I don’t think of cartoons or comics as being for kids.
Learning to write comics is, in fact, so bloody difficult because it’s such a weird form that it does actually make you a bit more adaptable for other forms.
Yes, I enjoyed my share of fantasy fiction series and comics. Among superheroes, Spiderman was my favorite. I always had this fascination for costume-clad vigilante who would come and save the day!
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.
One of the best things about my job is that I get to meet a lot of great children’s and YA authors at events all over the country. So I figured it might be fun to interview some of them and turn the interviews into short online comics.
In the past, in the ’60s and ’70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics.
In spite of being so absorbed in comics when I was in primary school, for whatever reason, I stopped reading them that much once I started junior high. I think it’s probably because I got caught up in movies and TV.
Not everyone reads comics, although most people know the major superheroes, but the majority of people play video games.
I think, for the most part, comics have devolved into fantasy for the sake of fantasy.
If Portland can truly have a true comics show that doesn’t become a media show but retains its focus on comics, I think it’s going to serve the city well. If this becomes a big show, it’s going to bring in a lot of money for the city.
In general, I feel so much of pop culture is set in the generic big city, particularly comics. I feel like there are so many other stories to tell.
I’ve been collecting comics since I was 10 years old. One of the first books I ever got my hands on was a Captain America-Falcon team-up.
Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren’t in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his dresser, in easy reach of a kid making a beeline to the bathroom.
The fact that so many comics were waiting to jump on the bandwagon of hate toward me – what is it about me that engages this kind of behavior? I began to see it: My cockiness, my lack of hanging out with other comics. A lot of that wasn’t my fault.
I would tell my 23-year-old self to be friends with more comics.
I love the Marvel movies, but I always feel like we should be a step ahead of the movies. One of the reasons those movies have been so good and so successful is that they’ve been very good at mining the comics.
What crushed my soul was hanging out with bitter, desperate comics backstage. They’re a different breed than the bitter yet eager psyches in the wings of an improv theatre. Struggling stand-ups have externalized self-loathing into an art form. They’re a hunching, quaking, unshaven lot.
I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.
I’ve gotten more and more cut off from the regular comic-book world, from straight comics and stuff like that. Once in a while, I’ll take a look at something.
If I wanted to write a bunch of comics about 50-year-olds sitting around having a conversation about politics, that would be realistic, but it’d be the dullest comic in the world.
I would not be in comics if it weren’t for independent creators like Kate Beaton, Jess Fink, and Emily Carroll. That’s where I found my start and inspiration, through women who did it themselves and built a career on their own terms.
It wasn’t until I booked the role of Cyborg that I was sent literally everything Cyborg-related from DC comics.
Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it’s not jokes that are funny, it’s characters that are funny. And isn’t that true! That’s why I always kill jokes. I’m terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can’t get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.
After graduating college, I finally allowed myself to strive for what I loved to do, even if there were no guarantees that I would be able to make a living off of acting. This, combined with my life experiences prior – like stars aligning – led me to this lovely role of Katana within the DC Comics universe.
I don’t think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I’ve always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.
I’m not a big crossover person, I’ll be honest. I try to keep ‘Hellcat’ separate from the larger Marvel world because I want it to be a book anyone can read, not just a hardcore comics fan.
So many of these comics are just frustrated singers or actors – they want to get a gig doing a sitcom. It’s paint-by-the-numbers comedy, lame joke-telling. They’re drawn to it as a career move.
My mother wouldn’t even let me read DC Comics. I came from a very strict background.
Social media has been a great change. It’s also a great way to disseminate comics and market them.
Comics are such a powerful educational tool. Simply put, there are certain kinds of information that are best communicated through sequential visuals.
When you’re a kid that’s spent all your pocket money buying Spider-Man comics, and then as an adult, you’re in the Marvel Universe, and you get to meet Stan Lee – it’s wonderful.
I grew up on DC Comics, moral tales where the bad guys got their comeuppance. To me the gory panels or grotesque stuff just made me chuckle.
Stand-up comics reflect less of a visual humor and more of a commentary.
Comics are not theatre – there’s a very important difference in that the reader controls the page. You can linger on a page of comics as long as you want. You can read and go forward and then move back; you can reread, in one sitting or at your leisure. You can take as much time as you want to take in that story.
Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood – I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won’t be met by silence.
People lose it when I say this, but I’m a novelist who doesn’t read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I’m also a game writer who doesn’t play games – I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.
I’d begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.
I don’t write fight scenes in comics all that well. I think they’re a waste of space unless they can move a story forward in some compelling fashion. You’ve only got twenty-two pages to work with. Why throw that away on a set of meaningless punches?
What I’ve found in my career is that 70 to 75 percent of comics are nice and have some sense of social skills, but there are those who end up in comedy because they don’t know how to socialize. I don’t want to deal with that group.
When I first started doing comedy, I was 42 years old, and I was the brother of one of the most celebrated comics in history who made his name in the game 20 years earlier.
Show me one guy or woman as funny as Rodney Dangerfield or as good as George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, or Joan Rivers. There are a lot of good comics out there, no doubt, but as far as the quality of the comics goes, I think what you have is a bunch of situational comics.
Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation almost as much as I like comics, but I’m not rushing to pay out for a cheap hybrid of the two.
With my own comics, I try hard to get the vision in my head onto paper, to have one match the other as closely as possible. With the ‘Airbender’ comics, I’m working with someone else’s vision, an already-established vision. I want to stay true to what’s come before.
You go, well you can’t joke about race. Well if you’re from a different race and that’s your experience of the world and you want to talk about that, then fine. Or you can’t talk about disability, but disabled comics can talk about that.
One thing I hate in ethnic comedy is giving the audience the opportunity to laugh in a racist way at a thing. A lot of times dwarf comedians will do that, Arab comics, and gay comics will do it; everyone is laughing, but they’re not laughing at the joke, they’re laughing at this crazy character.
When they first start doing comedy, new comics or even people that have only been doing it three or four years, they’re doing an impersonation of a stand-up. This is what I think a stand-up should sound like.
I hate comics who look at comedy as therapy. But at least it gets things out of my system in a funny way.
We got to go to Lucas Ranch and, at that time, my brother was still living in a condo about a mile from Robin Williams, and so I made all of the other comics jealous because I got to get a ride home with him.
There’s tons of dudes – like David O’Doherty, Tim Key, and Alex Horne – I made a lot of friends with people who are really incredible comics.
