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.’
