When I first got the audition for Shado, I went online and subscribed to DC Comics and read a bunch on Shado and the Yakuza, just to get to know her character better.
I have yet to see one of those Comedy Central shows with multiple standup comics that doesn’t include someone the size of the Hindenburg.
I am thrilled to get the chance to write comics – and to tell Forgotten Realms tales, to boot!
I’ve wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.
There are a lot of comics at the top end making staggering amounts of money and selling out stadiums. I think stand-up is a more intimate thing than that. Maybe because of the kind of comedy I do. It’s like a discussion, but I’m the one with the microphone.
It’s pretty simple, really: I love the X-Men. They were my favorite heroes when I was a kid. My dad and I collected X-Men comics together, and I know it would have made him proud to see me writing ‘Uncanny X-Men.’
Marvel comics took a chance on me in my youth, allowing me to create so many toys in their sandbox.
If I hadn’t had the outlet of writing and drawing comics, I guess there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be around today.
These ‘mistakes’ occur in my books for a reason. I have an agenda: I’m secretly trying to inspire kids to create their own stories and comics, and I don’t want them to feel stifled by ‘perfectionism.’
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.
I do believe that sci-fi or historical fiction finds an easy home in comics because there are no budget constraints in regards to the necessary world-building or visual effects necessary to bring those stories to life in other mediums.
Changes can be made. New decisions can be made. If people say, ‘It’s not like that in the comics!’ Well, comic books reinvent their characters a lot. They do different things with them all the time. They’re always changing, always keeping things fresh. So that shouldn’t be an issue if the race changes for a character.
Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.
I like all of the early relationship strips that were collected in ‘Love Is Hell,’ where I pretended to be an expert in relationships and did comics like ‘The Nine Types of Boyfriends,’ ‘Sixteen Ways to End a Relationship,’ ‘Twenty-Four Things Not to Say in Bed,’ and other arbitrarily numbered lists.
There is a very diverse range of superheroes, especially with the Firestorm character. In the comics, there is a black Firestorm. But we still don’t see that many black superheroes. So what The CW is doing and what DC Comics is doing with this whole universe with diversity is absolutely amazing.
I like writing a joke, and I like when a joke works, and I like other comics who tell jokes.
I grew up on comics and cartoons. So, as an adult, I like comics and cartoons.
I don’t write anything. It’s all done onstage, which is why I always tell younger comics that they just have to go do it. You have to get up, talk, and take a thought or a word and just expound, and you find it in there. I don’t sit down and write.
I think it might surprise the average person how angry people can get over the comics.
Being online works really well for any creative work, but especially comics.
People, they think that animation is a style. Animation is just a technique. It’s like, people, they think that comics is a style, like comics is a superhero story. Comic is just a narration, and is a medium, you can say any kind of story in comics and you can say of any kind of story in animation.
In the sixties and seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special.
I got cast on ‘MADtv’ as one of eight permanent cast members chosen from 8,000 comics who’d been screened. For any comic trying to make something of themselves, that was like hitting triple 7s-jackpot.
I think comics is a really good way to talk about skepticism and atheism and things like that… it was easy to tell those stories and, I think, helpful to some people to tell them in comic form. Using visuals makes it easier to break stuff down and makes it somewhat easier to understand.
It wasn’t until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.
There are no easy answers for the balance of how you protect the core business of the books with what the digital future will look like, but that would be our job with DC Comics, to figure that out and experiment and take some risks while always protecting the core business.
By coincidence and not design, ‘Everstar’ is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn’t have to be a ‘boys’ club.’
Ever since I’m done with Zim everyone thinks that I’m going to go back to comics. I’ve been flooded with emails asking me if I’m working on the new Johnny over and over again.
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.
I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on ‘Flash,’ ‘Teen Titans’ and ‘JSA’ for years. I always like diving into characters.
Superman has been my favorite character since I was six years old, and I have more comics featuring Superman than any other single character.
Some of my earliest work was in comics. I tend to think in pictures and always like to write scenes possessing the dynamic you find in comics.
Marvel Comics has always been a place where I felt at home. It has been a very important part of my life and has always been a wellspring of creative and relevant ideas.
I never read any fairy tales or classics until I was an adult; all we ever had was comics… No television, either. If we wanted entertainment, we hung around the fish shop.
Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it – that’s true bliss.
Joan Rivers was a role model to comics everywhere, but especially to women. She got the first laugh and the last laugh.
There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.
Certain things work on paper held together with staples. Comics use bright colors to make things leap off the page, but movies are a different medium.
I don’t want little kids reading my comics.
It’s very rare that stand-up comics have kids, because once they do, they stop doing stand-up.
One of my favorite comics is ‘Love and Rockets’ by the Hernandez Brothers. They do such a wonderful job of showing you how the character of Maggie ages and really doesn’t present that with any kind of judgment.
I grew up loving cartoons, comics, magic, and writing.
Carolines is the best. It has great sound, you can hear from the front all the way to the back with the same quality. If you want to see the top comics, go to Carolines.
Comics is a language. It’s a language most people understand intuitively.
There seems to be a peculiar kind of clamor for comics. And I’m not sure how much a part of reality that is. I think partly it’s based on some idea that comics are what everybody wants to read – and I don’t think that’s the case.
I really think I tried to capture the essence of the comics: what I thought would be the essence of Elektra. And then, as any character that I play, I really tried to dig inside me and try to reach real emotions and transpose that in her world, in who she is.
If there are two kinds of people in the world – DC Comics people and Marvel Comics people – what kind am I? Well, to be honest… I’m a Wildstorm kinda guy. In the interest of full and fair disclosure, I write for Wildstorm. But even if I didn’t, I’d love what they do. No, seriously, I’d love their stuff.
‘Watchmen’ is a cornerstone of both DC Comics’ publishing history and its future.
The most frustrating part of working in TV and film is that you have to convince someone to let you make what you want; in comics you can do whatever you want and for 1% of the budget of TV and film.
I used to draw comics a lot. I was obsessed with ‘The Young Ones,’ and was massively into video games, although I was no good at them.
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 have always loved Las Vegas. It’s a traditional place for lounge comics to perform, and I love that.
Just about everything put out by Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics is what I keep up with. And once in a while, I’ll read the more mainstream comics – I like Grant Morrison’s writing and some of Warren Ellis’ stuff, although maybe they’re more on the fringe of the mainstream.
I was always most interested in drawing – most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
Like most comics, I tried to come up with a sitcom idea that was based around my life. And it didn’t work out. But maybe because it didn’t work out, that’s why I ended up on ‘Breaking Bad;’ I don’t know.
