Comics is a great medium to get a lot of stories out.
Comics brought me to the dance. It’ll always be my first loyalty.
With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.
I had a few comics, but I was by no means a huge aficionado. I was more of a ‘Mad Magazine,’ ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ sort of nerd.
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.
As much as I’m enjoying stuff out here in Hollywood, I will always think of myself as a comic-book writer who does film and television, not a film and TV writer who occasionally does comics.
I’ve heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn’t even want to do it any more because he’d already had all of the fun of working it out. It’s the same thing with these Frank comics.
I knew I wanted to do comics, but I wasn’t sure what they were about or what I wanted them to be about.
For a lot of comics who aren’t as silly or physical but more intellectual, we get looked at as ‘alt comics.’ No, I’m still a black comic, and there are black people who want to hear my type of black comedy, but that space hasn’t been built out for us.
Bad taste is not illegal. I always got my first laughs as a kid by saying inappropriate things. That’s always how we’re going to get our laughs as comics.
There’s no limitation on comics, nothing. From a logical standpoint, how can there be a limitation on comics? You can use any word in the dictionary. You can put them in any order you want to. You can use a vast variety of illustrating styles. People could do all sorts of things.
At some point, all comics have to go out and be retail salesmen doing door-to-door. And this idea of somebody who totally knows their craft having to get up for free in front of a crowd to work out some stuff they’re thinking in their head, still, after as much success as you can get, is really interesting.
There are comics in L.A. doing impressions, and the first thing they do is hunch over and then start to do this bad Rick Moranis voice I do as well when I really get going. It’s pretty horrible.
That’s the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.
The great comics can fall on their faces, but then they can say, ‘Oh, baby, you’re the greatest.’ They show their heart and their vulnerability.
When I was in the business as a young performer, it was a recognised fact that when you got to 60 you were out, because there’d be a new crop of comics coming up all the time, every 10 years or so.
Not saying that we are realer than most people, but because Chi is so segregated, first of all, we have to be diverse comedians and be able to make a lot of different people laugh. And Chicago comics, we’re OK with who we are in our truth. That stems from Bernie Mac and a lot of other greats who came before me.
I love the medium and I love individual comics, but the business is nothing I would be proud of.
I found that the artist market was expanding in comics. Marvel was going from something like eight books a month to somewhere in the 20s. As a result of this expansion, Marvel, in particular, was hiring anyone who could hold a pencil. That’s how I got my first job there.
I’d love to see Peter Parker and Daredevil hang out. There’s a wonderful issue of the comics where Matt Murdock has to defend Daredevil, because the public don’t know, and so he has Peter Parker put on his Daredevil outfit so that he can sit in the docks. You know, great storyline.
I like talking about comic book process, and one of the things is that I have plans going ahead for years, and the plans constantly get thrown away and shifted. There’s a difference between planning and what actually happens in life, and comics have a life of their own.
Comics don’t work if the story is all in the text and the images are illustrative. It’s hard to have enough faith in the artists to allow them to do their job.
I’m a joke comic. I tell jokes. I like writing a joke, and I like when a joke works, and I like other comics who tell jokes.
Great Canadian comics are often outsiders and insiders at the same time. That’s a great perspective for a comedian.
Much like every artist or every creator, I got into comics as a kid, and the most important thing was the ‘bang zoom’ of it. As many explosions as possible.
I wasn’t terribly aware of Catwoman. She was a DC comics character and as a kid, I wasn’t terribly fond of the DC comics characters. I was a Marvel boy.
As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.
Once you start listening to the comics, be they Jewish, Muslim, Italian, Filipino or whatever, the material often springs from the same source – the overbearing mom, the parents who want you to marry from within your community. That’s why the ‘Ethnic Show’ works so well.
I tend to bristle at people praising alt comics as some kind of perfect comics paradigm, because there’s quite a lot of misogyny in its history as well. Like, in my first comics class, every single great comic creator we studied was male.
When I came into comedy in 2005, I didn’t even know there was discrimination against musical comics in the alternative-comedy strain.
When ‘Watchmen’ was published in 1986, the vast majority of comics readers deemed it a watershed in comics history. The 12-part serial comic book was widely acclaimed as a genius subversion of the superhero genre, and it did much to popularize comics to adults.
The graphic style itself is influenced by a lot of very layered and detailed comics that I read as a kid, like ‘Vagabond’ by Takehiko Inoue.
A lot of comics will say that the thing about specials now is that they’re not special anymore because there are so many of them, and they come and go, and they’re not really talked about. They just kind of come and go.
I continue to be disappointed that people don’t try and diversify the kind of work they are doing in comics.
When comics are in the room, people have a tendency to try to make them laugh. That doesn’t really make you funnier. It makes you a comic’s comic, but you aren’t going to get a fan base doing that.
The thing that drives me crazy is when comics say ‘I have low self-esteem.’ No you don’t. You’re standing on stage asking people to pay. You don’t play an instrument. You want people to pay to hear what’s in your mind. You don’t have low self-esteem. You might have other problems.
I tell young comics, ‘Do you want this badly enough? It’s there. But you have to go get it. And if you think I’m going to give you the key to the lock of that door, there is no key, there is no lock, and there is no door.’
But with comics you’re reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.
There’s bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there’s bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between.
I came in with a very specific idea about what a Doctor Strange movie should be, which was rooted in the comics, and I thought it should be as weird and as visually ambitious compared to modern comic book movies as the comic was when it showed up in the ’60s compared to other comic books at the time.
Aquaman is one of the greatest characters at DC Comics and one of my favorites.
I never read any of the comics, but I grew up on the animated series when I was a little kid – I guess it came out in 1992. So I’ve always been an ‘X-Men’ fan.
The comics I hate are thieves. Nothing’s more disgusting than a guy who steals another person’s ideas and tries to claim them as his own.
I did auditions at a club called the Comedy Connection. They wanted nothing to do with me. But one night they were doing a night of all women comics, and they invited me to do that.
When people say ‘What are underground comics?’ I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved… we didn’t have anyone standing over us.
I never liked working on editorial-driven comics. I just didn’t see what was the point. They don’t pay well enough for me to write other people’s ideas.
Some comics don’t like it when people talk during the set, and it does get a little bit annoying after awhile, but I basically let people dictate what jokes I’m going to do.
All the pictures I could never do, I’ll do it in comics. All the comics I do are the pictures I could never do.
I think one of the problems that comics has in dealing with superheroines is that they try to hard to make them superheroes. All they’re doing is the same thing that men do. Just the idea that they’re no different than men, except in how they look, always seemed a bit off to me.
If you look at shows like ‘Def Comedy Jam’ in its heyday, there were so many really funny, talented black comics that never would have gotten on that show because they just weren’t doing comedy that fit that mold.
I do get the comics online I guess but it’s such a pain. I’d rather just get them in the paper and read them.
