly one of them.
I performed after 9/11 for relief workers down by Ground Zero. There were these men just coming back, and they were voraciously hungry. They were heroes, pulling rubble, and I was a new comic trying to go blue just so I could get some laughs.
I’m a severe graphic novels junkie. People ask me about it, and I say I like the graphic novels. Comic books are for kids, and graphic novels are for adults. But you can’t really separate the two.
The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story. Digital comic books, of course, can be interactive in many different ways, allowing the reader to feel like a participant in the story.
I created ‘Captain Underpants’ when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing ‘Captain Underpants’. Soon I was making my own comic books about him.
