In the history of comics and movies and music too, it’s always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there’s more chance-taking going on.
The difference between graphic novels and web comics is even greater than graphic novels and story boarding. Web comics really is a legitimately separate genre.
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.
I think when it comes to comics, I’ve been a lifelong comic book fan.
Jerry Robinson illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture’s greatest icons. As an artist myself, it’s impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work. Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich legacy that he leaves behind.
My kids love going to the comics store with me, but they have insatiable appetites for new apps, and I truly believe we have to be online in order to reach their generation.
I broke into comics by working as a press reporter for the industry, for a trade press in comics, and reporting on events and reporting on books and so forth, and I got to know some of the editors at DC Comics in the mid-’80s.
I grew up with comics. Whether it be from the East or the West, I devoured them.
When I’m writing comics, I’m also visualizing how the story will look on the page – not even always art-wise, but panel-wise, like how a moment will be enhanced dramatically by simply turning a page and getting a reveal. It requires thinking about story in a way I never had to consider when I was writing prose.
My brother’s in comics. I work in media.
It’s business, selling comics, you work out what sells and you don’t want to muck about with it too much.
I would love to learn archery. Unfortunately I’m too busy writing and drawing ten thousand comics a month. Maybe one day!
Then I abandoned comics for fine art because I had some romantic vision of being like Vincent Van Gogh Jr.
When I planned my wedding the first time, my ex-husband and I, we were both struggling comics. I had a TV show that had gotten cancelled. Basically, I rented a wedding gown; the reception hall smelled like feet.
I love comics. I like to do everything I used to do when I was 14-years-old.
In academia in general, there’s this push toward using comics as an educational tool.
At one time Tribune Syndicate emptied out their storeroom. They put tables full of original cartoons down in the lobby and said take one if you want one. The comics were simply a burden to them.
I can see people sharing my comics and talking about them, which is very gratifying.
I’ve always been very forward-looking, and it was actually kind of difficult to turn my gaze backwards to look at comics history.
I was a big ‘MAD Magazine’ fan when I was a kid, and I read a lot of horror comics – I illustrated as well.
I have a great affection for comics, and I think that people underrate comics as a genre.
If you look at Marvel Comics, there are very few Marvel characters I would like to write.
There’s nothing that could get me interested in Hollywood again. And, increasingly, there’s nothing that could get me interested in the American comics industry again.
I’m going to take over on the Techno Comics so I’m going to be dealing in the children’s merchandising type department. But that’s just setting it up and having somebody run it.
I think comics are faster to draw with a pen and then fill and tone by computer. But my illustrations are all done via computer. I even draw the lines on a tablet.
By and large, I think that comics work seriously hard. Many have other jobs as well, plus you never really switch off, so you’re always working.
I’m pretty illiterate when it comes to comics history.
Broadcast TV has a very classy but old-fashioned way of doing television. That’s what it’s always going to be. But you’ve still got to introduce young talent and ideas and shows to the masses. That’s the way you build a bigger and younger audience, introducing younger writers, comics, TV shows to viewers.
The general public has been conditioned to think ‘comics = superheroes’ for as long as caped crusaders have been around – by critics, mass media, and Marvel and DC themselves, who have what you might call a vested interest.
I guess you could blame it on being raised by comics and television, but I’ve always loved robots in any shape or size.
I’ve said this before, but I don’t like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.
I think the genre of comics sometimes overtakes the medium, and people assume that they are kind of frivolous. If you have a good, strong story teller, they can be as affecting as any character in literature. Period.
I’ll look at superheroes and comics and stuff and wonder, ‘Why wouldn’t you dress like that if you could?’ With fashion, I look at it as a way to express that. I don’t really pull any punches on it; otherwise, you get caught up in this nexus of dressing like everyone else.
My interest in the comic goes back a long time, because I grew up reading comics, mostly Marvel Comics, and I always loved ‘Doctor Strange’ uniquely. It was the presence of the fantastical, the presence of the supernatural that was in it. The idea of magic.
When you’re drawing comics, you get very involved in how the story is going to develop and you spend more time daydreaming on that particular subject.
I’m really interested in independent publishers and memes and mini comics. But even before that, I was interested in Japanese manga and anime.
I love creator-owned comics. Most of my favorite books these days are creator-owned, from stuff DC publishes, like ‘Fables,’ to books like ‘Saga,’ ‘Fatale,’ ‘Hellboy,’ and ‘Courtney Crumrin.’
I grew up on comics in the 1960s era, when ‘Wonder Woman’ was rather silly. She was an interchangeable female character plagued by bad stereotypes. She cried at the drop of a hat, she was worried about how she looked, all of that.
I wasn’t as big a comic book aficionado as some of my friends, but I definitely had some Batman comics.
I remember when I was a kid and I would go to the comic-book store, I would have no idea what was going on in that month’s issues. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know what comics were coming out until I walked into the store.
For comics, Edinburgh makes no financial or medical sense. Get an audience; that’s the first task. Once the punters are in, simply make them laugh for an hour, and then sweat on the critics.
Being able to work in comics at all – I know I came into it from a different medium, but I’d like to stay here. It’s not like a weird touristy thing for me.
If you think about how many headlining female comics are out there, you could say 15, maybe 20?
Some comics really thrive on being disrespectful, especially toward women, and it’s somehow understood as edgy, but I’m the opposite. I’ve never liked curse words for that reason.
I don’t buy comics anymore, for the most part. I eat my lunch off of them.
I never gave up on ‘Archie.’ I started picking up ‘Archie’ comics when I was in my thirties, and then I started subscribing to them.
I’m an attorney when I’m not writing comics, and have been for years. That’s a side of my life I don’t always associate with pure creativity, but it’s all worked out nicely.
I think, television and comics, what’s appealing to me as a writer about both of those mediums is that they allow you to sort of let the story unfold in its own time as opposed to trying to compress it into a two-hour discreet unit of narrative.
The fun of superhero comics is finding ways to turn the pieces that you know so that they’re suddenly about things that you want them to be about, as long as they’re true to the core and true to the DNA of the mythology.
The great opportunity with Deadman was that you had a character that nobody had really done anything with – Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino created the character, which is terrific, but Carmine only did one issue with him – and it gave me a chance to do things that I hadn’t seen done in comics all of my life.
I love comics for comics’ sake. Always have. Always will.
I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.
I’ve always been a Marvel fan. As a kid, I would pick up a two-foot stack of comics and read them in the back of my dad’s car on long journeys across the States. That’s how I used to make friends – I’d meet up with other kids, and we’d swap comics.
I’m supposed to be making comics, so I had to do it the best way I knew how, which is what those guys at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were doing.
I’m excited about becoming a transmedia storyteller. The idea that we can tell the ‘Agent Mom’ story online with MTV Comics and build a fan base that we can take over to Paramount to discuss turning that story it into a movie is just awesome.
Repeats are the worst, and ‘Peanuts’ was the one that started that. They don’t rerun the news, do they? They don’t repeat any other part of the paper. Why do they do it in the comics?
