I read a lot of comics growing up. My mom used to say, ‘Would you please read a book?’ She was worried where I was going in my life.
Comics are actually a lot more difficult to read than I thought they would be. After my second ‘Deadpool’ comic, I kind of gave up.
I’m like an actor who obnoxiously says he doesn’t watch his own TV show. It is extremely rare for me to read my own comics and have asked publishers to please stop sending them to me.
I tried to draw and write comics when I was four. By the time I was nine, I had written my first story – about my dog, of course.
I started out as a novelist, and I think novels have gotten a little stiff, a little repetitive, and the energy in comics was much more appealing.
At the end of the ’60s, I was trying to enter the world of comics.
There’s nothing that compares with the time spent all by myself on a creation that is all my own. I still think of my solo work as my ‘home planet’ in comics, though I’ve learned to listen much more to editors and trusted friends for feedback.
Comics, at least in periodical form, exist almost entirely free of any pretense; the critical world of art hardly touches them, and they’re 100% personal.
I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
And what better way to reinvent the form than to toss virtually 99% of everything that’s been done with it and start with a brand-new canvas, reinvent it from the ground up? Digital comics gave me the opportunity to do that, and producing things digitally gave me the opportunity to do that.
I’m not a comic. There’s twenty five percent of me that doesn’t trust people who identify as comics.
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
My relationship to comics isn’t nearly as strong as some people’s. Ha! I mean, I grew up with a comic book fanatic. My older brother was, and still is, obsessed. And I was obsessed with the fact that he was obsessed, because I was obsessed with him. But not necessarily with comics themselves.
I was cast in ‘Thor’ back in 2009, so it sort of took me out of the running for anything tied to DC Comics.
I’ll still do print comics; as long as there’s a market, I’ll still be there. I just have a hard time believing that’s the future.
I like learning things, and I like that writing comics is an excuse to look into new stuff and research and learn new things and hopefully put them in books.
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.
Historically, Hollywood comedy has arrived in skinny envelopes. From fence post Buster Keaton to herky-jerky Jerry Lewis to wiry nerve-bundle Woody Allen to hung-loose Richard Pryor to whippy contortionist Jim Carrey, its comics and clowns have tended to be sliced thin and bendable.
I was attracted to the comics because of the characters and, particularly, Wolverine because he is so complex. He is so damaged and tragic in many ways – he doesn’t have his memory. His body was invaded. He has unrequited love for Jean Grey.
When I first started out, ‘Time’ magazine did an article on what it called ‘the sick comics,’ and they were myself, Shelley Berman, Nichols & May, Jonathan Winters, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl. We were considered ‘sick.’
I’m a spoilt brat. I thought I was just going to walk in and make movies. But I’d been my own boss for so long that all of a sudden to be facing a roomful of people who were niggling over every little scene… I just thought I’d go back and draw my comics and have a happy life.
Oddly, the anti-heroes of both ‘The Chill’ and veteran comics writer Peter Milligan’s ‘The Bronx Kill’ share a first name, though their occupations and plights couldn’t be any more different.
I think all comics borrow from each other. Only a few have an original voice, and I wasn’t one of them. In the end, I couldn’t figure out who to steal from, so I stopped doing it.
We like to make the Marvel comics films because they’re fun. Families can go see them together. They’re entertaining. They aspire to inspire, and that is cool.
I think it’s the fact that I do something different and that I actually have some success with it. That bothers a lot of people… especially comics.
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.
Spider-Man has always been a huge part of my life. I love the movies. I love the comics. And I always just wanted to be Spider-Man.
I get asked a lot about writing for games and prose and film, and I will do some, but I can never see myself leaving comics. I love it too much.
‘All Def’ is unlike any other comedy show or set because ‘All Def’ goes back to the essence of how urban comedy started. We give it a ‘stoop appeal.’ A stoop appeal is important for us because it’s where pretty much all black comics started doing their standup: cracking jokes on the stoop, in the hood.
As a kid, I drew comics. I had curly hair. I liked to joke, but I was kind of nervous about it at first until it was coaxed out of me.
Funnily enough, the Federal Reserve produced comics about monetary policy, and there is a good comic book guide to microeconomics and macroeconomics out there. But it is not really appropriate for younger readers; it is really aimed at economics students.
I wanted to look like the most diverse writer in comics! Spy genre, space genre, crime genre, and then you realize that it’s all actually the same thing.
There will be the 5% on the fringe of any hardcore fanbase that get angry about any change you make to the source material. The truth is that novels, games, comics, and what-have-you are not usually ready to be slapped up on screen as-is.
I was the nerd. Because I was reading. I wasn’t into sports. I was really into art. Very geekish about comics. Assumed gay.
It’s depicted in comics as, like, this gung-ho, ‘Let’s die in battle, in glory’ idea, because that’s just the genre we’re in. But that’s not what war really is.
It seems to be a common denominator with a lot of comics, this low self-esteem thing.
I think Chicago has provided, for quite a long time, a very high level of stand-up comics that make their way out to New York and L.A.
I actually come from comics, and I’m big on comics. I was reading ‘Walking Dead’ from the beginning. Then just being on the show, I was really lucky to work on episodes like ‘Pretty Much Dead Already’ and ‘Clear.’ I worked a lot on episodes that I didn’t write.
In comics, we’re all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I’m the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.
Most comics point out what everyone else is thinking but hadn’t thought of verbalizing. I guess, in a way, that makes most comics seers. It just depends in what category – some choose to be the seers of relationships, some are seers of racial issues, and some are seers of political issues.
I read the Bible when I was 12 while studying for my bar mitzvah. I was also reading a lot of Dilbert comics at the time, and I guess the two kind of got fused in my mind. I’ve always imagined God as an irrational, distractible boss. It’s my best explanation for our planet.
Batman’s not mine. He doesn’t necessarily belong to me. As a character, he belongs first to the audience and second to the hundreds of writers who have been writing him in comics for 75 years.
I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.
I read comics and stuff. I buy a lot of comics, a lot of films and boxsets.
Honestly, before I started working at the comic shop, I was not a huge comic reader. I grew up reading ‘Archie’ and have an incredible love/hate relationship with Archie Comics. I got back into it when I started living with some roommates who were really comics fanatics.
I read the comics long before I was ever involved with the films.
I was a kid, and I would watch standup comics do the ‘Tonight Show,’ and if Johnny Carson liked you, he’d wave you over to the desk; that pretty much meant you were about to be the most successful comedian in the country for the next few years.
I created lots of characters in high school and college, and the first character I created in pro comics was Liana, Green Lantern of M’Elu, for a backup story in ‘Green Lantern #162,’ my first professional sale.
Comics are my first love, and I hate seeing an art form that I love suffer.
I’ve been trying to make this argument that digital comics and print comics are both art, but there are subtle differences.
You know what male comics can’t do? They can’t get pregnant. They can’t perform pregnant. So my attitude is, just use all those differences.
So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another – or in focused spaces where ‘the camera’ has to stay in pretty close on what’s going on.
